1. society
2. unrest and war

Table of Contents
Timeline of the Sister Republics (1794-1806)
9
The political culture of the Sister Republics
17
‘The political passions of other nations’
33
Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
National choices and the European order in the writings of Germaine
de Staël
Biancamaria Fontana
1. The transformation of republicanism
The transformation of republicanism in the Sister Republics
43
‘Republic’ and ‘democracy’ in Dutch late eighteenth-century
revolutionary discourse
49
New wine in old wineskins
57
Andrew Jainchill
Wyger R. E. Velema
Republicanism in the Helvetic Republic
Urte Weeber
2. Political concepts and languages
Revolutionary concepts and languages in the Sister Republics of
the late 1790s
67
Useful citizens. Citizenship and democracy in the Batavian
Republic, 1795-1801
73
Pasi Ihalainen
Mart Rutjes
From rights to citizenship to the Helvetian indigénat 85
Political integration of citizens under the Helvetic Republic
Silvia Arlettaz
The battle over ‘democracy’in Italian political thought during the
revolutionary triennio, 1796-1799
Mauro Lenci
97
3. The invention of democratic parliamentary practices
Parliamentary practices in the Sister Republicsin the light of the
French experience
109
Making the most of national time
115
The invention of democratic parliamentary practicesin the
Helvetic Republic
127
The Neapolitan republican experiment of 1799
135
Malcolm Crook
Accountability, transparency, and term limits in the first Dutch
Parliament (1796-1797)
Joris Oddens
Some remarks
André Holenstein
Legislation, balance of power, and the workings of democracy
between theory and practice
Valeria Ferrari
4. Press, politics, and public opinion
Censorship and press liberty in the Sister Republics
143
1798: A turning point?
151
Some reflections
Simon Burrows
Censorship in the Batavian Republic
Erik Jacobs
Censorship and public opinion
159
Liberty of press and censorship in the first Cisalpine Republic
171
Press and politics in the Helvetic Republic (1798-1803)
Andreas Würgler
Katia Visconti
5. The Sister Republics and France
Small nation, big sisters
183
The national dimension in the Batavian Revolution
187
The constitutional debate in the Helvetic Republic in 1800-1801
201
An unwelcome Sister Republic
211
Pierre Serna
Political discussions, institutions, and constitutions
Annie Jourdan
Between French influence and national self-government
Antoine Broussy
Re-reading political relations between the Cisalpine Republic and
the French Directory
Antonino De Francesco
Bibliography 219
List of contributors
245
Notes 249
Index 319
The political culture of the Sister
Republics
Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
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 off icially 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’état and purged the parliament of its most insistent political adversaries.
This act would turn the Batavian Revolution on its head.1
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.2 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.3
18 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
On the same day, another sequence of major events occurred some 550
kilometres southwest of The Hague. In the city of Basel, delegates from all
over the Swiss canton gathered in the Münster church to hear how the city
council had decreed that the citizens of the city of Basel and those of the
surrounding countryside would henceforth enjoy perfectly equal rights.
The council had succumbed to the demands of representatives of the rural
population, who had solemnly declared that they would not settle for less
than ‘freedom, liberty and the sacred inalienable rights of the people’,
as well as a constitution and a ‘national’ assembly that was to consist of
citizens from both city and countryside. On the central square in front of
the church, a tree of liberty was erected to celebrate the ‘unification’ of
the people of Basel, inaugurating the ‘Helvetic’ Revolution. The Basel city
government had come to embrace the need for change voluntarily, but not
necessarily with great enthusiasm. More than by the revolutionary spirit
that swept through the canton, its decision seems to have been prompted
by the persistent rumour that a large French army was ready to intervene
if the revolutionary demands of the people were not met. As had been the
case in many cities of the Dutch Republic three years earlier, the mere
threat of a French intervention had triggered a process of reform from
within. 4
The Helvetic revolutionaries would not be granted as much room for
manoeuvre as the Batavians three years earlier. In the weeks and months
following the revolutionary events in Basel, citizens in many Swiss towns
and villages forced their government to agree to reforms or step down. No
such concessions were made, however, by the aristocratic government of
the city state of Bern, which condemned the spirit of revolution and made
plans to reconquer the Pays de Vaud, the Francophone canton that had been
subject to German-speaking Bern until it had declared itself independent
some weeks previously. On 28 January 1798, the French reacted by marching
into the Swiss territory on the pretext of protecting the rights of the people
of the Vaud against the Bernese; when negotiations failed, the French army
moved against Bern, which fell on 5 March, breaking the resistance of the
Swiss ancien régime. 5 It was the French general Brune who proclaimed,
on 22 March, the unitary Helvetic Republic. Unlike the Batavians, who
had been able to make the framing of a constitution a collective effort, the
Helvetic people were forced to settle for a constitution written by Peter
Ochs, a revolutionary from Basel who had intended the text of this constitution as a draft, and edited by the French Directors Jean-François Reubell
and Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai.6 The imposing of a constitution
that unified the Swiss confederacy dealt a severe blow to the enthusiasm
The political culture of the Sister Republics
19
of many of the Swiss revolutionaries, even among those who had initially
been in favour of a French intervention.
