8An Ambivalent Conservatism: Edmund Burke in the Netherlands, 1770–1870
Introduction
It has often been remarked that the Dutch do not like to describe themselves as ‘conservative’.1 Even those politicians and intellectuals who were conservative in every respect usually asserted that they were forward-looking in one way or other. This tendency perhaps originates in the Dutch republican tradition, with its absence of an influential aristocratic and courtly culture, and its predominantly bourgeois and commercial values. In the Netherlands, the political programme developed by Edmund Burke, ‘the father of conservatism’, was usually associated with an aristocratic or elitist point of view. For a long time, it had only a limited appeal.2
Editions of Burke’s major writings in Dutch have begun to appear only in recent decades.3 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the audience for his works was restricted to the relatively small group of highly educated people who were able to read the original texts, or who consulted them in French or German. But precisely this group tended to think of itself as more or less ‘liberal’. Burke’s defence of the ancien régime in 1790 met with little sympathy in a country where widespread resentment was felt against the recent repression of the movement for constitutional reform. Public opinion for a large part sympathized with the French Revolution. A Dutch version of the Reflections was announced on several occasions, but it never saw the light of day. Most readers came into contact with Burke’s ideas only through the many books and pamphlets attacking him.
The situation did not change very much in the post-revolutionary era. There was nothing comparable to the impact the Reflections made in Germany. Romantic conservatism in the Netherlands did not draw its inspiration from Burke. Only around the middle of the nineteenth century did Burke’s ideas suddenly became the object of intense discussion, as the political wing of the orthodox Protestants, the so-called Anti-Revolutionary Party, began to present Burke as one of its models. This claim was contested by a number of moderate liberals who, evidently influenced by the prevailing view in Britain at the time, considered Burke as one of their own.
However, attempts to organize a secular, not explicitly religious, conservative movement remained without effect. Burke’s opinion that politics were inseparable from religion gave the Anti-Revolutionary leaders a strong argument against their opponents. But in spite of its name, the Anti-Revolutionary Party did not think of itself as primarily conservative. It represented a large segment of the lower middle class, which until then had been excluded from political participation. Emancipatory aims gradually prevailed. From the 1860s onward, the party adopted an extension of political and civil rights as part of its programme. When the first steps were taken towards a modern Christian-democratic ideology, Burke’s ideas again lost much of their immediate relevance.
Aesthetics and counter-revolution
Burke’s earliest readers in the Netherlands in the years before 1790 all belonged to the relatively small elite that had for a long time exercised almost absolute power in the republican government. From 1781 onward, in reaction to the disastrous war with England over the independence of the United States, a revolutionary movement, the so-called Patriot Movement, contested this hegemony. The widespread political unrest resulted in a radical coup d’état in many towns after 1784, followed by a counter-revolutionary coup in 1787, supported by the British ambassador, James Harris, and put into effect by Prussian military intervention.4 The outcome was a restoration in office of the ‘stadtholder’, William V of Orange, who, although he formally upheld the republican constitution, now occupied a semi-monarchical position. Most of the defenders of the status quo, the Orangists, looked for inspiration to England and Germany, whereas their radical opponents, the Patriots, were in close contact with oppositional groups in France. This may be the reason why references to Burke’s first important work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, are almost exclusively found in the writings of prominent Orangist intellectuals.
One of them was the young Rijklof Michaël van Goens (1748–1810). Acclaimed as a child prodigy, he was appointed professor of classical Greek at the University of Utrecht in 1766 when he was only 18 years old. By that time he had already completed the first of the essays for which he is remembered as a pioneer of comparative literary studies.5 In 1769, Van Goens published a Dutch edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s Betrachtungen über das Erhabene und das Naive in den schönen Wissenschaften (Thoughts on the sublime and the naïve in the sciences of beauty) (1758).6 Mendelssohn made no mention of Burke, but Van Goens added a footnote stating that the author of the Essay on Sublime & Beautifull [sic] (London 1767) had a different opinion on the effect of astonishment caused by the sublime (Mendelssohn 1774, 7–8). Although he boasted of his wide reading on the subject, from Longinus to the present day, Van Goens apparently was not aware of more important differences between Burke’s Enquiry and the traditional Longinian accounts of the sublime. Neither was he well informed about the author. He possessed two copies of the Enquiry, but the sale catalogue of his library ascribed them to William Duff, the Scottish Presbyterian minister whose anonymous Essay on Original Genius (London 1767) Van Goens had recommended as an ‘intelligent work … worthy of translation’.7
This remained the pattern for some time to come. The authorship of the Enquiry was established soon enough. After all, both the French translation of 1765 and the German one by Garve of 1773 printed Burke’s name on the title page. But for Dutch readers who tried to find their way through the rapidly growing number of treatises on aesthetics then appearing in English, French and German, it must have been difficult to select the really outstanding contributions. The classicist tradition, which conceived of the sublime primarily as a rhetorical instrument, was still highly influential. In Dutch late eighteenth-century writings on aesthetics the sublime was certainly not neglected. But Burke’s Enquiry played only a minor role.8 From the 1790s onward some authors began to consider the sublime as an autonomous category, but in this they followed Immanuel Kant, and they were mostly interested in the moral aspects.9
Even the one Dutch thinker who was personally acquainted with Burke, and who unreservedly admired his Enquiry, had little use for his conception of the sublime, or for an aesthetics of ‘delightful horror’. Petrus Camper (1722–1789), a professor of surgery in Amsterdam, Franeker and Groningen, and successor to the great Herman Boerhaave as one of Europe’s most highly regarded medical practitioners, was also a gifted amateur of the arts.10 Between 1770 and 1782, he delivered a number of lectures at the Amsterdam Academy of Design, in which he tried to combine his experience as a draughtsman with his insights as a surgeon and anatomist. After his death in 1789, his notes, only partially expanded and rewritten, were published by his eldest son (Camper 1791 and 1792). French, English and German translations followed almost immediately.11 In the last lecture, ‘On physical beauty’, Burke is explicitly praised as ‘the great philosopher and statesman’ (Camper 1792, 80).12 Camper was so impressed with the Enquiry that he tried to make contact with the author. In June 1775 he sent Burke a flattering letter, and ten years later, in November 1785, he spent a day and a night at Burke’s country house in Beaconsfield. Although an outspoken person himself, he described Burke, a ‘tall, well-mannered man in his fifties’, in his travel diary as ‘one of the most eloquent men I have met so far’.13
But it was not the idea of the sublime that attracted him in Burke’s aesthetic theory. In the arts, Camper was a strict classicist.14 Like most of his contemporaries, he admired the Apollo Belvedere as an unsurpassed masterpiece. But he refused to accept that this piece of sculpture was experienced as beautiful simply because it represented an ideal human form. From an empirical point of view, the Apollo was an anomaly. Real people never looked like that. There had to be a material reason why he, like almost everybody else, should prefer shapes like these above more naturalistic representations. He found part of the answer to this question in Burke’s Enquiry (Camper, 1791, 72; 1794, 79). In the first place, Burke offered an empirical, even materialistic, explanation of the way beauty is experienced by the eye. Secondly, Burke explained at length that beauty had little to do with ideal proportions. Camper experienced this insight as a revelation. When he revised his lecture ‘On the natural difference of features’ to be delivered in Paris in 1777, he added some remarks on his reading of Burke.
