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"A tour de force, the first work of a young English scholar that is already attracting the highest acclaim..., Patriots and Liberators captures the disintegration of a great European power--the Dutch Republic--into military impotence, economic ruin and near terminal eclipse as a nation state. Drawing on a mass of previously untouched archival material from several countries, Simon Schama gives us a brilliant portrait of an extraordinary nation at the point of no return. The moment is the ominous pause before the political cataclysm that will engulf the Old World in 1789. ... For more than a hundred years, the Dutch have been admired and envied as the miracle of a continent: affluent, urbane and tolerant, the masters of a global maritime empire, providers of Europe's ships, grain, cloth and spices, bankers to its monarchs, pioneers in science and printing, they have placed their stamp upon Western civilisation. But now their splendour is decaying, their Golden Century at an end. As grandeur sinks towards catastrophe (an incapable ruler, chaos in government, famine and poverty spreading across the land, an army and fleet pathetically inadequate to safeguard the Republic's independence), we see a people in extremis: they must either resign themselves to the total erosion of their power or else embark--deliberately--upon their own revolution. They choose the second course (three years before revolution erupts in France), but the brave attempt at regeneration--their enterprise: to create a democracy of citizens in arms--ends in disaster. Schama's book graphically documents the succession of calamities--civil war, invasion, occupation, economic strangulation and political sabotage--that befalls the Dutch from this moment on in their desperate efforts to avert obliteration as an independent state. Attacked by greedy enemies on all sides (first Prussia, then Britain, then Napoleonic France exporting "Liberty" and revolutionary imperialism on the points of bayonets), the country is tom apart. Livelihoods are ruined, crops destroyed; the fishermen of the deltas are driven to destitution by hostile privateers; beggars and academics in Leiden are caught up in a gunpowder explosion that rips their city apart; all across the land, people are subjected to financial extortion as agents and spies, generals and ambassadors, conspire to wreck the government and exploit every weakness to satisfy the limitless demands of the French war machine. Even Louis Bonaparte, installed by his brother as puppet king of the Dutch, joins his "subjects" in their concerted resistance; ultimately, he will contemplate breaking the dykes that protect his people from the seas and flooding the country rather than surrender. Patriots and Liberators is the anatomy of a satellite state in a time of total war. How the Dutch miraculously survived is the drama of this monumental, driving book, whose revelations mark a major contribution to our understanding of the shaping of modern Europe."--Dust jacket.… (més)
An engaging account of the Batavian Republic and its struggles to modernise the administrative machinery of government while grappling with opposing federalist and unitarist forces in achieving this. To add to the woes of Dutch Republic from 1780 to 1813 was the occupation, and then absorption, into the French Empire, a disastrous war with England, an economic blockade with debilitating demands for money and loans from France. France treated the Dutch with disdain, imagining the country was the counting house of Europe, as it had once been during its Golden Century. Schama gives due credit to Dutch values of persistence, thrift and self-management as the qualities that maintained the affiliation of the various parts of the Dutch Republic. At the heart of the struggle was a determination among its ablest politicians to reach a stage where a well managed unified Netherlands would emerge, even though it meant reduction in status as a department of France for some years, until Napoleon's megalomania was reversed in Russia and Prussia.
Dr. Schama’s very long (his own words are “indecently corpulent”), detailed but eloquent book is justified, in his view, by a revised interpretation of the importance of the reforming Patriot movement that arose in the 1780s, of the Batavian Republic set up after French troops entered the Netherlands in 1795, and of the “French times” that followed. What apparently started for Dr. Schama as a study of the French Revolution as it was mirrored in Dutch history ended as an autonomous study of the Dutch “revolution” itself. More than that, his bold theory of the specifically Dutch contribution to their own later development after 1813 takes unequivocal form. “…[I]t seems incontestable that the Dutch monarchy of the nineteenth century, conservative before 1848 and liberal after it, was not merely preceded but caused by the Batavian Republic and its successor Kingdom.
"A tour de force, the first work of a young English scholar that is already attracting the highest acclaim..., Patriots and Liberators captures the disintegration of a great European power--the Dutch Republic--into military impotence, economic ruin and near terminal eclipse as a nation state. Drawing on a mass of previously untouched archival material from several countries, Simon Schama gives us a brilliant portrait of an extraordinary nation at the point of no return. The moment is the ominous pause before the political cataclysm that will engulf the Old World in 1789. ... For more than a hundred years, the Dutch have been admired and envied as the miracle of a continent: affluent, urbane and tolerant, the masters of a global maritime empire, providers of Europe's ships, grain, cloth and spices, bankers to its monarchs, pioneers in science and printing, they have placed their stamp upon Western civilisation. But now their splendour is decaying, their Golden Century at an end. As grandeur sinks towards catastrophe (an incapable ruler, chaos in government, famine and poverty spreading across the land, an army and fleet pathetically inadequate to safeguard the Republic's independence), we see a people in extremis: they must either resign themselves to the total erosion of their power or else embark--deliberately--upon their own revolution. They choose the second course (three years before revolution erupts in France), but the brave attempt at regeneration--their enterprise: to create a democracy of citizens in arms--ends in disaster. Schama's book graphically documents the succession of calamities--civil war, invasion, occupation, economic strangulation and political sabotage--that befalls the Dutch from this moment on in their desperate efforts to avert obliteration as an independent state. Attacked by greedy enemies on all sides (first Prussia, then Britain, then Napoleonic France exporting "Liberty" and revolutionary imperialism on the points of bayonets), the country is tom apart. Livelihoods are ruined, crops destroyed; the fishermen of the deltas are driven to destitution by hostile privateers; beggars and academics in Leiden are caught up in a gunpowder explosion that rips their city apart; all across the land, people are subjected to financial extortion as agents and spies, generals and ambassadors, conspire to wreck the government and exploit every weakness to satisfy the limitless demands of the French war machine. Even Louis Bonaparte, installed by his brother as puppet king of the Dutch, joins his "subjects" in their concerted resistance; ultimately, he will contemplate breaking the dykes that protect his people from the seas and flooding the country rather than surrender. Patriots and Liberators is the anatomy of a satellite state in a time of total war. How the Dutch miraculously survived is the drama of this monumental, driving book, whose revelations mark a major contribution to our understanding of the shaping of modern Europe."--Dust jacket.
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France treated the Dutch with disdain, imagining the country was the counting house of Europe, as it had once been during its Golden Century.
Schama gives due credit to Dutch values of persistence, thrift and self-management as the qualities that maintained the affiliation of the various parts of the Dutch Republic. At the heart of the struggle was a determination among its ablest politicians to reach a stage where a well managed unified Netherlands would emerge, even though it meant reduction in status as a department of France for some years, until Napoleon's megalomania was reversed in Russia and Prussia.