Still further to the southeast, on the other side of the Alps, the citizens
of Verona were witness to an entirely different event. On 22 January 1798,
the French army abandoned the city to the Austrians, who entered through
the city gates that very day.7 The French retreat followed from the Treaty
of Campo Formio, which had stipulated the partial cession of the Venetian
territories to the Emperor. For Napoleon’s armée d’Italie, the abandonment
of Verona ended an episode that had caused serious damage to its desired
image of a revolutionary army of liberation. In what has come to be known
as the Pasque Veronesi, the people of Verona had revolted against what they
considered a French occupation on Easter Monday 1797, taking over the
city and its castles. A week later, the French had regained control when
15,000 soldiers had come to the rescue of the overpowered garrison, but it
had by then become painfully clear that the French were unwanted in the
city. When in the summer of 1797 the French had organized the first-ever
free elections for the Veronese city government, the citizens had responded
by electing the heroes of the counter-revolutionary revolt, after which the
elections had been cancelled and the French military authorities had appointed a ‘democratic’ government of their choice.8 Now, six months later,
the undesired ‘revolution’ of Verona was over.
Some 140 kilometres west of Verona, in the Milanese Palazzo di Governo
(the current seat of the Italian state archives), the Gran Consiglio of the
‘Cisalpine’ Republic seemed to experience a relatively ordinary day. The
members of the lower house of the Cisalpine bicameral legislature discussed the grain and rice trade, the nomination of candidates for vacant
positions in the departmental governments, and a proposal that sought
to cease the holding of sessions that lasted until deep in the night.9 The
Gran Consiglio and the Cisalpine upper house, the Consiglio dei Seniori, had
started their sessions exactly two months earlier, on 22 November 1797.
They represented a republic that had been created by Napoleon in June 1797
and that largely comprised present-day Lombardy and Emilia Romagna;
they served a constitution that had been imposed on them by the French
government and that was a faithful imitation of the French Constitution of the Year III.10 As Antonino de Francesco shows in this volume,
this constitution had at first met with resistance amongst radical Italian
revolutionaries, but after the coup of 18 Fructidor Year V (4 September
1797) had taken place in Paris, bringing a more radical French regime into
power, they joined their more moderate colleagues in embracing the new
constitutional order.
20 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
Their hopes for a viable and truly independent republic were soon to be
crushed. On 22 January 1798, the history of the Cisalpine Republic was not to
be written in Milan but in Paris, where the French foreign minister CharlesMaurice de Talleyrand summoned the Cisalpine envoys and presented them
with a sixteen-article alliance treaty with France, containing extremely
harsh and humiliating conditions.11 After the Cisalpine Directory and its
envoys succumbed to French threats and the Gran Consiglio followed this
example after ample discussions, the Consiglio dei Seniori refused to ratify
the document. The French army responded to this reluctance with force:
in April 1798, General Brune, who a month earlier had stood at the basis of
the Helvetic Republic but was now the commanding general of the armée
d’Italie, purged the Cisalpine Direttorio and both houses of parliament,
setting in motion a whole series of coups, all initiated by rivalling French
factions.12
22 January 1798: one day in the age of the democratic revolution.13 While
the Batavian Revolution was reaching its peak, the Helvetic Revolution
was only just getting underway. By contrast, the Veronese revolution, if
there had been one at all, was coming to an end, whereas the Cisalpine
revolution was taking a dramatic turn. Further southwards, in Naples and
Rome, the revolution was yet to begin. From this cross-sectional view of late
eighteenth-century revolutionary Europe, it should be sufficiently clear that
parallels can be drawn between the revolutions in the various so-called ‘Sister Republics’.14 Recurring elements are the constitutions, the parliaments,
the coups, and the French power politics. Similar chains of revolutionary
events took place in various parts of Europe, some earlier, some later and in
different tempos, but all within a time range of five to six years.
