Batavian Republic
| Bataafse Republiek (Dutch) Bataafsche Republiek (Nine Dutch) |
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| Batavian Republic | |||||
| 1795-1806 | |||||
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| Official language | Dutch | ||||
| Capital | de facto: The Hague | ||||
| Form of government | republic | ||||
| Head of state , also head of government | Council pensioner | ||||
| population | 1,880,000 (1795) | ||||
| currency | Dutch guilder | ||||
| founding | 1795 | ||||
| resolution | 1806 | ||||
 (with the areas ceded to France in 1795) |
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The Batavian Republic ( Dutch Bataafse Republiek , nine songs : Bataafsche Republiek ) was a subsidiary republic established by French exports of revolution , formed from the Republic of the Seven United Provinces . It was proclaimed on January 19, 1795 and converted into the Kingdom of Holland on June 5, 1806 . The designation of the republic as "Batavian" was based on the ancient Batavian people, in keeping with the zeitgeist of that time .
The old republic of the United Netherlands
The Republic of the Seven United Provinces had existed since 1581, but was characterized by a closed political elite consisting of the commercial aristocracy and the House of Orange , which had held the hereditary governor's office (supreme military and naval leader) since 1747 . As more and more power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, resistance to the existing power structures arose in the last quarter of the 18th century. Circles that were based on the ideas of the Enlightenment demanded more rights to co-determination. After initial success, the patriots failed and had to flee to France in large numbers in 1787 when Prussia intervened militarily in favor of the Orange .
At the beginning of the First Coalition War against revolutionary France (1792-1797), the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands remained neutral. For Great Britain, however, it was the main donor. Great Britain, in turn, was the main enemy of the French Revolution , which brought the United Netherlands into the conflict. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain and the United Netherlands. In the winter of 1794/1795, French troops under General Jean-Charles Pichegru entered the Netherlands. Amsterdam was captured on January 19, 1795, two days after the inheritor left for England. The exiles of the 1780s proclaimed the Batavian Republic before the end of the fighting. On January 28, 1795, the Dutch fleet , which was trapped in the ice near Texel and was banned from fighting by the new republic , was surrendered to France.
The new republic
On May 16, 1795, the French and the already constituted Batavian Republic concluded the Peace Treaty of The Hague . The exclaves Maastricht , Venlo , State Limburg and State Flanders were integrated into the Austrian Netherlands, which had already become French (today's Belgium ); the Batavian Republic had to maintain a French army of 25,000 men on its territory with high contributions and pay 100 million guilders for the costs of the war. A defensive and offensive alliance linked the two republics in the further fight against the coalition (above all Austria and Great Britain).
The Batavian Republic represented a political turning point - it was a unitary state . The United Netherlands, on the other hand, was merely an amalgamation of several small states, each of which went its own way in terms of domestic politics. From now on there was a central government for the Netherlands, comparable to the absolutist monarchies like France or Prussia. In terms of foreign policy, the republic, as a state dependent on France, played no role, but domestically the changes, for example in religious freedom , did not remain without effects; many forward-looking innovations such as the standardization of Dutch were decided and implemented at this time.
The National Assembly, the parliament from the circles of the population who had stood in opposition to the previous aristocratic rule until the 1780s and which met for the first time in 1796 as the successor to the provisional representative body established in 1795, was characterized by factional and constitutional struggles. In 1798 there was the first coup to accelerate democratic change. It was only as a result of these disputes that the republic received a constitution based on the model of the French Directory of 1795, which was not implemented in the following years.
A second coup followed in 1801. This time to reverse the democratic reforms. Napoleon Bonaparte , First Consul in France, had orchestrated this coup as he increasingly positioned himself as a monarchical ruler.
In 1805, Napoleon Rutger appointed Jan Schimmelpenninck a “council pensioner ”, a state president with almost unrestricted power, who, however, set about putting the constitution that had been in place in 1798 into force.
In 1806, Napoleon finally put an end to the Batavian Republic by introducing the monarchy in the Netherlands and making his brother Louis regent of the Kingdom of Holland . The Restoration did not change the reforms or the idea of a unitary state much, so that many of the achievements of the French period in the new kingdom under William of Orange (from 1814/15) were retained.
Remarks
- The state name goes back to the Batavians , a West Germanic tribe who settled in the southern area of today's Netherlands during the Roman period. As with most of the French subsidiary republics, the antiquated name meant that the new state referred to an earlier, natural law and non- feudal social order.
- In contrast to the other subsidiary republics, the Batavian Republic did not have to give itself a newly invented tricolor in imitation of the French one. On February 14, 1796, it decreed the traditional Dutch tricolor with the horizontal division in red-white-blue (which is not in connection with the vertical French blue-white-red) to the national flag. For the ships of the Kriegsmarine, however, an addition to the flag was ordered, which was described as follows: “A field is inserted which contains a representation of a female figure in a graceful posture, sitting on a patch of green foliage, and a spear with the Holding freedom hat in hand. A lion sits at her feet, his head tilted to one side and equipped with a wild expression. "
- The illustration was used independently as a bow flag (Gösch) on all warships.
- The field in the flag was abolished in 1806 with the establishment of the monarchy.
- As a new ally of France, the republic became the enemy of the coalition in 1795, to which the old Dutch colonial empire was largely defenseless. In order to save at least part of the overseas possessions, the governor of the Netherlands, William V of Orange , who had fled, signed a treaty with Great Britain in 1796 in which he placed the colonies in British "preventive detention" and gave instructions to their governors to be placed under the new sovereignty . The Batavian Republic failed with its attempts to recapture, such as an expedition to the Cape Colony ( surrender in Saldanhabucht in 1796 ) and ultimately lost a large part of the colonial empire: Dutch Guiana and Ceylon became British through the Peace of Amiens in 1802, although the Cape Colony remained on the The paper was Dutch, but in 1806 it was again, now finally, taken over by the British. The remaining colonies came back under Dutch administration in 1814.
Departments
The Batavian Republic was divided into eight departments in 1798 (population 1798):
| department | main place | Residents |
|---|---|---|
| Ems | Leeuwarden | 244,495 |
| Old IJssel | Zwolle | 237,788 |
| Rhine | Arnhem | 242,516 |
| Amstel | Amsterdam | 238.431 |
| Texel | Alkmaar | 240.384 |
| Delft | Delft | 239,488 |
| Dommel | 's-Hertogenbosch | 222,479 |
| Scheldt and Meuse | Middelburg | 217.282 |
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz : The European Constitutions from 1789 to the Most Recent , Volume 2, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1833, pp. 118 ff ( Google Books )
- ↑ a b Constitution Act for the Batavian Republic of April 23, 1798, p. 14 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Carl von Rotteck : General Political Annals , Volume 7, Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1831, p. 101 ( Google Books )