Introduction

Nowadays the Dutch are famous or even notorious for the particular kind of relationship they have evolved between themselves and their public bodies. They have an almost universal reputation for their ‘liberal’ regime or ‘liberal state’, with ‘liberal’ used here in the sense of tolerant, permissive, generous, humane, non-repressive. Is there any evidence in the nineteenth century of such ‘liberalism’ and tolerance? What was the Dutch official attitude to non-standard forms of behaviour and under-privileged groups?

In seeking out this historical process of defining the relationships between state, interest group and individual, three principal areas will be investigated in this chapter: the growth of democratic political institutions; the role of the liberals in that process; and finally the famed Dutch tolerance. Where did this ‘tolerance’ originate, and how did it develop? How was it manifested (if at all) in Dutch political and social institutions as they developed in the nineteenth century? This is a large subject area, and here we shall take certain specific aspects of it. We shall focus in turn on traditions of religious and political freedom interspersed with examples of intolerance, and finally and most importantly on that particularly Dutch brand of political tolerance, verzuiling.

Democratization

The Dutch were not in the vanguard of the evolution of the institutions of parliamentary democracy, in comparison to other European nations. In particular, the suffrage was expanded only very gradually in the nineteenth century.