‘I myself had always been a great defender of this idea (i.e. that art depends on proportion)’, admitted Camper,
until I read Burke’s On the Sublime. I found his argument so strong that I was immediately convinced. … If beauty depends on the proportion of the head and the neck with the height of the body, either the swan cannot be beautiful, or the dove is quite ugly.15
Burke’s rejection of the proportional canon became the basis of Camper’s well-known theory of the ‘facial angle’.16 Looked at in profile, the Apollo has an almost flattened face; the nose projects only a little, while the line from the chin to the forehead is almost exactly vertical (Camper 1791, 20).17 This is not a perfect proportion, but an exaggeration. In normal human beings, the facial angle is always below eighty degrees. The reason we admire the Apollo, instead of being repelled by it, is related to a problem of optics. Nature is, at least since the Renaissance, represented in Western art according to the laws of perspective. Perspective, however, leads to certain deformations in the field of vision. In the Apollo, which was made to be seen from below, these deformations are corrected. In this way, according to Camper, the impression of beauty afforded by the Apollo could be scientifically explained without recourse to a theory of ideal proportions (1791, 73–75, 90–91; 1794, 80–82, 99).
Camper discussed these ideas with Burke during his visit in 1785. Whether Burke agreed with him is not recorded, but in gratitude he presented Camper with the antlers of a moose for his anatomical collection (Camper 1939, 202–04).18 Did they talk about politics as well? Camper was a confirmed Orangist, and naturally he looked to Britain for support of his own cause. His praise of Burke as a ‘great statesman’ already dates from before the Patriot upheaval. It may still refer to Burke’s attitude towards American independence. But it is striking how, during the next few years, the political sentiments of Burke and Camper developed along similar lines. After the restoration of the ancien régime in the Netherlands in September 1787, Camper was appointed president of the Council of State. In this new capacity he had the honour of welcoming the consort of the stadtholder, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, with her two sons and daughter, at her return to The Hague.
The ceremony was explicitly meant to compensate the Princess for her offended sense of dignity. Camper was not only officially but also emotionally involved. During the Patriot uprising, the stadtholder and his family had sought refuge in Nijmegen, in the eastern part of the country. In the spring of 1787, however, Princess Wilhelmina decided to travel to The Hague in the hope of stirring up Orangist resistance. Halfway, she was arrested by Patriot militiamen, held in custody for several days, and then sent back to her husband. The incident, represented as a deliberate insult to the Prussian crown, provided the government in Berlin with the final pretext to put down the Dutch revolution. An anonymous pamphlet railed loudly against the indignities the Princess had had to suffer at the hands of the populace. Its author is generally assumed to be Petrus Camper (1787, 7–8). Burke probably never read it. In retrospect, however, Camper’s complaint sounds like a first draft of the famous passage in the Reflections where Burke takes up his chivalric stand in defence of the ill-treated Marie-Antoinette. Without doubt, Camper would have applauded Burke’s indictment of the revolution in France, had he lived until 1790.
Waiting for a translation
After the restoration of 1787, the Dutch press was severely curtailed. Nonetheless, public opinion remained very much on the side of the opposition. Burke himself was well aware of the prevailing mood. As he wrote in 1791: ‘The suppressed faction, though suppressed, exists. Under the ashes, the embers of the late commotions are still warm’ (Writings and Speeches, 8:361). In Holland, his reputation had suffered much from his support of the Orangist restoration. Characteristic of the ambivalence with which he was regarded, is the first short review of his Reflections, published in January 1791 in the Algemene Konst- en Letterbode (General Review of Arts and Letters). According to this enlightened middle-class weekly, the Reflections were ‘an unusual book, in every sense of the word, with much that is beautiful, but also much that is wrong; with much truth, but no less falsehood’. ‘His work was written with the explicit aim of placing the revolution in France in a hateful light, and discrediting its sympathizers in England, especially Dr. Price, in the most violent manner.’ When the popular Richard Price died a few months later, the journal attributed his unexpected demise to Burke’s attacks.19
In Europa op het einde der agttiende eeuw (Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century) the anonymous author, writing in 1790, tried to evaluate the consequences of the recent revolutionary movements for the balance of power in Europe. Although he welcomed the French Revolution as a ‘blessed event’, his interpretation of international affairs was strictly based on the theory of raison d’état. France’s internal struggles obviously weakened her position as a great power. This was much to the advantage of the English. To conceal their political aims, they tried to convince the French of their benevolent intentions. Primarily for that reason, the British government had allowed the publication of so many declarations of sympathy and adhesion. But now Burke had rudely torn off the official mask:
The savage anger, the outbursts of envy, the ill-considered ranting of the peevish Burke, ran the risk of making this effort fruitless, and of opening the eyes of the nation which they hoped to lull asleep. This must be why both parties in the House of Commons so strongly combatted the rage of this hot-headed orator.20
In December 1790, several Dutch newspapers advertised a forthcoming translation of the Reflections on the Revolution. Apparently, it never went into print, and from February 1791 a French translation was made widely available in Holland (Burke, 1791). Did the French edition obliterate the demand for a Dutch version? Or were Burke’s arguments too controversial even for his Dutch sympathizers? Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp (1762–1834) was an ambitious aristocrat with close connections to the court of the stadtholder. He was educated as an army officer in Berlin, and from 1783–84 spent a few months in the newly independent United States, where he met Washington and Jefferson. After the restoration of 1787 in Holland, he was raised to the office of pensionaris (permanent city counsellor) in Rotterdam. But he saw this only as a stepping-stone towards greater things. In late 1790, or perhaps early 1791, he started work on Burke’s Reflections.21 Characteristically, his version would have been a selection with his own comments. His first draft of an introduction neatly summarizes the lessons he wanted to draw from the book.
‘The author’s primary aim was evidently’, he wrote, ‘to make his fellow citizens aware of the danger of making changes in the structure of the State, and especially to warn them against desperate attempts to demolish this structure, in order to replace it with something new’. It was Burke’s great merit to have shown ‘that the happiness of men, such as they are, or at least such as they are in the present age, is not promoted by forms of government that are based on abstract considerations of their natural and original rights’.22 With his translation, Hogendorp hoped to reach ‘the well-to-do middle classes’, the honest bourgeois, who had been led astray ‘by fashionable ideas of freedom and rights’. They might understand Burke’s great sagacity ‘in showing the middle way between a general revolution and blind attachment to what is old’. This was the position he himself wanted to take, as by now he had come to see the necessity of ‘suitable improvements in our Constitution’.23
Van Hogendorp’s papers and letters offer no clue as to why he did not complete his version of the Reflections. But it seems that the devising of ‘suitable improvements’ very soon took precedence in his mind. Moreover, in the course of 1791 and the following years, it became clear that the Dutch middle class was not yet ready to part with its easily acquired ‘pseudo-truths’.