While the above account of events merely scratches the surface of the
study of the revolutionary era, the past decades have seen many innovative
monographs that go far beyond such histoire evenementielle, and that can
generally be brought together under the heading ‘political culture’. Almost
all of these studies have been written by specialists of the various national,
or in some cases regional, revolutionary contexts, who are often equally
well-versed in the history and historiography of the revolution in France
but know surprisingly little about the history of the ‘other’ Sister Republics.
To state it boldly, most historians of the Batavian Revolution have until
now most probably been unaware of the fact that 22 January 1798 was not
only the day in which Dutch radicals staged a coup in The Hague, but that
it also marks the beginning of the revolution in Basel. In this volume, we
have therefore brought together experts on the French, Batavian, Helvetic,
Cisalpine, and Neapolitan revolutions and their recent historiographies in
The political culture of the Sister Republics
21
an attempt to bridge this gap and open up new possibilities to study what we
believe should ultimately be seen and studied as one revolutionary sphere.
National narratives
A question we might f irst ask is whether the citizens of the different
revolutionary republics were themselves aware of the political events that
occurred in the various Sister Republics. At least when speaking of the
Batavian Republic vis-à-vis the Helvetic and the various Italian Republics
and vice versa, the answer should most probably be that this was hardly the
case. As Andreas Würgler shows in this volume for Switzerland, newspapers
and periodicals that had previously focused on news from abroad as a result
of censorship restrictions were during the revolution largely filled with
domestic political news. With the exception of key events in France – the
coup of 18 Fructidor Year V, for example – the public was chiefly interested
in the revolutionary events in their own country, which gave them enough
to talk about. In the chaotic days following the Dutch coup of 22 January
1798, when the periodicals had trouble keeping up with the domestic news
and were printing special issues, the creation of the Helvetic Republic seems
to have been the last thing on the minds of Batavian citizens.
If politicians knew more than ordinary citizens about what was happening in the other Sister Republics, it was probably not a great deal more.
Recent scholarship suggests that the governments of the Dutch, Swiss,
and Italian republics have never shown particular interest in establishing
multilateral alliances including all the revolutionary republics, preferring
instead to invest in ‘bonds of friendship’ with monarchies such as Spain,
Denmark, or Sweden when this seemed more opportune. When the Helvetic
and Cisalpine Republics were created, for instance, the Batavian government did little to welcome them. It seems to have intended to establish
diplomatic relations with the Cisalpine Republic, but while the Cisalpine
government sent an envoy to The Hague, no Batavian envoy ever arrived in
Milan, and neither did the Batavian government bother to send an envoy to
Aarau, from April 1798 the seat of the Helvetic government.15 Occasionally,
the governments sent each other declarations in which they confirmed the
ideological bonds between the revolutionary republics, but no action was
taken to actively strengthen these bonds.16 As a matter of fact, relations
between the Helvetic and Cisalpine Republics were even problematic, as
the Cisalpine Republic strove to annex the Italophone parts of Switzerland
from the beginning of its existence.17
22 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
The general state of ignorance or even indifference about the fate of the
fellow Sister Republics, caused by a lack of information and the language
barrier certainly but above all the self-centredness of the revolutionary
nations, never changed after the Age of Revolution ended. Preoccupied as
they were with their own pasts, historians from the nineteenth-century
nation-states that were built on the foundations of their revolutionary
predecessors – the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Swiss Confederation,
and, somewhat later, the Kingdom of Italy – have long focused on questions
regarding the place of the revolution in their national Grand Narratives,
and the nature of their relation to France during the revolutionary years.
This means that those revolutions are mainly treated as a component of
the diachronic development of their respective nation-states. The historical
analysis of the revolutionary period is therefore dependent on the role that
is ascribed to it within the dominant national historiographical narrative.
In the case of the French Revolution, its role has been characterized as
both positive and negative, but at least as an important episode in the development of the French nation-state.18 Most historians also see the French
Revolution as an event that had a transnational and even global influence.
