Democrats and Aristocrats 263
Most of them thought that the main leader of the Belgian Revolution was Van der
Noot, operating in patriotic limelight across the border.
It should be added that people of all groups and classes at first joined in Pro Aris
et Focis. Van der Noot’s own brother rejected his plan, and favored Vonck’s. The
great Abbot of Tongerloo, other abbots, and the bankers of Brussels financed the
sojourn and the arming of patriots across the frontier. One of Vonck’s most persis-
tent followers, even after Vonck became a democratic leader in 1790, was the Duke
of Arenberg, who had 732,000 florins a year. But most of Vonck’s partisans were
middle- class townspeople outside the gilds.
On June 18, 1789, Joseph II, who could see that Van der Noot was at Breda, and
surmise that secret internal preparations were being made, suppressed the Estates
of Brabant and annulled the Joyous Entry. It was the very moment when the
French were afraid that Louis XVI would dissolve the Estates General. The very
day before, on June 17, the French Third Estate had proclaimed the National As-
sembly, in which segregation of the three orders was abolished. News of this event
had a great repercussion in Belgium. On August 18 revolution broke out in Liège.^38
This too immediately affected the Austrian Netherlands. The Orange regime did
not favor the rally of armed Belgian subversives within its borders. The Liège revo-
lutionaries enthusiastically welcomed them. By October there were over 2,000
arming and drilling in the territories of Liège. They were mostly very young men
of the burgher class. Vonck found a professional army officer, the Flemish Colonel
Van der Mersch, to command them. The colonel said that with 3,000 such men, a
third in uniform, supported by a general rising, he stood a good chance of driving
out the Austrians without foreign aid.
And so it happened. The Austrian authorities remained to the end, if anything,
too unperturbed. The agents of the enlightened Joseph II could hardly be charged
with counterrevolutionary hysteria. Trautmannsdorf, reporting the assembly of
2,800 men in Liège, expressed no concern; from such burgher youths nothing was
to be feared. It was only of the aristocracy that eighteenth- century governments
were really afraid. The Austrians, by remitting taxes in 1789, and propagating the
idea that discontentwas instigated by fanatical priests in favor of oligarchic estates,
managed to keep many of the peasantry loyal.
Nevertheless, the Austrian regime collapsed abruptly at the end of 1789. The
armed companies streamed in, riots and demonstrations broke out in the towns;
there were few Austrian troops present, many being engaged in the war with Tur-
key. Each province separately declared its independence, Flanders appropriating a
few words from the American Declaration of 1776.
Now, with independence, two distinct parties began to form. One favored keep-
ing everything in Belgium as it had been. It had fought only for independence.
Van der Noot became its leader. He had never believed in stirring up the lower
38 Neither space nor the requirements of clarity allow development here of the complex and inter-
esting phenomena of the Liège revolution. See P. Harsin, La Révolution liègeoise de 1789 (Brussels,
1953). The philosophical views of its prince- bishop allowed Liège to become an important center, after
1750, for the publication of books and periodicals of the Enlightenment. See G. de Froicourt,
François- Charles comte de Velbriick, prince- évêque de Liège, franc- maçon (Liège, 1936), and U. Capitaine,
Recherches historiques el bibliographiques sur les journaux et les ecrits périodiques liègeois (Liège, 1850).