In the next few years, almost every English-language refutation of Burke was translated into Dutch. It was as if Dutch readers tried to ignore the Reflections, but nonetheless felt the need to fortify their own convictions with every argument against Burke they could find. The two volumes of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, published in a Dutch translation in 1791–92, were an immediate success; by 1793 the book was already in its third printing (Paine, 1791–92). Reviewers insisted on Burke’s impure motives. He had ‘represented the Revolution in the most hateful manner, and trampled the holy rights of man underfoot’. Therefore all that was left to him was ‘to write the epitaph of the aristocracy’.24 One reviewer even assumed that Burke had written the Reflections out of spite because he had been unable to foresee the coming of the Revolution. As he did not even show ‘a faint spark of contentment about the liberation of such a great people’, inevitably others had rushed into print to confute ‘his doctrinaire and authoritarian arguments, set down without proof’.25
Paine’s Rights of Man were followed in 1792 by a translation of James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae – in Burke’s own opinion the only valuable response to his Reflections. In his introduction, the anonymous translator announced that now, at last, the Reflections would soon be published in Dutch. A counterweight such as the Vindiciae therefore would be welcome. He thought the book much superior in style and argument to Paine’s Rights of Man, which had been ‘read so eagerly by our nation’. Until recently, Burke’s attitude in the political arena had been ‘worthy of great respect’. But now he had been carried away by his own eloquence. His sudden change of opinion must have been caused by ambition. ‘The behaviour of this statesman raises the presumption that we will soon see him climb to the highest rank among ministerial honours in the English Cabinet’ (Mackintosh 1792, vi–viii).26
A reviewer of this version of the Vindiciae expressed his surprise that this was ‘the second refutation, published in our language, of a work that is still unavailable in that language’.27 But again, the promised translation of the Reflections failed to appear. Perhaps the moment had passed, according to the editor of the next anti-Burke treatise that found its way into Dutch: A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective Against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons of 1792. By now, the translator declared, Burke’s arguments
had been surpassed and replaced by the competent and truly disinterested writings of gentlemen such as Van Alphen, Meerman and the anonymous other Dutch statesman in his curious essay The Rights of Man in France no Illusory Rights in the Netherlands.28
These writers, however, carefully avoided giving the impression that they were followers of Burke. They sometimes came to almost identical conclusions, but they arrived at this position from a different point of departure (Velema 2007, 141–42). Their main argument, sometimes explained at great length and with much subtlety, was that in the context of the Dutch constitutional tradition many individual and political liberties had already been realized. Holland was in this respect much more advanced than France. Therefore every attempt at transplanting French revolutionary ideology on Dutch soil ran the risk of jeopardizing the Republic’s historical freedom. This was a conservative point of view, but it was presented on intellectual, not emotional, lines.
Elie Luzac (1721–1796) sometimes came very close to Burke’s political ideas, but he never referred to him (Velema 1993, 185). Neither did Hieronymus van Alphen (1746–1803), treasurer-general of the Republic, in his learned De waare volksverlichting met opzigt tot godsdienst en staatkunde beschouwd (The True Enlightenment of the People with Regard to Religion and Politics) of 1793, the first of the cluster of writings mentioned by Thomas Cooper’s translator. He rejected Thomas Paine’s ‘exaggerated principles’, but seems to have had similar thoughts about Burke (1793, 178). His heroes were Montesquieu and Herder. Adriaan Kluit (1735–1807), the anonymous author of the ‘curious essay The Rights of Man in France no Illusory Rights in the Netherlands’, published in the same year, on just one occasion spoke of ‘the basic principles of Edmund Burke and all healthy brains’.29 He at least admitted he had read the Reflections.
Johan Meerman (1753–1815), who wrote extensively on the contrast between healthy civic liberties and dangerous popular freedom, did not name any of his sources at all (1793). Nonetheless, one reviewer read Meerman’s treatise, once again dating from 1793, as no more than a Dutch adaptation of Burke’s theories (Anon. 1793a, 143). Precisely this sense of familiarity may explain why Burke was not received with more enthusiasm among those who agreed with him in principle: they had already been saying the same things since the 1780s (Kossmann 1987b, 236; Van Sas 2004, 192). An additional explanation may be that Burke was one of the leaders of the war party in Britain, whereas the reigning Dutch government tried to avoid or postpone war with France as long as possible (Van Hogendorp 1981, 253). ‘In my opinion, to wage war on France’, wrote L. P. van de Spiegel, until 1795 head of the Orangist government, ‘was the greatest folly one could commit, and the surest way to make the Revolution there completely triumphant’ (Van de Spiegel 1800, 71).30
The notorious Burke
The name Burke – ‘the notorious Burke’, as he was called in a compendium of grievances against the stadtholder, published in 1793 – became an easy catchword to denote everything a well-meaning Dutch citizen objected to (Anon. 1793b, 685).31 But with one exception, there was very little original engagement with his ideas. In 1790 one of the many Dutch scientific, literary and theological societies held a competition for an essay on the question: How far can people be said to be equal? And which rights and duties can be derived from this? The winning answer, by the Amsterdam professor of law Hendrik Cras (1739–1820), was published in 1793. Cras was no radical, but in his opinion the theory of the rights of man was unassailable. ‘Let them now come to the fore’, he exclaimed in his concluding words,
who hold the subject of these considerations, and this whole discourse, in contempt, or even ridicule it! … Let them decide whether it is decent to display and abuse their gaudy eloquence in order to suppress and overwhelm the right cause, the cause of Humanity!
In a footnote he explained that he had in mind ‘Mr Burke, in his booklet against the Revolution in France, published in 1790’.32
Cras’s essay appeared in a series of Verhandelingen, raakende den Natuurlyken en Geopenbaarden Godsdienst (Treatises Devoted to Natural and Revealed Religion). This shows that even at this stage explicit admiration of the French Revolution was not considered incompatible with the enlightened Protestantism professed by most Dutch intellectuals. A second contribution to the same competition, however, written by the lawyer and politician Pieter Paulus (1753–1796), and published separately in 1793, tried to add a new argument to the debate on Burke’s Reflections.33 Paulus declared himself in full agreement with Tom Paine. But although he rejected Burke’s work as ‘nothing but an eloquent show of words, a demonstration of some antiquarian learning, full of dogmatic, authoritarian expressions and haughty but unproved judgements’, he thought the subject urgent enough to devote some more attention to it. In the next few pages he tried to prove that Burke’s refusal to recognize a right to participation, based on the principle that nobody should be a judge in his own case, was irrational, and in contradiction with his acceptance of other rights. He concluded that the great success of the Reflections in England must have been caused by Burke’s sudden change of opinion, and looked back with nostalgia at Burke’s attitude in the Wilkes affair in 1770: ‘But that was the Burke of the good old days, and the Burke we now have to combat is Burke of the present times; two completely different persons, in whom we are unable to discover the same man.’34
To find expressions of sympathy with Burke in the Netherlands at this point, one has to leave the intellectual world of the educated social elite. Part of the traditional education of schoolchildren in Holland had been books with vivid descriptions of the sufferings of the Dutch people under foreign occupation or during foreign invasions. Various often reprinted pamphlets in this genre, the so-called ‘mirrors of the young’, were current: about the cruelties of the Spanish during the Dutch war of independence, the cruelties of the French during the occupation of 1672–74, and the cruelties of the British during the wars at sea.35 In 1793 a sequel was added detailing the bloodshed and deprivations caused by the French Revolution.
In De spiegel der jeugd of Nieuwe Fransche tiranny (The mirror of the young or the new French tyranny), a dialogue between a father and son, Burke is portrayed in his famous ‘dagger scene’.36 It was discovered ‘that the National Convention planned to send eighteen- or twenty-thousand scoundrels into Britain, all well paid to propagate their false teachings of freedom and equality in that country’. After they had stirred up local revolts, ‘they were to ask the French to send troops, in order to effect a complete revolution in that kingdom. Mr. Burke, one of the members of British Parliament, showed a dagger in the House of Commons, according to which model several thousands were manufactured in Birmingham to serve the murderers, and he also declared it demonstrably true that nineteen regicides had arrived in Britain to eliminate the whole Royal Family.’ The obedient son of course reacts with dismay, as the same might happen at home.37
In January 1795 the French army finally did cross the Dutch frontiers. The Patriot émigrés returned and began transforming the old United Netherlands into the new Batavian Republic. This inaugurated a period of French dominance which lasted until 1813. After a number of successive constitutions had been tried, in 1806 a kingdom was proclaimed under Napoleon’s brother Louis, but in 1810 all that remained of the former territory was incorporated into the immense French Empire. During this time, open opposition to the principles of the Revolution and demonstrations of Orangism or of pro-English sentiments were obviously impossible. Burke and his Reflections were largely forgotten, or, if mentioned at all, dismissed according to the official ideology.
