268 Chapter XI
people, led by their priests, poured into Brussels from the villages of Brabant.
Some 20,000 arrived from a dozen villages on June 8 alone; 12,000 on June 21.
They carried with them symbols or apparatus for the intimidation of democrats.
One band brought a hangman’s scaffold; another, a noose; in a third, women car-
ried cutlasses; and the crucifix was much in view.^52 Nothing but religious excite-
ment could have aroused so many people. The outraged prelates of Brabant thus
made exhibition of their strength. The democratic movement—in the sense of a
desire for broader participation in public life, or modernization and liberalizing of
legal and constitutional structures—did not, in Belgium or in various other coun-
tries, arise by demand of the populace, least of all at the wish of virtuous and sim-
ple agrarians.
The democrats in refuge in France established contact with agents of Leopold
II.^53 They had every reason to expect consideration from him. The Austrian gov-
ernment, if only out of dislike for the obstructionist estates, and memories of resis-
tance to its own reforming program, was actually inclined to look on the demo-
crats with favor. In December 1790 the Austrian authority in the Belgian provinces
was in fact restored, against the selfish, quarrelsome, and self- defeating rule of the
momentarily victorious estates. For the democrats the return of the Austrian
troops was “almost a deliverance”^54 —in contrast to the effects of the Prussian army
on the Dutch Patriots. The Belgian democrats were allowed by the Austrians to
return home, and even to form political clubs.
The irony and tragedy of the great Revolution now became very apparent. The
Belgian democrats returned to Belgium more radical than they had left it. Most of
them were positively anticlerical, convinced that there could be no desirable change
except by getting the church out of politics. More were convinced that compro-
mising and halfway measures were a waste of time. There was more willingness to
admire and imitate France, and even to look to revolutionary France for moral
support or political intervention. There was a sense of a Europe- wide or “world”
revolution of which Belgian affairs were but a part. The grounds for these senti-
ments lay in Belgium, not in France.
On the other hand, the very Austrians who could see the point of view of the
democrats were afraid of them—because of the French Revolution. Marie Chris-
tine observed to her brother, Leopold, that the Belgian democrats were “the most
52 Ibid., 390–93. Mlle. Tassier remarks that at the moment when all France was on the move in
the Fête de la Féderation to found the new commonwealth, Belgians trudged the roads in a way recall-
ing phenomena of the Crusades.
53 Vonck in France in April 1790 refused an offer of 2,000,000 florins by the Austrians for his
assistance toward an Austrian restoration. The offer was made through the Belgian- born Brussels
banker, Proli. This Proli later went to Paris, joined the Jacobin club, and was executed at the wish of
Robespierre as a member of the “foreign conspiracy” in which Robespierre believed. The historian
Albert Mathiez, like Robespierre, regarded Proli as an Austrian spy, and cited Proli’s case as a piece
of evidence for the reality of a conspiracy in the sense meant by Robespierre. It seems reasonable to
agree with Mlle. Tassier that Proli was more likely a progressive Belgian, favorable both to the demo-
crats and to the reforming Hapsburgs, and mediating between them in good faith in 1790, out of
opposition to the old regime. The incident suggests how a comparative view, which Mathiez never
attained, throws light on the French Revolution itself. Démocrates belges, 363, n. 3.
54 Ibid., 412.