R. R. PALMER

T HE present paper deals only with the
Dutch, but its purpose is to illumi-
nate the whole complex of war and revo-
lution which then gripped the Western
world.

The United Provinces, though very dif-
ferent from Bourbon France, were typical
of the ancien régime in Europe. They were,
indeed, very small. From the spire of
Utrecht cathedral, on a clear day in 1794,
Ann Radcliffe saw the whole of Holland
and its six sister-provinces spread out be-
fore her, with fifty towns visible in the flat-
land from this one elevated point. The
population, some 1,800,000, was less than
that of the infant United States. The small
size of the political unit was characteristic
of that core of Europe which reached from
the North Sea to the island of Malta. Small
states or weak ones--the United Provinces,
the Papal States, the German principalities,
and most notably Poland--all faced the
prospect, by the 1780's, of control or out-
right partition by those giants soon to be
called "great powers," in whose rise Leo-
pold von Ranke saw the chief political phe-
nomenon of the eighteenth century. In
fact, in 1787, a Prussian army invaded Hol-
land and forcibly restored the evicted
Prince of Orange. Prussia and Great
Britain, by treaty, thereupon "guaranteed"
the Orange regime, not so much against
France, reduced to impotency by the ap-
proach of revolution, as against indigenous
Dutch agitation. It was this restored regime,
supported by Prussia and Britain, that fell
to Dutch revolutionaries supported by
France in 1795.

In the sense in which "medieval" was
and is sometimes applied to the eighteenth
century, the United Provinces were, if any-
thing, mora medieval than France, having
never felt the hand of a unifying and mod-
ernizing absolute monarchy. Medieval lib-
erties persisted as inherited rights. Each
province and each town was an autono-
mous entity, jealous of all powers above it
in the federal structure. The estates general
represented the estates of the seven prov-
inces and could not act without unanimity.
Naval affairs were purposely divided
among numerous boards and colleges,
whose cumbersome operation was one cause
of the decline of the Dutch fleet. Other
executive and financial business was simi-
larly impeded. The stadholderate had be-
come legally hereditary in the House of
Orange, but the stadholder's authority was
narrowly circumscribed, and there had been
long decades with no stadholder at all. As
elsewhere in Europe--in Venice, the Ger-
man free cities, most of the Swiss cantons,
and the Belgian provinces; in the British
parliamentary system and in France and
the other great monarchies--the exercise of
public authority had fallen into the hands
of a relatively few interconnected families,
the oligarchies, patriciates, and aristocracies
of the Old Regime. Among the Dutch the
ruling group was called the regenten or

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