8. Pieter Geyl and the eighteenth century

Reinier Salverda

When Pieter Geyl passed away on New Year’s Eve 1966, praise was not long in coming. The Times obituary of 3 January 1967 charted how Geyl, with a doctorate from Leiden University and having served as the London correspondent of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC) during the First World War, held the chair of Dutch history at University College London (UCL) from 1919 to 1935, after which he became professor of Dutch history in Utrecht. Geyl, a combative and unorthodox historian, was well known for his active involvement with the Flemish movement and for his outspoken anti-monarchist and anti-Orangist views concerning the history of the Netherlands. After the Second World War he achieved great fame internationally with his brilliant Napoleon: For and Against (1946) and his essays on and debates with leading historians. His magnum opus, however, the six-volume Dutch-language Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (‘History of the Dutch People’, 1930–62), remained unfinished, its sixth volume ending in 1798, well before our modern age.

Praise and admiration for Geyl came from many different quarters. Arnold Toynbee, in a letter to The Times of 7 January 1967, valued Geyl as ‘a critic from whom one might learn much’, and praised his Dutch Revolt (2 vols, 1932–4; reissued in a single volume in 2001 by Phoenix Press under the title of History of the Dutch-speaking Peoples, in obvious analogy to Churchill’s A History of the English-speaking Peoples (1956–8), as a work which ‘produced a lasting modification of traditional views by throwing fresh light, from a new angle, on an important passage of history’. On the other end of the spectrum, Geyl was praised by A. L. Rowse for his critique of Toynbee’s A Study of History (1946).1 In between, there is John Bromley’s and Ernst Kossmann’s dedication to Geyl of their volume Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (1968): ‘Piae memoriae Petri Geyl praeceptoris prudentis scriptoris praeclari amici egregii grato animo dedicatum’ (‘Dedicated, with a grateful heart, to the revered memory of Pieter Geyl, prudent teacher, excellent writer, extraordinary friend’). Another tribute came from Alice Carter in her monograph The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years War (1971), a thorough analysis of the deep divisions underlying the Dutch Republic’s outward neutrality. As she put it in her preface:

I was one of the many English students Professor Geyl taught to love his mother country, and to want to learn about relations between the Netherlands and England, which Geyl had come to regard as his second fatherland. Professor Boogman, also a student of Geyl’s, has written recently of the freedom with which we were allowed to choose our own area of research, and make our own discoveries therein in our own way and at our own time. We could draw our own conclusions, to which Geyl would listen courteously before kindly revealing to us the fallacies apt to beset the young student who starts working on his own. We were not submitted to unsought direction, though it was always to be had on request. Nor were we intimidated by obiter dicta, though we would not, I think, have been permitted to harbour doubts about the Greater Netherlands theory. With that one exception his seminars were meetings of free minds.2

Herbert Rowen, the American historian of the seventeenth-century Dutch statesman John de Witt, ranked Geyl alongside Johan Huizinga.3 Following on, three Dutch historians discussed Geyl’s achievements in commemorative articles: first, in 1967, J. C. Boogman;4 then Lodewijk Rogier, who stated that in Dutch historiography there is a ‘before Geyl’ and an ‘after Geyl’;5 and lastly, in 1972, Hermann von der Dunk, who mentioned ‘the important stimuli to innovation emanating from his work’ but also noted that his work now belongs to ‘a completed period in historiography’.6

Some two decades later, a rather more critical view of Geyl’s work emerged, first from Von der Dunk in Clio’s Mirror,7 then in 1987 from Ernst Kossmann, Geyl’s successor to the chair of Dutch history at UCL. The latter expressed his great respect for Geyl but also voiced clear reservations vis-à-vis his Greater Netherlands idea and his view of the Dutch language as the binding factor in the political history of the Low Countries. As Kossmann put it, these views were something out of the past, and shared neither by his colleagues nor by the subsequent generation of historians: ‘[Geyl’s work] no longer excites us, it no longer challenges us, though it does strike us by its force, liveliness and spontaneity. It goes without saying that he will continue to be valued as a great historian, as he wanted and expected.’8

Kossmann’s point was that Geyl was not a theoretician, and the renewal of historical studies after him came about in large part thanks to input and impulses from outside the Netherlands: with Fernand Braudel’s longue durée, Mona Ozouf’s culture of the revolution and Michel Foucault’s mentalities and psychodynamics for example; along with innovative studies by American scholars of the radical Enlightenment (Margaret Jacob) and book history (Robert Darnton) and in-depth British studies of Dutch history by Simon Schama and Jonathan Israel.9 In all these respects, said Kossmann, history and historiography had simply moved on and left Geyl behind.