No other revolution managed to enforce a break with the early-modern
period in such a vigorous way, and its events and ideals are deemed to have
had an enormous influence outside the French borders since 1789.19 But
such an analysis, correct as it may be, can hardly be called comparative
or even transnational, since it is a story told only from the perspective of
the French Revolution and how it was received outside of France. Such a
Rezeptionsgeschichte is important in understanding the dynamics of the
revolutionary era, but it only tells part of the story.
When we look at the different national historiographies of the other
Sister Republics, we can clearly discern a divergence in the ways the revolutionary era has been judged during the past two centuries; this makes us
realize all the more clearly how closely these judgments have been linked
to contemporary political circumstances. In the Netherlands, throughout
the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, the history
of the Batavian Revolution of the 1790s and the reformist Patriot movement that had preceded it during the 1780s was mostly written by royalist
historians who thought of the anti-Orangist revolutionary era as a ‘French
Epoch’ and saw the Dutch revolutionaries either as marionettes operated
by French puppeteers or as violent epigones of the French Jacobins of the
Year II (1793-1794).20
This negative view became unsustainable during the later twentieth
century. Ironically, it was Herman Colenbrander (1871-1945) who paved
The political culture of the Sister Republics
23
the way for a revisionist approach by publishing an extensive collection
of source material about the revolutionary years, though he himself is
mostly remembered for his adherence to the puppet theatre metaphor.
In recent decades, historians have increasingly ascribed to the Batavian
revolutionaries a mind of their own and credited them as pioneers of the
Dutch representative democracy and founders of the Dutch unitary state,
while at the same time acknowledging that the Batavian and French Revolutions were deeply intertwined.21
Whereas in nineteenth-century Dutch historiography, one needs a
magnifying glass to find historians who embraced the Batavian Revolution, in the contemporaneous Swiss historiography it is harder to find
historians who altogether rejected the Helvetic Revolution. Much more
than their Dutch counterparts, liberal Swiss historians such as Johannes
Strickler (1835-1910) explained the Helvetik as a process of modernization
and necessary break with the ancien régime, a view that was sometimes
even shared, though with less ardour, by more conservative colleagues. The
positive judgement of the Helvetic Era was, however, never unconditional;
as in the Netherlands, but less exclusively, there always remained a certain
ambivalence about the revolution because of the French military occupation
of the Swiss cantons, the political interventions of the French, and the
Napoleonic Era that followed the years of democratic reforms.22
In the twentieth century, the way the Helvetic Revolution was interpreted
and judged remained strongly linked to fluctuations in the appreciation for
the era that had preceded it: a glorification of the Swiss old regime (as well as
anti-French sentiments) led to a more critical assessment of the revolution
during WWI, while the same happened, though with less intensity, in the
1960s and 1970s when the study of the Swiss ancien régime experienced a
revival.23 Interestingly enough, in recent years there has been a tendency to
stress the continuities rather than the ruptures between the ancien régime
and the Helvetic Republic, while at the same time, in the Netherlands, the
conviction that the Batavian Republic should be seen as the most important
rupture since Dutch independence has rapidly gained ground.24
The Italian historiography of the revolutionary era has long focused on
the relation between the Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento, combining
the familiar question regarding respectively the ‘Frenchness’ and ‘Italianness’ of the so-called revolutionary triennio (1796-1799) with another theme
that has also been central to both the Swiss and the Dutch historiographical
debate: the crucial importance of the revolutionary era for a much longer
process of determining whether to opt for a number of independent states,
a confederacy of interdependent states, or one centralized unitary state.25
24 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
The French ideal of unité et indivisiblité got a grip on all Sister Republics,
and all saw internal divisions between unitarists and federalists, but not a
single other theme is likely to have been shaped more by the way national
historiographies have been embedded in national contexts, and thus by
the directions in which the Dutch, Swiss, and Italian states have headed:
for a country that went from a confederacy to a unitary state during the
Batavian Republic and remained so ever since, or a country for which the
Helvetic Republic was a short-lived unitary intermezzo, the historiographical perspective is quite different from that of a country that was formed only
in 1870, where the leading question became, in retrospect, whether the seeds
of the Italian unification had been sown during the revolutionary years.
