Desktop versionMobile version

Les nations européennes entre histoire et mémoire, xixe-xxe siècles

 | 
Francis Démier
, 
Elena Musiani

La nation, quelle rupture dans l’histoire européenne ?

The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830): A case of failed European nation building?

Matthijs Lok

Full text

Introduction: the historical “anomaly” of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands

  • 1 The bicentenary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 2013-2015 has led to many new publications on (...)

1Research on the history of nationalism and nation building tends to favour national identities that exist in the present. Far less attention is usually given to national identities that have disappeared or have failed – so far at least – to become national states. The failed attempt to create a Greater-Netherlandish – or perhaps better formulated – to create a Netherlandish national identity for all the provinces of the Low Countries, during the short lived United Kingdom of the Netherlands ( “Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden”) between 1815 and 1830 is the subject of this article1.

  • 2 Aerts R. and Deneckere G., “Inleiding”, Het (on) Verenigd Koninkrijk (1815- 1830-2015). Een politie (...)
  • 3 Leerssen J., “Landsnamen, taalnamen. De lexicale aanloop tot de Groot-Nederlandse gedachte”, in Nee (...)

2In Dutch as well as in Belgian historiography, the United Kingdom under king Willem I (1772-1843) has not been met with a kind reception. In both national historical traditions, the kingdom that existed between 1815 and 1830 is regarded as an anomaly, doomed to failure2. The “artificiality” of this short-lived nation state is contrasted by nationally inclined historians in the 19th and 20th century with the “natural” national identity of the Dutch and, in more complicated way, Belgians. This view on the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, however, is anachronistic. In the first half of the 19th century the process of nation formation in the Netherlands was still very much fluid. During the Restoration concepts and identity marking names such as “the Netherlands”, “Dutch”, “Belgian” ( “Nederlands”, “Hollands”, “NederDuytsch”, “Belgisch/Belge”) did not have their more or less fixed meaning as they have now. The events of the early 19th century determined their meanings, as Dutch historian of nationalism Joep Leerssen has convincingly argued elsewhere3.

Europeanism and nationalism after Napoleon

3The establishment of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was part of a larger reordering of Europe after the Napoleonic era in 1814 and 1815. Interestingly in the context of this conference on national and European identities, in these years national and European feelings coexisted harmoniously and were complementary for a limited period. In the transitional years 1814-1815, a new European identity was conceived in contrast to the pax napoleonica. Whereas in contemporary public opinion all over Europe the disgraced and defeated Napoleonic Empire now stood for bloody military despotism and repression, the Restoration order in the dominant discourse had brought back freedom and peace.

  • 4 Cf. Fontana B., “The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations”, in The Idea of Europe from antiq (...)

4This new freedom was understood by contemporaries above all as the restoration of the principle of self-determination of Europe’s many states and cultures and the return of religious freedom independent from state control. National diversity and Freedom within the family of European nations, led by a brotherly band of wise and kind monarchs, and sanctioned by the divine providence, were the pillars of this reinvented European identity in official discourse4.

5A good example of the complementary character of post-Napoleonic nationalism and Europeanism in the early years of the Restoration is the pamphlet written by former Batavian revolutionary, ardent Dutch patriot and professor of Leiden University, Johannes van der Palm, entitled De vrede van Europa, The Peace of Europe (1814). This is one of many pamphlets published in 1814-1815 in the Netherlands with “Europe” prominently in the title. In this pamphlet, Van der Palm contrasts the false and bloody European peace which was created by the despotic Napoleon, “the slavery of Europe”, with the true and free peace constructed by the victorious allies. “Europe” for Van der Palm is essentially an anti-Napoleonic concept. Van der Palm associated Europe not with a universal monarchy but with what he called “an equilibrium of powers”, by which he understood a system of independent states coexisting peacefully with each other. Within the newly found continental unity led by Europe’s monarchs, the Dutch nation could once again flourish while retaining its unique character, he wrote.

  • 5 See for instance on post-Napoleonic European dreams: Comte de Saint-Simon (and A. Thierry), De la r (...)

