Democrats and Aristocrats 267
monarch and limit the rights and authority of the latter. The sovereign who does
not respect this contract thereby loses the position that has been given him only on
this condition.”^49 Their late brother Joseph, he gave his sister to understand, had in
fact violated the liberties of the Belgians, who therefore had reason for their rebel-
lion. In March he offered a basis of reconciliation to the Belgian estates. Explicitly
repudiating Joseph’s policies, he offered autonomy to Belgium under the revived
Estates General, to which he would grant full powers in legislation, taxation, and
appointment to office. Some Belgian writers express astonishment that the Estates
of Brabant never even replied to Leopold’s offer of compromise.^50 We need be less
surprised, in view of the attitude of the American Congress to similar British pro-
posals in 1778. The Belgian estates were committed to independence.
It was to be an independence, however, from both crown and people. Neither a
moderate democratization nor a modern constitutional monarchy was desired, es-
pecially by the Estates of Brabant—for those of Flanders, Hainaut, Tournai, and
Malines showed more disposition to reconsider “ancient laws.” In the circum-
stances, the democrats were more inclined than the Estates party to listen to Leo-
pold and to put faith in the known liberalism of his ideas. The democratic wing of
the Belgian revolutionaries could therefore be suspected of royalism and reaction.
On the other hand, the Estates party charged them with sympathy for the French
Revolution. The Belgian democrats, in this view, were mere doctrinaires deter-
mined to force a foreign ideology upon their country. They were accused of desir-
ing a National Assembly in place of the Three Orders, and of intending to destroy
the Catholic and Christian church. These charges were in part fabricated for po-
litical purposes, against the known public statements of Vonck and his chief fol-
lowers, and in part they reflected the genuine fears already aroused by the neigh-
boring revolution in France, the belief that moderates were the dupes of extremists,
and the feeling that an inch of concession would become the ten thousand miles of
total revolution.
In March 1790 the Estates party won out, after various scuffles and disorderly
episodes. Van der Mersch was imprisoned at Antwerp. Vonck, Walckiers, and hun-
dreds of others fled to France. The democrats were hounded, arrested, silenced, or
driven into exile. A true terror broke out, conducted mainly by regular clergy, who
were faithful to their great abbots. Vonckists and Royalists were damned to the
third generation, said one monk in a sermon. Anyone meeting a Vonckist, said an-
other, should simply kill him on sight. A Brussels watchmaker was struck a dozen
times with a sword for a few words in criticism of the Estates. There were innu-
merable such cases. Forms of justice need not be observed, said Feller in his jour-
nal. “They are respectable, no doubt... but when they lead the country to ruin...
they are detestable.”^51 For the first time in this Belgian revolution there was a
genuine mass upheaval, reminiscent of the Great Fear among the French peasantry
the year before. It was, however, of opposite political tendency, being religious and
deeply conservative. Every day throughout June 1790 thousands of the country
49 Ibid., 315. This often quoted letter was first published in A. Wolff, Leopold II und Marie Chris-
tine: ihr Briejwechsel (Vienna, 1867), 85–86.
50 Ta s sier, Démocrates belges, 313–14.
51 Ibid., 38 7.