When, after WWII, the triennio started to be studied more in its own
right, the all-absorbing question became whether it had been a triennio
giacobino, that is to say whether the ideology of the leading revolutionaries from 1796 onwards was in fact the ideology of the French Jacobins of
the Year II, i.e. that of the Jacobin leader Robespierre. As we have seen,
nineteenth-century Dutch historians had previously concluded the same
about the Batavian revolutionaries. The idea of giacobinismo italiano that
was advanced by Armando Saitta (1919-1991) and led to a controversy with
– amongst others – Franco Venturi (1914-1994) and Furio Diaz (1916-2011),
dominated the debate on the Italian revolution throughout the first postwar decades. The position that the Italian revolutionary movement should
be considered a monolithic Jacobin bloc has long remained influential, but
more recently a new generation of historians has convincingly shown that
in Italy, like elsewhere, there have been different revolutionary ideologies;
as a result, the giacobini italiani have become patrioti and the triennio
giacobino is now called the triennio democratico.26
The national perspective dominant in history writing has created the
inevitable illusion that national developments must have had national
causes, because sticking to the national framework has led to a blind spot
for the international context.27 This perspective has obscured the fact that
many facets of modern European politics, such as representative democracy,
constitutions, national citizenship, and civic rights manifested themselves
for the first time during the revolutionary era. In this book we want to show
how the revolutionary political cultures took root in the different Sister
Republics not only within their national context, but specifically how they
were influenced by international contexts – if not from one Sister Republic
to another, then surely because the revolutionaries in different countries
were inspired by the same Enlightenment thinkers – and whether and to
what extent the political experiments and experiences of the revolutionary
The political culture of the Sister Republics
25
groups in different countries amounted to an international political culture
or ideal.
The transnational character of the revolutions
A volume concerned with the revolutionary political culture of different
European territories is comparative and transnational by nature. But such a
statement raises all sorts of questions. It raises questions on a methodological level: how should historians go about in writing comparative histories?
What does ‘transnational’ mean in the context of the late eighteenth century
when most European nation-states had yet to be formed or even ‘imagined’,
but when at the same time the revolutions were responsible for the creation of nation-states? It also raises a question concerning the nature of the
revolution(s) of the late eighteenth century. Should the upheavals at the
end of the ancien régime be characterized as (different) manifestations of
a single revolutionary movement, or can we understand the revolutions
better if we study them primarily as ‘national’ revolutions?
This calls for a brief reflection on the scholarship on the transnational
character of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Despite the
dominance of the national perspective, over the past half-century a number
of groundbreaking works have been written in which the revolutions were
placed in a broader international pattern, following the argument that
‘this whole [Western] civilization was swept in the last four decades of the
eighteenth century by a single revolutionary movement, which manifested
itself in different ways and with varying success in different countries, yet
in all of them showed similar objectives and principles’.28 This was done
most famously by Jacques Godechot and R. R. Palmer in the 1950s and
1960s. Godechot emphasized that the revolutions of the late eighteenth
century formed a part of a single ‘Atlantic Revolution’ that swept through
Western and Central Europe and the Americas. It was possible to speak of a
single revolution because, according to Godechot, the social and economic
problems and circumstances that caused it were relatively similar in the
different territories where revolution broke out.29
Palmer also saw the different revolutions as part of a larger movement, but
he chose to focus more on its ideological coherence. In his view the revolutions were the outcome of a struggle between ‘democratic’ and ‘aristocratic’
groups and ideals, and he concluded that the era under investigation should
therefore be called the Age of the Democratic Revolution.30 Although both
authors admit that the revolution took different courses and had different
26 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
outcomes in specific countries, they stress their basic and fundamental
similarities. This book also points to a number of similarities between
the Sister Republics, but it focuses more on similarities and differences in
political cultures than on social and economic circumstances or on a strict
dichotomy between ‘aristocrats’ and ‘democrats’.
