Proto-Jacobinism in the Dutch Republic

Abstract

This paper may be a disappointment to anyone expecting a piece of Soboulatry, or even just of Brintonism. The study of the Jacobin phenomenon during the French Revolution has been focused for many decades now on the social composition of its membership, with some but declining attention to its political ideology and program. I will not go so far as to say that these questions are ceasing to yield new answers; for my purposes here, it is irrelevant whether or not this is so. What interests me today, and has interested me since my fledgling days in graduate school, is a quite different aspect of the Jacobin experience, one which has proved to be extremely useful in understanding the little known political history of the United Netherlands.

This paper was prepared for a conference on “populism,” but not delivered. It was presented without a critical apparatus because it rests upon a mass of reading and was not written with research notes immediately on hand. The factual material will be familiar to the few specialists in Dutch history, and for them annotation would have been an exercise in the unnecessary.