264 Chapter XI
classes anyway; he would have favored a respectable diplomatic intervention by
foreign powers. Those of the other party “were called Vonckists by their enemies,
democrats by themselves.”^39 They wanted internal changes, now that change seemed
to be possible.
In the brief turmoil of ejecting the Austrians the insurrectionary committees
prepared by Vonck came to life. Their members—at Brussels, Ghent, Bruges,
Mons, Namur, and elsewhere—were often men who had hitherto had no role and
no interest in politics—”merchants, small landowners, lawyers, who desired to take
part in public life, to interest themselves directly in public affairs.”^40 Their methods,
according to one conservative report, were very different from those of the
sixteenth- century revolution against Philip II. Then, it had been magistracies and
estate- assemblies that acted. Now “individuals” (significant word) “in each prov-
ince sit with provincial bodies, in which persons of all classes are placed.... The
people renew their magistrates, and assume an active authority to oversee all
operations.”^41 At Menin, where no mayor had been really elected since 1578, one
was elected on December 12, 1789. Town revolutionary committees began to ex-
change delegates, to form provincial congresses, and to think of a National As-
sembly. A really revolutionary way of talking began to be heard. The Belgians, ac-
cording to one pamphlet, were now “precisely as at the moment of issuing from the
hands of the Creator.”^42 The state of nature was in effect; the nation was sovereign,
and it should summon a national convention to bring a new state into being. Old
provincial constitutions should disappear.
Such ideas came from France, or indeed from America, or, rather, from the ap-
plication by Belgians, in their own struggle and to solve their own problems, of
observations that they had made on developments in America or France. The
French Revolution, however, had also the contrary effect. Those with an interest in
the old order were alarmed. The French, on the preceding August 4, had repudi-
ated all forms of provincial, ecclesiastical, class, gild, and corporate privilege. In
November they nationalized the property of the Church. It was not for this that
Van der Noot and other higher- ups in the Belgian Revolution had rebelled against
Joseph II. They turned to conservative arguments. When democrats urged equal
representation for all persons as citizens, the Abbot of Tongerloo gave the classic
reply: virtual representation, and the constitution. “The abbots as a group represent
the secular and regular clergy, and indeed they represent the whole rural country as
well, being the largest landowners; and, finally, usage has always been this way, and
should remain so, since it is constitutional and the Constitution cannot be
changed.”^43
The Estates of Brabant, suppressed in June, reconvened in December. The ab-
bots, the noblemen, and the bigwigs of the chefs- villes, to forestall the democratic
agitation, announced themselves as the true and only sovereign in Brabant. They
39 Suzanne Tassier, “Les Belges et la Révolution française, 1789–1793,” in Revue de Université de
Bruxelles, X X XIX (1934), 453. For Belgian use of the word democrat see Chapter I above.
40 Ta s sier, Démocrates belges, 198.
41 Ibid., 199.
42 Ibid., 208, quoting a pamphlet by Doutrepont, Qu’allons- nous devenir?
43 Ibid., 190.