The transnational perspective as employed by Palmer and Godechot
has been far less popular than the national or local focus over the last
half-century, but recently scholars have again become interested in linking the revolutionary movements of the Age of Revolutions. Historians
are focusing once again on the ‘Atlantic’ character of the revolution,31 but
also on its global scope, analyzing how revolutionary ideals and practices
jumped back and forth around the globe, stressing reciprocity rather than
the unidirectional influence of the American and French Revolutions.32
The international and reciprocal nature of the revolutionary ideals and
practices will also be stressed in this volume, but with two important points
in mind. First, the Sister Republics were called Sisters for a reason. They were
the sisters of the French Republic, who could act as a caring sister but also
as a dominant mother. The Sister Republics had been made possible by the
French military, and they existed under the French sphere of influence. The
Sister Republics had varying degrees of political autonomy, but the power
relations were never equal. Though the patriotic governments of the Sister
Republics should not simply be viewed as puppet regimes, we have to take
the dominant role of France into account when analyzing the political
culture of the Sister Republics.33
The second point concerns the geographical scope. The Sister Republics
were not so much Atlantic or global phenomena as European ones. Studying
the revolutions as part of a ‘European’ revolution is uncommon but, as many of
the contributors to this book note, it is highly feasible.34 As mentioned above,
revolutionaries in the different Sister Republics and France were mostly
preoccupied with events in their own respective countries and often unaware
of foreign developments. There were exceptions, however, as Malcolm Crook
explains in his contribution. The French politician and ambassador JacquesVincent Delacroix published reflections on the various constitutions that
were written at the time in the different republics, and Italian revolutionary
Matteo Angelo Galdi called for a federation of sister republics based on France,
Holland, and Italy.35 The celebrations that commemorated the foundation
of the French Republic in 1798 included the insignia of the Sister Republics,
together with a banner proclaiming an eternal alliance between them.36
These examples show the tension during the revolutionary era between
the actors’ wish to create new political systems that would fit national cir-
The political culture of the Sister Republics
27
cumstances and their belief that their ideals were of a common, enlightened,
and universal nature. If these ideals were common, should this be reflected
in the cooperation between the European states and to what extent? Or
should each revolutionary republic follow its own autonomous path in the
realization of the revolution’s ideals? The French had to ask themselves if
it was just or even possible to implement their ideals in other countries, as
Biancamaria Fontana points out in her discussion of the political thought
of Germaine de Staël. Were the French ideals universal enough for all
countries, and if so, could they be realized if local people felt that political
change was forced upon them by foreign armies? De Staël believed it was
not and felt that the very ideal of the revolution, namely self-government,
necessarily meant that people had to be convinced rather than forced to
accept political change, for any other solution would mean a failure of
democratic principles and practice.37
Likewise, the citizens of the Sister Republics were asking themselves
whether it was feasible to follow the ‘French model’ and to what extent
French institutions reflected supranational ideals that made such an
implementation even possible. The international, European context and
the tensions within it need to be highlighted to understand the political
culture of the Sister Republics. At the same time, this history can offer a
historical perspective on current debates on European integration.
Comparative and cross-national history
In order to understand the nature and dynamics of the political culture(s)
of the Sister Republics and the international dimension of their national
development, a comparative or cross-national approach is required. Comparative history can be defined as a mode of analysis that is concerned with
similarities and differences, explaining a given phenomenon by asking
which conditions were shared and which were distinctive, usually, but not
necessarily, by comparing different nations.38 Although comparing different
national developments is a very apt method for modifying and falsifying
specific national explanations for historical developments, there are several
problems and pitfalls connected to the comparative method.39
The first problem concerns the broad scope of comparative history: a
historian has to be not only a specialist in the revolutionary era on a specific
region or country and the specific historiographical traditions and perspectives that differ from case to case, but a specialist on all of them – a task
virtually impossible for an individual scholar in today’s highly specialized
28 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
and professionalized scholarship. We have therefore invited a range of
researchers who are specialized in one of five selected topics with regard
to one of the Sister Republics. Each section is preceded by an introduction
in which an explicit comparison between the different countries is drawn
concerning the topic of the section.
This connects to a second problem of comparative history: which unit of
comparison is to be chosen, since in principal anything can be compared
with anything?40 Since this volume is interested with the nature and development of the political cultures of the revolutionary era, we have taken
what we deem the most important elements of these political cultures as
our units of comparison. An explanation as to why these specific elements
have been selected follows in the next section.
