Reform, Revolution and the Republican Tradition The Case of the Batavian Republic

Franco Venturi was one of the first historians to suggest that the republican tradition ought to be an essential element in our understanding of both the Enlightenment impulse for reform and the subsequent political revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Subsequent scholarship, however, has shifted attention away from the surviving republican states to the importance of early modern republican discourse, ultimate rooted in the classical past, as a crucial element in the genesis of both reform and revolution. This chapter seeks to explore these themes further, in the context of the movements for reform and revolution in one of the most important surviving old republics in the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic. Whereas many scholars nowadays acknowledge that early modern classical republican discourse was a prominent presence in the early phases of the Dutch revolution of the late eighteenth century, this chapter will attempt to demonstrate that, far from suddenly disappearing, classical republican themes – such as the conviction that republics needed to be small, the distrust of the principle of representation, and the insistence upon the necessity of political virtue – continued to influence Dutch revolutionary debates until the very end of the eighteenth century and of the Dutch revolution itself.