On a pleasant evening in April 1869 a pastor from Utrecht, Abraham Kuyper, gave a lecture in the Odéon building on the Singel canal in Amsterdam entitled Eenvormigheid, de vloek van het moderne leven (Uniformity, the curse of modern life). The title must have provoked amazement, because the idea that everything increasingly resembled everything else was by no means generally accepted. The prevailing view was one that until then had been elaborated in most detail by the English liberal philosopher, Spencer. Inspired by evolutionary theory, he had asserted that on the contrary, everything was becoming more varied over time. The idea that uniformity was increasing was not completely new, though; in a novel of 1866, for instance, Allard Pierson had referred in passing to ‘the deadly uniformity to which we are doomed by modern civilization’. Most characteristically, this opinion was linked to the thought that very little could be done about it: the wave of modernization could not be stopped. And it was precisely on this point that Kuyper would put forward an entirely different view. He had already complained about the ‘all-levelling life of society’, but in his Odéon lecture, he let rip: uniformity was a curse of which the Netherlands, inspired by history and naturally with God's blessing, should rid itself.

It was a fine lecture, in which the French Revolution was blamed for systematically undermining all that was familiar, all that was typical, and along with this, personal individuality as well. The effects of the revolutionary slogan ‘one and indivisible’ were to be seen everywhere: old Dutch towns were losing their variety, which had grown organically over time, by constructing boring, straight streets and building large, uniform blocks of housing; the natural difference between young and old had been erased, young people were acting like old people – ‘our children are no longer children’ – while old people were playing at ‘jeune garçon’; women were behaving like men and men were becoming effeminate; moreover, all men dressed the same everywhere, and whereas women's clothes were more varied, Paris nevertheless dictated the fashions; the language had been watered down and corrupted, and was becoming shoddy and standardized. A comparable process could be seen in social relations, whereby sections of society were becoming less diverse.