A last problem concerns the varying contexts of the regions or countries
that are being compared. As mentioned above, there were similar developments within the different Sister Republics, but under different conditions
and not at the same time. Whether reforms were instigated in 1795 when the
Directoire was in power in France, or in 1801 when Napoleon was tightening
his grip on the territories under the French sphere of influence, was of great
importance to the success and direction of democratic developments in the
Sister Republics. The problem of context here is not only diachronic but also
synchronic: the local social and political contexts, not to mention historical
developments were very different in the Dutch and Swiss Republics and
the different territories in the Italian peninsula. This also means there are
conceptual problems to deal with: did Dutch, Swiss, and Italian patriots
mean the same things when they used the word ‘democracy’, or were the
political circumstances and intellectual traditions so different that their
meanings cannot be compared in a useful way?41
This volume is, to a large degree, concerned with exactly this type of
question. We try to answer those questions in two ways. First, this book
places concepts such as ‘citizenship’, ‘(parliamentary) democracy’, ‘liberty’,
and ‘republic’ at the core of its investigations and asks what these elements
of revolutionary political discourse (which was often proclaimed as being ‘universal’ by the protagonists) meant in different contexts. Second,
although the structure of this book points to a predominantly inter-national
comparison, it is complemented with attention for the cross-national transfer of political ideas and practices that highlights the international dynamic
of national developments.
The contributions in this volume, taking their cue from the perspective of political transfer (whereby the migration of political practices
across national borders and their use as examples is studied42), show that
The political culture of the Sister Republics
29
revolutionary political thought and practice were not simply the result of
a singular intellectual and institutional mould of French fabrication. They
were rather the result of a complex process of adaptation and a national
reworking of intellectual debates that were international in nature. Revolutionaries all over Europe were in debate over the question which foreign
and international ideas and practices could and should be adopted and
which ones should be rejected. 43
We should not underestimate the dominating influence of France – as an
inspiring example but also as a military force that could and sometimes did
force its will on other nations. But it is important to stress that the French
governments often let the Sister Republics make their own political choices,
resulting in political structures that were a mix of old and new, domestic
and foreign. This was caused, on the one hand, by the contingent nature
of French foreign policy (in many instances during the revolutionary era,
France did not even have a foreign policy), and the fact that many foreign
patriots were able to influence French policymaking decisions. 44 On the
other hand, French ‘constitution makers’ such as Pierre Daunou were sensitive to the idea that different nations needed different political systems and
were therefore also concerned with the question which ‘universal’ ideals and
practices should be part of the different constitutions and constitutional
drafts of the Sister Republics. 45
The international and transnational focus of this study has helped to
test and re-evaluate the national perspective that is commonly used as
an explanatory and normative framework for the analysis of the Sister
Republics. This becomes clear from most of the chapters in this book, in
which many national historiographical accounts of the period of the Sister
Republics are debunked. But it also provides new insights into the character of the revolutionary political culture as a whole. For example, what
becomes clear from the section on republicanism is that the transformation
of early modern republican thought during the revolutionary era was not
a process limited to the American and French Revolutions, the countries
that are usually studied in this respect. 46 In fact, the elaboration of the
hybrid forms of republicanism that were the result of this transformation
process was carried out with great conceptual depth and richness in the
Sister Republics as well – something that, as Andrew Jainchill notes in his
contribution, mainstream historiography of the Age of Revolution has too
often neglected. 47
Another example concerns the extraordinary emphasis that all the sister
regimes placed on civic education as a means to instill the new republican
and democratic values and duties in present and future generations – thus
30 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
hoping to guarantee the future of these democratic republics. In the Batavian Republic, the first minister of education stated that ‘the young Citizens
and Citizenesses of the State’ should be taught the foundations of the new
enlightened regime from an early age, since these foundations were crucial
for ‘the durability, maintenance and happiness of the Fatherland, which
they should passionately love.’48 These notions and policies were also highly
present in the other Sister Republics, and the international perspective
employed in this volume shows that it was in fact a vital element central
to all revolutionary regimes that were looking for ways to legitimate and
perpetuate their political model. 49
The comparative element of this book, then, serves to highlight previously
undervalued aspects of the political culture(s) of the Age of Revolution and
looks to question some of the national historiographical models of historical
explanation by bringing together – in English – knowledge on different
aspects of the political culture of the Sister Republics in a systematic way.