6Although the Restoration order in later hostile liberal historiography was itself associated with oppression and the attempt to turn back the revolutionary tide, in the early years there seemed to have been a genuine attempt to create a new Europe based on the ideals of freedom, cultural difference, religious unity and political harmony. The split between (liberal and radical) nationalism and the Restoration order dates from a few years later, with the years around 1820 in many countries as an important turning point. In 1814 and 1815, contemporaries from all political persuasions, countries, religions, and social walks of life believed that the century’s old dream of achieving eternal European peace could now be achieved and there were high hopes of the Vienna Conference to fulfil this dream5.

7What different parties understood by a “European Peace” of course widely differed, and almost immediately after the unrealistic expectations, disillusion became widespread. The almost euphoric spirit of unity, which had surfaced as a result of the end of the Napoleonic wars, disappeared quickly after 1815. Nonetheless, as it seems to me the transition of 1814- 1815 seems a crucial and perhaps understudied moment in the complementary development, not only – as is well known – of national identities and memories, but certainly also of ideas of Europe and the formation of European memories.

The « national past » and the construction of a pan-netherlandish identity

8One of the most important new political constellations founded in the tumultuous years 1814-1815 was the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. This new state was regarded by the European powers as a bulwark against the dreaded spectre of a resurging revolutionary France ( “le boulevard de l’Europe contre la France” it was called). The foundation of this state formed a provisional ending of more than two decades of revolution, regime changes, (near) civil ware and foreign invasions in the Low Countries.

  • 6 Koch J., Koning Willem I (1772-1843), Amsterdam, Boom, 2013.
  • 7 Van Sas N.C.F., Onze natuurlijkste bondgenoot. Nederland, Engeland en Europa, 1813-1831, Groningen, (...)

9On November 30 1813, the son of the last Stadtholder of the House of Orange, prince Willem Frederik, living in exile for more 18 years after the invasion of French revolutionary troops in the Dutch Republic, had returned on the beach of Scheveningen near the political capital of The Hague6. On March 29 1814, a constitution was accepted by a meeting of notables in Amsterdam and a day later Willem Frederik was inaugurated as sovereign prince “Willem I”. During the Hundred Days, when the young state was under threat of Napoleon’s armies, Willem I assumed the title of king with the consent of the great powers on March 16 1815. On September 21 1815, Willem was inaugurated in Brussels as monarch of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands, a new combination of the old Dutch republic, the former Austrian Netherlands and the former Prince-Bishopric Liege. The United Kingdom was not a traditional composite monarchy, but a unitary state, under the special protection of Great Britain, which regarded the kingdom as its foremost bridgehead to the continent7. In the eyes of the not very modest king Willem I, his kingdom was an important European great power, at least comparable in status with the other new great power Prussia.

  • 8 Aerts H., Het (on) Verenigd Koninkrijk (1815-1830-2015), op. cit., p. 138-181.
  • 9 On a comparison of Dutch and French nation formation: “La guerre a fait les États et l’État a fait (...)

10It was Willem’s ambition to turn this new and coincidental political construction into a true new nation state8. The past, however, was more of a problem than a help in this project of nation building. First of all, there was the problematic recent past of the Revolution. The Northern and the Southern parts had had a different experience of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era. The Southern or Austrian Netherlands had been annexed to France by French revolutionary armies in 1792, with an intermezzo of a restored Austrian rule in 1793-1794. The Northern Netherlands stayed at least nominally an independent state until 1810 when the former revolutionary Batavian Republic was incorporated as an integral part of the Napoleonic Empire, or as Napoleon has put it: the Netherlands, too insignificant to stay independent, had been adopted by the French, la Grande nation, out of mercy. For a few years it seemed that Dutch national identity would become a sub-species of the larger French-imperial statehood9.

  • 10 Lok M.M., and Scholz N., “‘The return of the loving father’, Masculinity, Legitimacy and the French (...)
  • 11 Lok M. M., “Un oubli total du passé? The Political and Social construction of silence in Restoratio (...)

11Willem’s attitude towards Napoleon’s legacy was very ambiguous. On one hand, Willem I described himself as a returned loving father who had heroically chased away the man eating foreign monster Napoleon10. On the other, in many ways, Willem, who personally greatly admired Napoleon, continued the institutions and administrative personnel of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Willem’s solution to this dilemma was to stay silent on the recent past and he promoted a culture of oubli or forgetting. Willem I seemed to have very well understood the later insight of Ernest Renan that “the essence of the nation is that all individuals have lot in common, but that they have also forgotten many things11”.