Characteristic of this is Jan Konijnenburg’s Tafereelen van de staatsomwenteling in Frankrijk (Scenes from the Political Revolution in France) where ‘the notorious Burke’ appears as an eloquent mercenary in the service of the British aristocracy, full of ‘partisan ignorance and bad faith’, whose ‘open violation of the rights of men and of peoples made him hated, even in his own country, by all friends of liberty’. The only reason his writings had reached such a wide audience, Konijnenburg explained with heavy irony, was that nobody, even among his best-known opponents, ‘was able to refute his wide-ranging nonsense with the exquisite delicacy corresponding to his exaggerated requirements’.38
At least everybody recognized Burke’s talents as a writer. In February 1797, several Dutch newspapers prematurely announced his death, which had to be repeated in July, after he had actually died (Bremmer 2013, 10). In September 1797 a major weekly journal looked back upon the tumult Burke had caused during the last days of his life with his Letters on a Regicide Peace. Again, his eloquence was praised: the pamphlet, ‘a subtle product of partisanship’ was ‘as clever as it was full of anger’.39 The reviewer did not feel impelled to defend the revolutionary principles at all cost. Among the many replies to Burke’s Letters, he recommended Thomas Erskine, A View of the Causes and the Consequence of the Present War with France, which he much preferred over ‘the furious Rights of Nature against the Usurpation of Establishments by John Thelwall, the well-known popular orator’. In Erskine’s pamphlet one found ‘calm deliberation and level-headed conclusions, combined with real eloquence; the more respectfully he appears to treat his opponent, the deeper his arrows hit’.40 An obituary published in the same journal in April 1798 showed a similar desire for moderation. Clearly a certain fatigue with the course of the revolution had set in. Burke’s change of opinion in 1790 was described as follows: ‘He, who had fought so bravely for the freedom of the Americans, now suddenly and openly jeered at the then still so magnificent attempt by a neighbouring people to free itself.’41 Then still so magnificent – the sense of disappointment is hard to mistake.
From Falck to Groen
From the French occupation in 1795 until the establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1814–15, Burke’s writings seem to have had little resonance in Holland. But there is at least one example of a Dutch politician and diplomat who was introduced to Burke’s ideas while staying abroad. In 1802, the young lawyer Anton Reinhard Falck (1777–1843) was appointed secretary to the Dutch ambassador in Madrid. Here, Falck became close friends with Henry Richard Fox, Lord Holland, nephew of the famous Charles James Fox, and especially with the attractive and free-spoken Lady Holland. Until then, Falck, like so many Dutch moderates, had seen Montesquieu as his guiding light, but Lady Holland set him on a reading course in modern British political and economic theories: Smith, Bentham, but especially Burke. Falck admired Burke’s defence of private property and his insistence on an aristocratic element in politics. But he admitted he found parts of the Reflections hard to digest. The British constitution was in his opinion no more than an incidental and arbitrary form, erroneously taken by Burke as something definitive, and he saw Burke’s veneration of religious pomp and circumstance as an absurdity (Van der Horst 1985, 81).
Nonetheless, it is remarkable that two of the men who played a leading role in the Dutch declaration of independence from France in 1813, and in the formation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands under William I, had been deeply impressed by Burke at an earlier moment in their career. Van Hogendorp had, after his failed attempt at translating the Reflections in 1790–1791, drawn the conclusion that things had to change in order to retain their balance. The constitution of the new kingdom was largely based on his proposals. In a similar way, Falck, who in 1813 had led the revolt against the French in Amsterdam and later became Dutch ambassador in London, was confirmed by his reading of Burke in his opinion that every country had to adapt a policy according to its own traditions. Both interpreted Burke in a more or less ‘liberal’ way. They did not favour a reactionary politics in the Romantic style.
For their part, the Romantic reactionaries in the Netherlands had no use for Burke. Neither Willem Bilderdijk (1756–1831), poet, historian and political visionary, nor his follower Isaac da Costa (1798–1860), who shocked the nation in 1823 with his ultra-orthodox Bezwaren tegen de geest der eeuw (Objections to the Spirit of the Age), mention Burke anywhere in their writings.42 As far as Burke was remembered at all in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he was no longer seen as a controversial figure. John Bake (1787–1864), professor of classics at Leiden University, always declared Burke one of his favourite authors. He read his speeches again and again, but primarily as an example of brilliant oratory (Bakhuizen 1876, 418).
The crisis of 1830, however, revived an interest in Burke’s political ideas. The Belgian declaration of independence and the expensive status-quo policy maintained by King William I until 1839 accentuated the need for reform, both internally, as the defects of the existing constitution became more and more evident, and in the international context, as the kingdom of the Netherlands had to shed the last illusions of being a significant power. The leader of the liberal opposition was Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798–1872), architect of the new constitution of 1848 and, later, three times prime minister. In the course of the 1830s and 1840s, his political opinions developed into a principled or ‘doctrinaire’ liberalism. It is significant that the only reference to Burke in his writings occurs in his early and still very cautious Over de verandering van het algemeen staten-stelsel van Europa (On the Changes in the General Political System in Europe) of 1831 (Drentje 2004, 269).43 For the rest of his career, Thorbecke left the adaptation of Burke’s legacy to his friend and political adversary Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–76).
Thorbecke and Groen were united in their rejection of indifference, mediocrity and commonplace thinking. But whereas Thorbecke tried to stimulate the nation to greater industry and initiative by introducing new legislation, Groen van Prinsterer hoped to restore its confidence by returning to what he saw as its age-old Calvinist identity.44 He approached politics through history. The political crisis of 1830 coincided with a crisis in his personal life. While staying in Brussels as a government official, he concluded that the union with Belgium was unsuccessful, and that the northern Netherlands, as a separate nation, had to reinvent a proper political raison d’être. In the private sphere, he found a new moral footing by converting to a personal variety of revivalist Protestantism. Soon he began to develop these ideas into a political programme. About the same time he read Burke’s Reflections and came to see them as a vade mecum:
They aroused an irresistible desire for the Opera Omnia. These were not well-regarded in Brussels, for obvious reasons, and even difficult to find. I still remember the joy I felt when I finally discovered the complete edition in eight volumes. I insatiably devoured those that were most ad rem, for their content as well as their form, in particular the eighth volume, with the Letters on Regicide Peace, his swan song.45
It was a true shock of recognition, and he immediately began to recommend Burke to his friends (Groen van Prinsterer 1925, 279; 1964, 98). For a long time, he thought Burke’s Works ‘almost indispensable’. He always had them ready ‘on the tribune of the Estates-General, when, during a lengthy and soporific debate, I allowed myself the pleasure of some absorbing reading’ (1874, 306).46
To a certain extent, of course, Groen was already familiar with Burke’s ideas, even if he had not read the author himself. He had studied Friedrich von Savigny, the German founder of historical law, and the historian A. W. L. Heeren, who were both deeply influenced by Burke.47 Moreover, Groen had been taught in Leiden by John Bake, who admired Burke as a writer. In 1847, on the eve of a new revolution, Groen van Prinsterer offered a synthesis of his thoughts on history, religion and politics in his programmatic treatise Ongeloof en revolutie (Unbelief and Revolution) in which Burke was frequently quoted as an authority. From Burke, Groen derived three important principles: the wisdom of the forefathers has a prescriptive value for present-day society; every attempt at revolution will inevitably lead to bloodshed and dictatorship; the prevention of revolution is not only a political but also a religious struggle. Time and again, he quoted Burke’s saying that ‘a religious war’ had to be fought, ‘a holy war for religion, morality, property, order, public law’.48 But there were problems, as his opponents as well as his friends pointed out.49
Groen tried to combine his reading of Burke with the absolutist conception of kingship and the state by the German theorist C. L. von Haller. To do so, he had to ignore the fact that Burke allowed much more room for change and renewal than would ever have been acceptable to someone like Haller. Moreover, as everybody knew, Dutch independence was the result of a revolt against the Spanish king Philip II, who from a legal point of view was perfectly entitled to rule the country. Groen therefore had to explain that the Dutch Revolt had not been a revolution in the modern sense, but a legitimate change of government, like the Glorious Revolution in Britain. On these points his liberal critics could easily accuse him of inconsistency or even hypocrisy. On the other hand, Burke had a more instrumental conception of religion than Groen, who sought ultimate political wisdom in obedience to God and his laws. Groen’s copy of Burke’s Works shows that he only read and reread his later writings (Spruyt 2004, 19–24).50 He clearly had no affinity with the image of Burke as a reformer or even as a liberal thinker, current in England about this time.
