266 Chapter XI
the wealthy Duke of Arenberg. As a group the democrats were not anti- Catholic,
nor even anticlerical; there were priests in good standing among them, though the
weight of the clergy was thrown against them. Men who followed Vonck in their
youth founded the Belgian Catholic liberal party in their middle age.^47
Vonck, always cautious, drew up a detailed plan for broadening the representa-
tion in the Brabant estates. He intended to allay the fears aroused by the more
radical among his associates. As Pitt in his reform bill of 1785 tried to anticipate
the opposition of Burke, so Vonck tried to make room for the privileged interests
in the existing Brabant assembly. His plan, like Pitt’s, was compromising and com-
plicated, and hence not easy to appreciate or to explain. It became, however, the
official program of the Brabant democrats.^48
Vonck objected to the claim of full sovereignty made by the estates, but he did
not expound the alternative doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. He de-
manded no National Assembly. Far from repudiating the estates, he proposed that
there be four of them instead of three. He would have the abbots continue to sit in
their own right, but would add elected deputies of parish and chapter clergy to the
First Estate. He would have deputies of the Second Estate elected by all nobles.
He would divide the Third Estate into two chambers: one for the three chefs- villes,
but with more citizens in these towns taking part in election of delegates; and a
new chamber for the small towns and for country people who were neither nobles
nor clerics. He would have these four chambers deliberate and vote apart, and pos-
sess all legislative power, the executive to be given to a council to which each estate
elected a member. He argued for this plan, not by appealing to natural right, but by
insisting that it was historically entirely compatible with the Joyous Entry.
The Estates party would have none of it. The abbots and the doyens des métiers
had the most to lose by such an absorption of new deputies into the chambers, and
they stood firm against any concession. The abbé Feller, their great spokesman and
journalist, found the democratic principles too rationalistic and abstract.
Moderation was expressed also in an opposite quarter by Leopold II, who suc-
ceeded Joseph as Emperor in February 1790. Leopold was one of the most reason-
able men ever to occupy a European throne. A few years before, as Grand Duke of
Tuscany, after study of the American state constitutions, he had devised a constitu-
tion for that duchy. He accepted the role of ruler as defined by the enlightened
philosophy. In January he wrote to his sister, Marie Christine, the ousted regent of
the Austrian Netherlands, in the very words of a “philosopher”: “The sovereign,
even a hereditary one, is only a delegate employed by the people. In each country
there should be a fundamental law to serve as a treaty between the subjects and the
47 Tassier insists that the democrats were not anti- Catholic, except for a handful of Josephists like
the Doutrepont mentioned in note 42 above. This is confirmed from a different direction by H. Haag,
Origines du catholicisme libéral en Belgique (1789–1839), (Louvain, 1950), 82. Haag holds that such
anticlericalism as developed in Belgium, beginning in 1790, was the direct consequence of the incred-
ible vindictiveness and terrorism of certain churchmen in the estates party. Haag maintains that the
views of the abbé Feller, important in Belgium as a founder of traditionalist philosophy, were not de-
rived from St. Augustine or Bossuet, as has been said, but from Bellarmine and Edmund Burke. Feller
was one of the many former Jesuits active after the dissolution of the order in 1774.
48 Ta s sier, Démocrates belges, 233–44, for a long analysis of Vonck ’s Considérations impartiales sur
la position actuelle de Brabant, published on January 29, 1790.