The political culture of the Sister Republics
This volume seeks to study the political world of the Sister Republics from
the broad and inclusive perspective of political culture. This means that
politics is interpreted as much more than a factual struggle for power and
is broadly defined as, in the by now classic words of Keith Michael Baker,
‘the activity through which individuals and groups in society articulate,
negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon
one another and upon the whole. Political culture is the set of discourses
or political practices by which these claims are made.’50 This approach
to politics more inclusively interpreted as political culture has been
particularly rewarding and illuminating in the research concerning the
French Revolution over the past three decades.51 We have gained a deeper
understanding of politics and new and valuable perspectives on the political
process by studying the way in which political habits, conventions, and
styles take shape,52 by researching the way in which politics is embedded
in a wider network of communication,53 and by analyzing the forms of
argumentation and the meaning of key concepts used by political actors.54
Although this rich research on eighteenth-century political culture has
helped our understanding of French political culture, it has had far less
influence on the historiography of the Sister Republics.55 This volume hopes
to fill this gap and strives to develop a new outlook on the differences and
similarities between the various revolutionary states in Europe by applying
The political culture of the Sister Republics
31
the fruitful framework of political culture. It does so by exploring five
general themes that are deemed to be central to the creation and development of revolutionary political culture.
The first section of this book addresses the ways in which modern forms
of republicanism emerged in the Sister Republics, all of which were proud to
call themselves republics. They therefore placed themselves within the rich
tradition of republicanism – an overarching political category during the
Age of Revolution. To properly understand the Age of Revolution, as Franco
Venturi argued in 1971, historians thus need to ‘follow the involvement,
modifications and dispersion of the republican tradition in the last years
of the eighteenth century.’56 Following recent trends in historical research,
the transformation of republican thought and practice will therefore be at
the centre of this section, and the chapters discuss the critical appraisal of
the classical and early modern languages of republicanism, the redefinition
of republican citizen participation and political virtue, the enlargement
of the republican political space, and the uses made of the American and
French republican examples.
The second part focuses on (additional) political key concepts of the
revolutionary republics. The decades surrounding 1800 have been described,
among others by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, as the Sattelzeit in which political key concepts acquired their modern meanings
and connotations.57 The culmination of this process of conceptual renewal
and transformation coincided with the years of most radical change in
other areas of political activity.58 This same pattern can be discerned in
the Sister Republics, where similar intense and fundamental debates were
conducted over the meaning of political key concepts such as liberty,
equality, sovereignty, representation, and citizenship. These debates were
particularly urgent because the meaning ascribed to these key concepts
would be decisive in the process of creating a new political order. This
section deals with the nature of this conceptual change and focuses on the
changing meanings of citizenship and democracy/representation, concepts
that were central to the most fundamental political change of the time: the
development of parliamentary democracies within nation-states.
In the third section, the development of parliamentary cultures in the
countries under discussion will be investigated. Just like representative
democracies, these ‘national’ parliaments (or the attempts to create them)
were political novelties, which meant that most aspects of parliamentary
culture had to be either invented or copied and adapted, either from former
political assemblies or from foreign examples such as the French Assemblée
Nationale. The chapters in this section will concentrate on the different
32 Joris Oddens and Mart Rutjes
attempts to create national democratic parliaments. They discuss parliamentary rules, rhetoric, and tactics and consider the strategies that were
employed when discrepancies between democratic ideology and practice
became manifest. Did the activities of these parliaments, the informal
parliamentary conventions, the political styles and codes of conduct eventually lead to a modern parliamentary culture?
The chapters in part four deal with the interaction between press and
politics in the revolutionary states. During the eighteenth century, public
opinion developed and was increasingly reflected in a periodic political
press. This political press (the forerunner of modern-day political journalism) became a powerful force within the political process of the revolutionary period, helped by the fact that freedom of the press and well-organized
public opinion were seen by many revolutionaries as fundamental to the
functioning of a representative democracy. This immediately led to debates
within the Sister Republics on the limits of free speech and the proper place
of public opinion and the role of the press. This section questions to what
extent freedom of the press existed, whether openness of government was to
be actively sought after, and whether politicians influenced public opinion
via the press or whether the people behind the press tried to influence the
political process.
The book concludes with a section on the relationship between the
French Republic and its Sister Republics, and explores recent revisionist
insights into this relationship. It will particularly focus on the ways in which
the Sister Republics, despite the obvious presence of the French, succeeded
in shaping and establishing their own political objectives and arrangements.
It also puts the relative success of the Sister Republics in maintaining a
degree of independence from France in a comparative perspective.
Before beginning with the first section, however, Biancamaria Fontana
provides a prologue in which she discusses the views in revolutionary
Europe on the future of the European order. Her contribution is a fitting
prelude to the story of a revolutionary world – the political world of the
Sister Republics.