Conservatives and anti-revolutionaries
Once more a revolution revived interest in Burke among political commentators. The course of events in 1848 seemed to bear out Burke’s prediction that revolutions always follow the same pattern, from a call for popular sovereignty to civil war and inevitable repression. In his monthly political feature in the journal De Gids, Jan Heemskerk Bzn. (1811–80), a liberal member of parliament, came to the conclusion that ‘the experiments in revolution had only damaged the cause of liberty’.51 Only British institutions and statecraft remained as a model of constitutional practice. This tradition, Heemskerk assured his readers, was thoroughly imbued with Burke’s ideas: ‘Everything shows that British politicians of every colour and shade do not forget the lessons, and at least act according to the principles of the man whose authority is recognized as nearly classical by all parties, that is to say Edmund Burke.’52 Again and again he referred to Burke as one of ‘the profoundest thinkers’ (‘diepzinnigste denkers’) and ‘the wisest of statesmen’ (‘wijsste der staatslieden’). But of course he was aware that this reverence for Burke brought him close to Groen van Prinsterer, whose political and religious convictions he did not share at all. In 1850 he added a long footnote to one of his columns, in which he contested Groen’s right to appropriate Burke exclusively for his own Anti-Revolutionary movement (Heemskerk 1850, 719).
This, for the first time in the Netherlands, led to a debate about Burke in which all participants favoured his ideas. The question was not whether Burke was right, but who could justly claim him as a model. In 1852, Cornelis W. Opzoomer (1821–92), a professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht, supported Heemskerk with a brochure De staatkunde van Edmund Burke (The statecraft of Edmund Burke).53 The slender volume opened with a string of quotations translated from Burke, and continued with a summary of his life, career and political opinions. Like Heemskerk, Opzoomer was full of praise for Burke, and clearly he had looked at his pre-revolutionary writings with more attention than Groen. In publishing his essay, originally planned as a public lecture, he was motivated by a double agenda.54 Until 1848 his thinking had shown a strong idealist element, but influenced by the political circumstances he now adopted a strictly empirical position. By referring to Burke, political empiricist par excellence, he hoped to justify his philosophical turnabout.55 Moreover, he belonged to a group of liberals who had acclaimed Thorbecke’s constitutional reforms in 1848, but who now felt that political change was accelerating too much, and who began to look to Burke for political guidelines.56 To do this, they had to distance themselves from Groen and his followers.
Opzoomer left it to his friend Robert Fruin (1823–99), later professor of history at Leiden University, to attack Groen directly. At first, Groen had welcomed the growing interest in Burke’s ideas as an approach to his own point of view. Even the Roman-Catholic press discerned in Opzoomer’s apparent conversion to anti-revolutionary politics an important sign of the times.57 But Fruin’s brochure Het Antirevolutionair staatsregt van Mr. G. Groen van Prinsterer ontvouwd en beoordeeld (The Anti-revolutionary Constitutional Law According to G. Groen van Prinsterer Explained and Criticised) dispelled this illusion. In 1853, an improvised national-conservative movement brought down Thorbecke’s liberal government.58 Fruin, concerned about what he saw as Groen’s growing influence, tried to demolish his political principles on theological, historical and constitutional grounds. That the moderate liberals now claimed Burke as one of their own was no concession to Groen, for he had completely misunderstood the British statesman. Burke never preferred abstract ideas above facts. Groen’s own system, taken at face value, excluded even the possibility of gradual change. It misconstrued the historical origins of the Dutch nation as well as its political and legal tradition. In fact, it amounted to a rigid, absolutist dogmatism, closer to Joseph de Maistre than to Burke, and completely at variance with the libertarian ideals that had always been the country’s safeguard (Fruin 1853).59
Fruin’s polemic drew much attention.60 In a review of his pamphlet, J. Heemskerk Bzn. concentrated on the way the liberals and anti-revolutionaries both harnessed Burke for their own ends. He tried to take an intermediate position. Fruin’s interpretation was far too radical; what Burke had actually said came closer to Groen’s point of view, but then his writings did not warrant an explicitly orthodox Protestant politics, as propagated by Groen (Heemskerk 1853). This, of course, pleased nobody. Heemskerk made it clear that he was not ready to join the Anti-Revolutionaries, but the liberals from now on regarded him as a traitor to their cause (Fruin 1957, 49; Aerts 1997, 188–89).61 Fruin reacted with an even sharper second pamphlet in which he pointed out, among many other things, that Burke had always remained a Whig, and therefore, in contrast to Groen, sought to limit the power of the monarchy. Against Groen’s frequent appeals to principles, he quoted Burke’s remark in the Reflections that he would not reject any form of government on the basis of abstract principles (Fruin, 1854).62
From 1853 until 1862 the Netherlands had a succession of governments that are usually described as conservative (Kossmann 1978, 275–83). As far as they looked for a theoretical foundation, they came close to Heemskerk’s point of view, but they felt no need to justify their programme by references to Burke. Some of the participants were inspired by scientific positivism. They saw in Burke’s appeal to historical precedents precisely the kind of Romantic thinking they wanted to distance themselves from. But the overwhelming majority of politicians and political commentators at the time belonged to the legal profession. They were interested in law making, and discussed political problems, including constitutional issues, almost exclusively in legal terms. For them, Burke’s concepts were too vague and too ambivalent. In their disagreements with Groen and the more progressive liberals, they turned to German theorists, not the British constitutional tradition (Kossmann 1995, 197).
For his part, Groen van Prinsterer always refused to think of himself as a conservative (Kuiper 2001, 56). In his writings, the word ‘conservatives’ always denotes a separate group of traditionalist liberals with whom he could at best conclude temporary alliances, as in 1853, but to whom he certainly did not belong. In 1857 one of his followers, Isaac Capadose, published a short biographical introduction to Burke and his works. The text, part of which was clearly derived from Opzoomer’s earlier publication, was not much more than an extended dictionary article, but at the end the author showed he had also digested Fruin’s remarks: ‘In an English sense Burke was thoroughly liberal: he remained a Whig even while fighting against the French Revolution’ (Capadose 1857, 72).63 He regretted that Groen had taken an anti-liberal position. The reproach stung; many years later Groen still grew indignant at the thought that Capadose had apparently considered him a reactionary.64
A new constitutional crisis in 1866 definitively established the principle of parliamentary democracy. To all effects, this put an end to Dutch conservatism as a distinct political movement; Groen this time resolutely refused to take their side. Influenced by the German theoretician F. J. Stahl, he published a new edition of his Ongeloof en revolutie (Unbelief and Revolution) in 1868 in which he, at least for the post-revolutionary age, accepted an idea of the state as based on the interests of the citizens.65 Some of his followers thought he had now erred too far in the other direction: ‘I thought you would never agree with the revolutionary conception of the state, any more than Burke in his time’.66 But in his own opinion, Groen remained true to Burke until the end. In 1869, he warmly recommended his works to the young preacher Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), who was to become his political successor and the founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party as a modern organization. Kuyper took his advice, and summarized his studies in a (now lost) lecture on Burke. But although he held a high regard for Burke, it is significant that he only occasionally mentioned him in his voluminous later writings.