  • 12 Jensen L., Verzet tegen Napoleon, Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2013.

12The more remote past was not more useful for the nation building project of Willem I than the recent past. During the Napoleonic annexation of the Northern Netherlands, the memory of the so-called golden age of the 17th century was revived in pamphlets and songs as part of the anti-Napoleonic resistance literature12. When Napoleonic authority collapsed in the North in November 1813, a veritable flood of publications appeared to glorify the 16th century Dutch revolt against the Habsburg King Philips II, which had led to the foundation of the Dutch Republic and the de facto separation of the Northern and Southern provinces. The historical narrative of the 16th century struggle for freedom against a foreign tyrant was to a certain extent used as template for contemporaries to understand their own revolt of 1813. For the Southern Netherlands, the perspective was entirely different. Having been ruled from Vienna and then Paris, Willem’s Dutch and protestant rule from the summer of 1814 onwards, seemed to be only a new name in a long line of foreign rulers imposed on them from above.

13The amalgam between the Northern and the Southern Netherlands in 1815, made the memory of the Dutch revolt problematic as the dominant framework for the historical interpretation of current events. The Revolt in official discourse was increasingly seen not as a triumph of liberty, but as the tragedy of the split of the Netherlands the United Kingdom had finally overcome. Attempts were made to replace – or reconciliate – the memory of the revolt with the myth of a mediaeval Burgundian pan-Netherlandish Golden Age. Willem I described himself as the natural successor of the Habsburg emperor Charles V, with a mission to complete the aborted attempts of state formation in the Netherlands in the 16th century. However, the Burgundian myth never really took off as the dominant political memory in the new Kingdom. Many northerners regarded the new United Kingdom of 1815 in essence as the continuation of the Dutch state and nation that had come into being in 1813-1814, only now with an enlarged territory and, unfortunately for many protestant Dutchmen, an augmented number of Catholics.

  • 13 Tollebeek J., “Een gedwongen plooi. Geschiedenis schrijven in het Verenigd Koninkrijk van Willem I” (...)

14Perhaps exemplary for the lack of a unified political past in the United Kingdom is the failure of the state commission of 1826 to appoint a royal historiographer and to commission a unifying history of the United Netherlands. Willem’s hope that a new history of the Netherlands based on original source material would automatically lead to an ‘objective’ and unifying national past were to be disappointed13.

15As the remote history was unsuitable for nation building, the memory of the very recent past, above all the memory of the victorious battle of Waterloo of 1815, was used as a means of forgetting the political divisions not only between North and South but also within both parts of the country. Above all it seems, as a result of the absence of an appropriate past, the new Kingdom was founded on a promise for the future. Primarily Willem defended his at first uncertain rule over his new kingdom without a true historical precedent in terms of development, prosperity and stability. Good administration and paternal rule would end the internal strife and create unity between the North and the South in the near future.

  • 14 Lok M.M., “Renouer la chaîne des temps ou repartir à zéro? Passé, présent et futur en France et aux (...)

16This future oriented character of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands contrasted with other Restoration regimes. In France for instance, Louis XVIII also laid emphasis on reconciliation, forgetting (oubli), peace and stability as the foundations of his rule. The restored Bourbon monarchy, however, was explicitly described in terms of continuation of time, with the revolution and Napoleonic era regarded as an unfortunate ceremonial interregnum, and not as a new beginning14.

Conclusion: failed nation building

  • 15 witte E., Het verloren koninkrijk. Het harde verzet van de Belgische orangisten tegen de revolutie, (...)

17Willem’s attempt to construct a new and unified “Pan-Netherlandish” national state can be considered a failure from hindsight. Only fifteen years later, during the Revolution of 1830, the Southern half broke away with support of the French armies. The European powers did not intervene to restore the state of the strong-willed William for various reasons. One explanation for the sudden and by no means necessary collapse of this state, apart from the serious mismanagement of the Orange dynasty of the political crisis and the increasingly unpopular and authoritarian style of government of Willem, was the fact that the inhabitants of the Southern Netherlands hardly shared a common identity with the Northern part of the kingdom. Although some stayed loyal to the House of Orange as the legitimate dynasty of the Southern Netherlands, this did not imply that they were loyal to the United Kingdom as a unitary state15.

