Dead and buried after the elections? Voting and citizenship in the Batavian Revolution

 In 1793, six years after the Patriots had been defeated in their efforts to give the Dutch Republic a popular government based on elections and representation, and two years before the definitive fall of the Dutch ancien régime in 1795, Johan Meerman launched an all-out attack on the theory and practice of democracy. Meerman, who was a high-ranking civil servant, an erudite historian, a renowned book collector, and a tireless international traveler, was deeply worried about the unprecedented political unrest manifesting itself in both his own country and in France. The root cause of this unrest, he was convinced, was the inability of many of his contemporaries to properly distinguish between civil and political liberty, and their consequent failure to understand that the latter posed a grave danger to the former. Completely reversing the standard republican argument that liberty could only be guaranteed and political slavery could only be prevented by the participation of the citizen in politics, Meerman provocatively claimed that, on the contrary, it was precisely popular participation in politics, and particularly full-blown popular government, that lay at the root of political slavery. The essence of civil liberty, Meerman argued, was the protection of each individual’s life and property under a stable and constitutional government that guaranteed the rule of law. He proceeded to demonstrate in great detail that the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic enjoyed a very large measure of such civil liberty. Unfortunately, however, increasing numbers of Dutchmen were now suddenly dismissing this glorious and extensive liberty as altogether inadequate and were beginning to claim that without political liberty there could be no true republic. This, Meerman insisted, was extremely dangerous, since the introduction of political liberty, defined as ‘the right of all or a great number of the inhabitants of a country to participate in government either directly or through elected representatives’, necessarily meant the end of civil liberty.