Conclusion
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Burke’s presence in Dutch political debate dwindled to a few well-known phrases. His definition of a party as a group of men united for a purpose was regularly invoked in the journals and in parliament, as was his famous lament for the vanishing age of chivalry. Outside the Anti-Revolutionary Party, however, Burke’s influence as a theorist of conservatism was minimal. And even there, his importance was until recent times more taken for granted than discussed.67 The few unsuccessful proposals to found a new conservative party made no reference to Burke at all.68 For most conservative Christians, he was not religious enough, and for the right-wing liberals he was too exuberant, aristocratic and unsystematic to be of much use. Moreover, he was obviously a difficult writer. In the liberal journal De Gids, an occasional Anglophile invoked the ‘never-failing insight’ (‘het nimmer falende inzicht’) of the ‘noble Edmund Burke’ (‘edele Edmund Burke’), and in 1883 he was still described as ‘the great and enlightened statesman’ (‘de groote en verlichte staatsman’) (Kok 1867, 266, 280; Bake 1883, 268). But such expressions became more and more rare. Perhaps the development of Potgieter’s opinions can be taken as a measure of his diminishing reputation.
E. J. Potgieter (1808–1875), poet, critic, novelist and long-time editor of De Gids, had in 1844 translated Hazlitt’s ‘On Reading Old Books’ with its extended praise of Burke as a stylist. In 1858, Potgieter published a book-length essay on George Crabbe and his time, a mixture of literary criticism and biography, with frequent novelistic elements (Potgieter 1886).69 It is probably the only work in Dutch in which Edmund Burke is introduced as a literary character. Potgieter admitted that Burke possessed ‘genius’; he was ‘the unequalled investigator of all the great questions of his time’. Nonetheless, he left no doubt that he considered his ideas totally outdated. The Enquiry was unbearably tedious: ‘even with the best intentions, it is too taxing for our patience’. And the Reflections? Today ‘the people, even the rabble, fascinated by a copy of De la Roche’s Marie Antoinette, does not take sides with the terrorists, but with the queenly woman … democracy has kept its respect for virtue, she has not discarded everything you valued.’ Burke defended ‘a lost world with which we, who saw our republic change into a constitutional monarchy, were never infatuated’.70 Several years later, Potgieter referred to Burke in a letter simply as ‘that fanatic’.71 In the writings of his correspondent, the critic Conrad Busken Huet (1826–86), by his own admission a conservative thinker, Burke is conspicuously absent. During the next century, his name remained virtually unknown outside the circle of specialist historians.
Notes
1Von der Dunk (1975); Von der Dunk (1976, 119–22); Boogman (1982); Kossmann (1987a); Van Raak (1999).
2No complete analysis of Burke’s influence in the Netherlands exists in print. Kloek and Mijnhardt (2004, 58) remark that the Reflections ‘also created a stir in the Netherlands’, without explaining how and where. Spruyt (2002) is a useful discussion of Burke’s place in the thought of the founders of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. I have also profited much from the unpublished MA thesis by B. Bremmer at the University of Leiden (Bremmer, 2013), and I am grateful to him for showing it to me.
3A selection from the Reflections was published as Burke (1989b); it was reprinted, under a different title and with a new introduction by B. J. Spruyt, as Burke (2002). The first Dutch edition of the Enquiry is Burke (2004). A recent book-length study (the first after more than a century) is Boon (2004).
4On the ‘first Dutch revolution’, see Palmer (1959, 323–40); Leeb (1973); Schama (1977); Kossmann, (1978, 34–47); Te Brake (1989); Jacob and Mijnhardt (1992); Kloek and Mijnhardt (2004); Velema (2007). A recent summary in Dutch is Rosendaal (2005).
5The first of these essays, ‘Vrymoedige bedenkingen over de vergelyking der Oude dichteren met de Hedendaegschen’ (‘Candid thoughts on the comparison between the ancient poets and those of today’) (1765) was reprinted, with a summary in English, as Van Goens (1972). The most extensive study is Wille (1937 and 1993), but also see Van den Berg (1999).
6Mendelssohn (1774). The first edition of this translation was privately printed in 1769. Somewhat later Mendelssohn entirely rewrote his essay, incorporating ideas derived from Burke’s Enquiry, and this second version has become the standard text. But by then, Van Goens was no longer interested.
7‘Het verstandige engelsche werk … ’t geen ene vertaeling verdiende’. Van Goens, in a footnote to Mendelssohn (1774, 38). His copies of the Enquiry were the fifth and sixth editions of 1767 and 1770. Cf. Van Goens (1776, 1:242–43) and Wille (1993, 326).
8The poet and Orangist politician Hieronymus van Alphen (1746–1803) does not seem to have consulted Burke while preparing his Theorie der schoone kunsten en wetenschappen (Theory of the beautiful arts and sciences), published in 1778. The book was a heavily annotated translation of a German compendium by J. J. Riedel. The only reference to Burke was already there in the original German text; cf. Wille (1993, 83). The philosopher Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–1790), the author of an influential Lettre sur la sculpture (1769) and a number of Platonic dialogues on ethics and aesthetics, certainly knew Burke’s Enquiry, but felt no sympathy for his materialist explanations; cf. Funder (1913, 8–9, 77–81, 103); Sonderen (2000, 218–19).
9Cf. Madelein (2010). A modern edition of three Dutch treatises on the sublime, all of them influenced by or reacting against Kant, is Pieters and Madelein (2008).
10For a general introduction, see Schuller and Koops (1989) and J. Van der Korst (2008).
11The English version, translated by Thomas Cogan, was published as Camper (1794). This edition, which omitted the last lecture of 1782, was reprinted in 1821.
12‘De groote wijsgeer, en staatkundige’. Not included in Camper (1794).
13The letter is not preserved, but see Burke’s reply in Corr. 3:178–79 to Pieter Camper [18 July 1775]. For Camper’s visit in 1785, see Camper (1939, 202–04), original Dutch text (‘een lang, welgem. man, meer dan 50 jaar’; ‘een der welspreekendste die ik nog ontmoet hebbe’) and English translation. Courtney (1962, 467–75) suggests that Camper and Burke may already have met in London in 1752.
14For a more detailed treatment of Camper’s aesthetics, see Krul (2015).
15‘J’ai été moi-même un grand protecteur de cette idée, jusqu’à ce que j’ai lu l’ouvrage de Mr Burcke [sic] sur le Sublime. J’ai trouvé ses arguments si forts, et si persuasifs, que j’en ai été convaincu dès le moment. … Si dit-il la beauté dépend de la proportion de la tête et du col, etc., avec la hauteur du corps, le cygne ne peut pas être beau, ou bien le pigeon est fort laid’, Camper Archive, University of Leiden Library. Quoted in the original French in Courtney (1962, 471). Courtney found it impossible to date the manuscript, but it must have been written as an introduction to Camper’s lecture at the Académie des Sciences in Paris in July 1777; cf. Van der Korst (2004, 156). The idea of a canon of beauty, especially in the human body, remained a fixture of classicizing art theory until well into the nineteenth century (Barbillon 2004).
