To what extent did the Patriot Revolt of the 1780s and the Batavian Revolution of the 1790s break with the old regime? Recent decades have seen a wide range of responses to this question. This chapter aims to offer a synthesis that takes in multiple perspectives. It considers revolutionary ideas, the contentious repertoire of the Dutch Revolution, and the question which institutions, places, and people were affected by the revolution. I conclude that the revolution had a deep and lasting impact on the political life of Catholics, Jews, Brabanders, and rural dwellers, among other groups, because they were accepted, for the first time since Dutch independence, as full citizens. The higher degree of political participation and the introduction of public access to government entirely changed the dynamics of citizen-ruler interactions. New political practices were not there to stay, but their memory could not be banned from people’s minds. There were also many inhabitants of the Netherlands who largely remained outside the political domain. This could be because they were actively excluded, as was the case for Orangists, women, and those living in the colonies, but it could also be the result of a self-imposed stance of non-involvement.

On the morning of Monday, 22 January 1798, the inhabitants of The Hague witnessed a revolution within a revolution. Almost exactly three years earlier, reformist Dutch citizens had proclaimed the so-called ‘Batavian’ Revolution after the invasion of a French revolutionary army had caused the oligarchic regime of the Orangist stadholder to implode. In May 1795, the French had officially recognized the independence of a Batavian Republic. In March 1796, the Batavian revolutionaries had established a Nationale Vergadering, a legislative and constituent assembly loosely modelled on the French Assemblée Nationale. In May 1797, the members of this Dutch National Assembly had completed a draft constitution, which was then put to a popular vote some months later. The outcome of the first referendum in Dutch history was dramatic: eighty per cent of the voters had rejected the draft constitution, which most had considered a weak compromise between different views that had struggled for dominance in the first Dutch parliament. A second National Assembly was elected, but this constituent body was faced with a similar deadlock of opinions. In the fifth month after the second Nationale Vergadering had first gathered in The Hague, on the said 22 January 1798, a radical minority staged a coup d’etat and purged the parliament of its most insistent political adversaries. This act would turn the Batavian Revolution on its head.

Between the French invasion of January 1795 and the coup of January 1798, the French Directoire had refrained from direct intervention in Dutch politics, as it had taken the position that the Batavians would be of most use as military allies when they were allowed to have a stable and independent republic. Now, after three years of difficult and fruitless deliberations over the constitution that was to guide this republic, it had instructed Charles Delacroix, the new French envoy to the Batavian Republic, to intervene more actively than his predecessor had done and make clear to the Batavian politicians that the French government would not tolerate any further delays. Delacroix gave his support to the coup that the Dutch radicals had been preparing, putting an end to the policy of French non-interventionism in internal political matters.

Over the past fifty years, historians have come to see the closing decades of the eighteenth century as fundamental to the rise of a ‘modern’ concept of time. This is largely due to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, who wrote a number of articles on this topic during the 1960s and 1970s. Both for Koselleck and other historians connected to the German begriffsgeschichte school, the ‘shock of revolution’, and in particular the French Revolution, has been the most important catalyst for new ideas about time and a ‘rupture in continuity’, that is to say the notion, widespread among contemporaries, that they were living in modernity and that the future was unknown.‘With the [introduction of the French] revolutionary calendar,’ Koselleck writes, ‘the attempt to let a new era of time already begin with that caesura was officially sanctioned and celebrated as a revolution.’

This view has been very influential. One cannot, for example, fail to hear its echo in the following quote taken from a more recent article (2003) by Lynn Hunt:

The French Revolution did not stop at the border, and historians such as Ernst Wolfgang Becker and Peter Fritzsche have recently attempted to show how the revolutionary experience irreversibly changed the concept of time not only in France but also in other parts of the Western world. ‘It is difficult to overemphasize,’ Fritzsche writes, ‘the extent to which the prolonged nature of the French Revolution disrupted Western conceptions of historical continuity.’

As one of the aims of this book is a critical reevaluation of the relationship between France and its Sister Republics, I will take this assertion as the point of departure for my contribution, in which I intend to nuance the view that it was primarily the experience of the French Revolution that reshaped the concept of time everywhere in the West.