  • 16 Leerssen J., “De Nederlandse natie”, in Een nieuwe staat. Het begin van het koninkrijk der Nederlan (...)
  • 17 The comparison between the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and the European Union is not far fetc (...)

18The national identity of the United Kingdom was based almost exclusively on the more developed Northern national identity, and few southerners could identify with this cultural program16. Apparently, the emphasis on technocratic administration, economic development and wealth creation for a bright future was insufficient for the creation of a new national identity. The fate of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands can – in a speculative manner – be interpreted as interesting example and perhaps also as a serious foreboding for the current European Union, as a similar attempt to construct a political entity based primarily on technocratic progress, the idea of good administration and economic growth17.

Notes

1 The bicentenary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 2013-2015 has led to many new publications on the state of Willem I, almost all written in Dutch.

2 Aerts R. and Deneckere G., “Inleiding”, Het (on) Verenigd Koninkrijk (1815- 1830-2015). Een politiek experiment in de Lage Landen, Ons erfdeel, 2015, p. 9-10.

3 Leerssen J., “Landsnamen, taalnamen. De lexicale aanloop tot de Groot-Nederlandse gedachte”, in Neerlandistiek in contrast. Bijdrage aan het zestiende colloquium neerlandicum, Fenoulhet J. (ed.), Woubrugge 2007, p. 471-485.

4 Cf. Fontana B., “The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations”, in The Idea of Europe from antiquity to the European Union, Anthony Pagden (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 116-128. On the Congress of Vienna: Jarett M., The Congress of Vienna and its legacy. War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2013.

5 See for instance on post-Napoleonic European dreams: Comte de Saint-Simon (and A. Thierry), De la réorganisation de la société européenne ou de la nécessité et des moyen de rassembler les peuples de l’Europe en un seul corps politique, en conservant a chacun son independance nationale, Paris, chez Adrien Egron, 1814.

6 Koch J., Koning Willem I (1772-1843), Amsterdam, Boom, 2013.

7 Van Sas N.C.F., Onze natuurlijkste bondgenoot. Nederland, Engeland en Europa, 1813-1831, Groningen, Proefschrif, 1985.

8 Aerts H., Het (on) Verenigd Koninkrijk (1815-1830-2015), op. cit., p. 138-181.

9 On a comparison of Dutch and French nation formation: “La guerre a fait les États et l’État a fait la guerre. Étude comparée de la formation étatique française et néerlandaise (1600-1800-1945)”, Deshima 8, 2014, p. 183-202.

10 Lok M.M., and Scholz N., “‘The return of the loving father’, Masculinity, Legitimacy and the French and Dutch Restoration Monarchies (1813-1815)”, BMGN The Low Countries Review, 127-1, 2012, p. 19-44.

11 Lok M. M., “Un oubli total du passé? The Political and Social construction of silence in Restoration Europe (1813-1830)”, History and Memory 26.2, Fall 2014, p. 40-75.

12 Jensen L., Verzet tegen Napoleon, Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2013.

13 Tollebeek J., “Een gedwongen plooi. Geschiedenis schrijven in het Verenigd Koninkrijk van Willem I”, De Negentiende eeuw 38.3, 2014, p. 203-224.

14 Lok M.M., “Renouer la chaîne des temps ou repartir à zéro? Passé, présent et futur en France et aux Pays-Bas (1814-1815)”, Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle 49.2, 2014, p. 79-92.

15 witte E., Het verloren koninkrijk. Het harde verzet van de Belgische orangisten tegen de revolutie, 1828-1850, Antwerpen, De Bezige Bij, 2014.

16 Leerssen J., “De Nederlandse natie”, in Een nieuwe staat. Het begin van het koninkrijk der Nederlanden, de Haan I., den Hoed P., te Velde H. (eds.), Amsterdam 2013, p. 319-340.

17 The comparison between the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and the European Union is not far fetched. The new volume on the United Kingdom, written by Dutch and Belgian historians, Het (on) Verenigd Koninkrijk, was presented to the European commissioners Frans Timmermans in Brussels on May 29 2015.

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be used under OpenEdition Books License, unless otherwise stated.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search