16On account of his theory of beauty, and especially on the basis of the accompanying drawings, Camper has sometimes been regarded as one of the founders of modern racism. His text makes it abundantly clear that he had no such thing in mind, rather the contrary. The sequence ‘from ape to Apollo’ was no evolutionary sequence and depicted no ascending degrees of intelligence. The matter was aggravated by his English translator, Thomas Cogan, who used ‘races’ wherever Camper was talking of ‘nationalities’ or ‘populations’; cf. Meijer (1999). Nonetheless, Camper’s ideas perhaps too easily lent themselves to misconstruction, as has been argued by Bindman (2002, 81–91).
17Cogan’s English translation (Camper, 1794, 19) has ‘smoothness of countenance’, but this is not what Camper intended.
18See also Corr. 5:375–76, Dr. William Hamilton to Edmund Burke [24 January 1788].
19‘Een, in alle beteekenis des woords, ongemeen boek, waarin veel schoons, dog ook veel gebrekkigs voorkomt, veel waarheid, dog ook niet minder valsheid’ (Anon. 1791a). ‘Het stuk is opzettelijk geschreeven om de omwenteling in Frankryk in een haatlyk licht te zetten, en alle begunstigers daar van in Engeland, byzonder Dr Price, vinnig doortestryken’ (Anon. 1791b).
20‘De woeste norschheid, de openlijk uitbarstende jalouzij, en het onbezonnen razen van eenen gemelijken Burke, zou misschien in staat geweest zijn van dezelve vruchteloos te maken, en der Natie, die men zoekt in slaap te wiegen, de oogen te openen: ook hierom denkelijk, maar tevens hierom alleen, hebben zich, in het huis der Gemeenten, beide de partijen zoo zeer tegen de drift van dezen dollen redenaar verzet gehad’ (Anon. 1790, 355).
21It remains unclear whether his translation was the Dutch edition announced in December 1790 in the newspapers.
22‘Het schijnt mij klaar dat de Schrijver eerstelijk zijne medeburgers van het gevaar van alle verandering in het Staatsgebouw heeft willen indachtig maken, en vooral van de wanhopige onderneming afschrikken, om dat gebouw te sloopen, ten einde een nieuw in de plaats te stellen’. ‘Dat het geluk der menschen, zooals derzelven zijn, althans in dezen tijd nog zijn, geenszins bevorderd wordt door Regeeringsvormen ingesteld ingevolge de afgetrokkene beschouwing hunner natuurlijke, oorspronkelijke regten’, quoted in Van der Hoeven (1976, 45).
23‘Nieuwerwetsche denkbeelden van vrijheid en regten’; ‘de middenweg, tusschen de omkeering van alles en de blinde verkleefdheid aan het oude’; ‘aangepaste verbeteringen’ (Van der Hoeven 1976, 45). The two most recent biographies, united in their representation of Van Hogendorp as a modern liberal, fail to mention his interest in Burke (Slijkerman 2013; Van Meerkerk 2013).
24He had the Revolution ‘op de haatlykste wyze voordragt, de heilige rechten van den Mensch als met de voeten getrapt’. All he could do was ‘deszelfs grafschrift schrijven’ [i.e. of the aristocracy] (Anon. 1791c, 572, 575).
25‘een flauw vonkje van genoegen over de verlossing van zoo een groot volk’; ‘zijne leerstellige en gezagvoerende redevoering, zonder bewijzen daar neder gesteld’ (Anon. 1792a, 212–13).
26‘Dat met de grootste greetigheid door onze natie geleezen is’; ‘die tot hiertoe zulke achtingswaardige gevoelens op het staatkundig toneel hadt aan den dag gelegd’; ‘Het gedrag van deezen Staatsman doet mij vermoeden dat men hem eerlang tot den hoogsten top van ministerieele eerampten in het Engelsen Kabinet zal zien opstijgen’.
27‘in onze Taale, eene tweede Wederlegging … van een Geschrift, ‘t welk daarin niet bestaat, schoon de Vertaaling van ‘t zelve aangekondigd zy’ (Anon. 1792b, 416).
28‘door de kundige en waarlijk belanglooze schriften van de Heeren VAN ALPHEN, MEERMAN, en den Naamloozen anderen Hollandschen Staatsman in zijn curieus stuk de RECHTEN van den Mensch geen gewaande Rechten in de Nederlanden, is voorgekomen en vervangen’ (Cooper 1793, iii–iv).
29‘het grondbeginsel van Burke en van alle gezonde harsens’ (Kluit 1793, 351). On his affinities with Burke, see Leeb (1973, 256) and Boogman (1982, 40).
30‘Ik voor my ben in een denkbeeld geweest, dat den Franschen den oorlog aantedoen, de grootste dwaasheid was, die men begaan kon, en het regte middel, om de Revolutie aldaar volkoomen te maaken.’
31The demand for anti-Burke publications in Dutch seems to have been inexhaustible. Joel Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, reviewed as ‘the most original and intelligent contribution to the really important debate initiated by Mr. Burke’s attack on the French Revolution’ (‘Gedurende den ganschen loop des waarlyk belangryken geschils, dat ontstaan is uit Mr. Burke’s aanval op de Fransche Omwenteling, verscheen er geen meer origineele Schryver, geen beter beoeffend Staatkundige, of schranderder redenaar dan de Auteur van dit stuk’) (Anon. 1793c), also duly appeared in translation (Barlow, 1794). But in the same year, obviously in reaction to the Terror, a pamphlet was published, purportedly translated from the English, which called for a middle course between Burke and Paine (Anon. 1794a).
32‘Dat zy dan vry komen, die het onderwerp van deeze geheele overweeging, en dit betoog, of kleinagten, of ook zelfs bespotten! … Dat zy vry komen, en beslissen, of het betaamlyk is, alle hunne opgesmukte welspreekendheid uit te stallen en te misbruiken, om de goede zaak, de zaak der Menschlykheid, te onderdrukken en te overrompelen!’; ‘den Heer Burke, in zyn Werkje tegen de Omwenteling in Frankryk, in ‘t licht gegeeven in ‘t Jaar 1790’, cited in Anon. (1794b, 20). On Cras and Burke, see also Leeb (1973, 225–26).
33Cf. Vles (2004, 85–91).
34‘welsprekende woordenpraal, vertooning van wat oudheidkundige geleerdheid, leerstellige, gezagvoerende en zonder bewys uit de hoogte vonnisvellende uitdrukkingen’. ‘Doch dit was Burke van den goeden ouden tyd, en de persoon, dien wy thans te bestryden hebben, is Burke van den nieuwen tyd: twee onderscheidene personaadjen, waaronder het onmooglyk is, denzelfden man te erkennen’ (Paulus 1793, 154–56, 168). Interestingly, Paulus admitted he knew Burke only from the French translation published in Amsterdam in 1791, and had never seen the English edition.
35The first of these ‘Mirrors’ was based on the Morgenwecker (Morning Watchman, 1610), an anti-Spanish pamphlet by Willem Baudartius (1565–1640). Cf. Van Deursen (2010, 89).
36On 28 December 1792, Burke threw a dagger to the ground in the House of Commons, pretending that many such daggers were held ready in England by revolutionary societies.
37‘Men had ontdekt … dat het plan van de Nationaale Conventie was, om een agttien of twintig duizend van deze schelmen, in Grootbrittanien over te voeren, deze alle wierden door de Nationaale Conventie rykelyk betaald, om hunne valsche Vryheids en Egaliteits leer in dat Land voort te planten … en dan de Franschen om hulp te verzoeken … en daar mede een geheele omkeering in dat Koningryk te veroorzaaken. De Heer Burke een der Leeden van het Britsche Parlement vertoonden in het huis der gemeenten een ponjaard, die het model was waar naar eenige duizende in de Stad Birmingham ten dienste der Moordenaars wierden gereed gemaakt, zeggende tevens dat het een beweezen waarheid was, dat negentien Koningsmoorders uit Frankryk waaren overgekomen om de geheele Koninglyke Familie om te brengen’ (Anon. 1793c, 84–85).
38‘de partijdige onkunde, of wel de kwaade trouw van den Brit’; ‘dat zijne openlijke schennis der rechten van menschen en volken hem, in zijn eigen land, den haat berokkenden van alle vrienden der vrijheid’; ‘bij verr’ te kort schoten, om weidschen onzin zoodanig te wederleggen, dat de verfijnde smaak zijne overdreven eischen mogt kunnen voldoen’ (Konijnenburg 1798, 54–56).
39‘Dit fyngesponnen gewrogt van Partyzucht … zo schrander als vol woede geschreven.’
40‘bedaard overleg, en koelzinnige gevolgtrekkingen by echte welsprekendheid gevoegd; en met hoe meer eerbied Erskine zynen tegenstander, in schyn, behandeld, hoe dieper zyne pylen treffen’ (Anon. 1797, 92).
41‘Hy, die voor de vryheid van Amerika zo fier gestreden had, beschimpte nu op eens de toen nog zo schitterende poging welke een naburig Volk voor de vryheid deed, openlyk’ (Anon. 1798, 110). The sequel even spoke of the ‘honest Burke’ (‘de eerlyke Burke’), who had often possessed ‘a striking foresight in politics’ (‘in het Staatkundige menig treffend voorgevoel’) (Anon. 1798, 114, 116).
42Van Eijnatten (1998, 515) considers it likely that Bilderdijk never read Burke.
43Thorbecke read Burke in French during his time as a professor in Ghent between 1825 and 1830. In 1835, when a colleague told him he had set a PhD student to prove that ‘Burke could very well reject the principles of the French Revolution and accept those of the Americans, without being inconsistent’ (‘dat Burke, zonder inconsequent te zijn, zeer wel de beginselen der Fransche omwenteling kon afkeuren, en die der Americanen goedkeuren’), Thorbecke showed no marked enthusiasm. The PhD thesis apparently was never written (Thorbecke 1979, 232).
44The most recent biography is Kuiper (2001).
45‘Zij maakten de begeerte naar de Opera omnia onweerstaanbaar. Te Brussel waren ze, dit laat zich begrijpen, niet in trek en zelfs niet ligt uitvindbaar. Nog herinner ik mij de blijdschap, toen ik eindelijk de volledige uitgaaf, in acht deelen, ontdekt had. Die het meest ad rem waren verslond ik onverzadelijk om inhoud en vorm. Inzonderheid het achtste; vooral den zwanezang Letters on a Regicide Peace’ (Groen van Prinsterer 1874, 334).
46‘Bijkans onontbeerlijk, zelfs op de tribune der Staten-Generaal, wanneer nu en dan, bij de gerektheid van een slaperig debat, het genoegen eener boeijende lectuur vergund was.’ Groen added that he read Lamennais with the same intensity. The passage is often interpreted as if Groen later, when a member of Parliament, used to return to Burke in quieter moments on the benches. But here he is clearly referring to his job as secretary of the King’s Cabinet from 1829 to 1833.
47This is rightly pointed out by Bijl (2011, 105–16).
48Groen adopted the phrase in 1831 and returned to it throughout his career; cf. Kuiper (2001, 56). For a similar expression in 1874, see Groen van Prinsterer (1874, 333, 336).
49The similarities and differences between Burke and Groen are systematically listed in Van Vliet (2008, 131–42).
50Groen’s annotated copy of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols (London: M’Lean, 1823) is now in the Royal Library in The Hague. Apparently he never bought a later, more reliable edition.
51‘Dat de revolutionaire experimenten de zaak van de vrijheid alleen maar geschaad hadden.’
52‘Uit alles blijkt, dat Britsche staatslieden van alle kleur de les niet vergeten, ten minste handelen overeenkomstig de leer van den man, die bij iedere partij bijna als klassiek gezag wordt beschouwd, – van Edm. Burke’ (Heemskerk 1848, 246–47). Cf. Aerts (1997, 186–89). The suffix ‘Bzn.’ (‘son of B. Heemskerk’) is added to distinguish this author from his cousin Jan Heemskerk Azn. (1818–1897) who was also a prominent political figure.
53On Opzoomer’s ideas see also Kossmann (1978, 261–63).
54Requested to deliver a public lecture at his university, Opzoomer had planned to speak about Burke. When it was made clear to him that this had to be in Latin, he decided to publish his text separately, rather than make the effort to drape Burke in classical costume; cf. Fruin (1957, 37).
55This is stressed in a review by Van der Hoeven (1852, 689–92).
56As he wrote in May 1853: ‘Since I, at the same time as you, made the change from speculation to empiricism, I have grown more moderate … in certain respects, especially by Burke and Stahl, I have been convinced of former errors, but I have not changed my principles’ (Fruin 1957, 42).
57See Groen’s reactions to Opzoomer in De Nederlander, 19 April 1852 and 17 January 1853. For a Catholic opinion see De Tijd, 16 April 1852; quoted in Bremmer (2013, 40).
58Groen’s Anti-Revolutionaries were involved, but other leaders of this improvised coalition, the so-called ‘April Movement’, did not look to Burke for inspiration, but rather scientific rationalism and positivism; cf. Van Raak (2001, 39–43).
59Cf. Smit (1958, 23–24) and especially Geyl (1978, 135–80). A recent assessment of Fruin’s work is Paul and Te Velde (2010).
60The wider context of the debate, which immediately took a legal-constitutional turn, is analysed in Kossmann (1995, 192–208).
61See also Groen van Prinsterer (1874, 326–33).
62For the quotation, see Burke (1989, 174).
63‘In dien Engelschen zin was Burke zeer liberaal; hij bleef Whig toen hij de Fransche omwenteling bestreed’. From 1867 onwards, Capadose (1834–1920) was active as a preacher (‘Angel’) in the Catholic-Apostolic Church, expecting the imminent return of Christ the Saviour.
64Letter to Abraham Kuyper, November 8 1869, in Groen van Prinsterer (1967, 52).
65An abbreviated English translation is included in Van Dyke (1989).
66C Mulder to Groen, 6 November, 1875; in Groen van Prinsterer (1967, 852).
67Not very long ago, the debate was brought full-circle by Sap (1993), who contended that Calvinism, far from being an anti-revolutionary principle, originated in a revolution and was itself the origin of popular sovereignty.
68E.g. the naïve and simplistic Kremer (1866).
69The essay was ostensibly a review of a Dutch translation of Crabbe’s Parish Register. Potgieter derived much of his information on Burke from Charles de Rémusat’s essay in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1853).
70‘De ongeëvenaarde onderzoeker van iedere groote vraag zijns tijds’ (Potgieter 1886, 18:102); ‘het Onderzoek blijkt, ook bij den besten wil, te zwaar een toets voor ons geduld’ (Potgieter 1886, 17:356); ‘staat het volk, staat zelfs het graauw, niet voor eene navolging van De la Roche’s Marie Antoinette geboeid, of het schaart zich niet aan de zijde der terroristen, het trekt partij voor de koninklijke vrouw … der democratie is de eerbied voor deugd gebleven, alles wat gij waardeerdet verloor zij niet’; ‘eene ondergegane wereld, met welke wij, wier republiek in eene constitutioneele monarchie is verkeerd, nooit dweepten’ (Potgieter 1886, 18:104, 106). The painting referred to is Marie Antoinette devant le tribunal (1851) by Paul Delaroche (1797–1856).
71‘Die fanaticus’. Potgieter (1972, 2:412), letter of 23 May 1872.