Given these different judgements, it is worth going back to re-examine Geyl’s work in light of the historical scholarship of today, fifty years on. Two questions in particular will occupy us here: ‘Why Geyl?’ and ‘Why the eighteenth century in the Netherlands?’ The first of these questions explores issues such as whether today Geyl is more respected than read and his work seen primarily as useful, sound and solid rather than challenging and stimulating. He was a generalist who covered all periods of Dutch history, but maybe his works are too Dutch in character and out of sync with today’s era of globalization and progress through specialization? So, why would (or should) one still read and re-read his historical work? These and similar questions will occupy us when we consider the basic principles which Geyl as a historian adhered to when he practised his profession, his craft of studying, interpreting and criticizing his sources.

The second question takes us into issues such as: what was the eighteenth century to Geyl and what did he make of it? Why did he engage with this period of decline in Dutch history? And what led him to his re-evaluation of the Patriots in Dutch history and their democratic ideas and actions at the end of the eighteenth century? As we shall see, in contrast to Marx, for whom reading Diderot and the French Enlightenment was intellectual refreshment in old age, for Geyl, studying the eighteenth century was a lifelong intellectual pursuit, resulting in a large body of published work from early on in his London years until the end of his career. This state of affairs makes it doubly interesting to explore what Geyl’s work can still teach us and why his studies of the Dutch eighteenth century still matter today.

Our underlying central question, meanwhile, is a critical one and concerns the merits and demerits of Geyl’s scholarly contribution. Our overall aim is to contribute to a critical reassessment of the unique achievements and the enduring value of Geyl’s contribution, both to history as a discipline in general and to the history of the Dutch eighteenth century in particular.

Geyl and the craft of the historian

Sources, discovery and scrutiny

In Geyl’s practice as a historian, and in his reflections on his craft, three basic principles are paramount. Throughout his career, Geyl put great emphasis on the handiwork of the historian, the professional craft, the expertise and skills to be applied when working with sources and in archival research. If he taught us anything, it is that the historian must investigate, analyse, interpret, scrutinize, compare, discuss and do the historical detective work that is necessary if we want to know and understand what happened in history. Geyl’s emphasis on the importance of sources and a thorough study of them harks back directly to the critical-empirical tradition within the Dutch Enlightenment, and especially to the scholarly work of Jan Wagenaar, the eighteenth-century Amsterdam Patriot historian.10

An interesting example from Geyl’s work is the following. In his annotations to the English translation of the Journal of the famous seventeenth-century United Dutch East India Company skipper Bontekoe,11 Geyl informs us that Bontekoe, on his return voyage from the East Indies in 1625, encountered an English man-of-war in Kinsale harbour (Ireland), and this vital piece of external information led the author of this chapter to the hypothesis that there might well be other things that Bontekoe does not tell his readers. Pursuing this further led to the discovery in the letters of Jan Pieterszoon Coen that Bontekoe was not the emblematic Dutch merchant skipper-next-to-god of his Journal, but in fact the captain of a Dutch warship carrying weapons and ammunition to Java, where these were urgently needed to fight the British and the Indonesians.12 On a more practical level, Geyl built up the Dutch history library in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) as a solid collection of primary sources to be used in research and seminars.13

Relevance and commitment

A second fundamental principle of Geyl’s was that the position of the investigating historian is not outside the history under investigation. On the contrary, the historian is actively involved in that investigation, from their particular vantage point. This was certainly true of Geyl himself, whose dominant, headstrong personality, Multatulian polemical style and enlightened, liberal-national and republican political leanings are acutely present throughout his writings.

A good example is Geyl’s post-war brochure rejecting the vilification of the Dutch Patriots of the Napoleonic era as collaborators, similar to the Dutch Nazi party Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB) during the German occupation. As a democrat through and through and having been interned during the war, Geyl spoke up for the democratic and national character of the Dutch Patriot movement, aiming to rescue them from this slur. This happened at a time when, for example, Jo van Ammers-Küller’s pre-war Patriot Tavelinck trilogy (1934–8) had the stigma of the NSB attached to it, because its popular author had collaborated with the Germans during the war.14

In this respect, Geyl himself was not too different from the eighteenth-century pamphleteers who took part in the great 1757 debate about the proper place of the Dutch statesman John de Witt in political history and theory, the subject of Geyl’s impressive Wittenoorlog (1953). In Geyl’s work we find the same political involvement and polemical talents that Jan Wagenaar brought to bear in his pamphlets of 1757. In fact, Geyl’s commitments descend directly from the eighteenth-century ideal of the philosophe as intellectual and social tribune: his active and polemical involvement with public debate and opinion, his recognition that when doing political history the historian cannot avoid (and therefore must acknowledge) their own bias and his focus on the contemporary social and political relevance of his historical work.15

Geyl’s critical historiography

Third, behind these first two principles lies Geyl’s critical philosophy of history, which he developed in Napoleon: For and Against (published in Dutch, 1946; in English, 1949). This book opens, almost as an invocation, if not a clarion call, with Madame de Staël as the voice of liberalism in Europe, the enlightened author of the Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution françoise (‘Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution’, 1816) and the indomitable female protagonist opposing the tyranny of Napoleon and the Restoration of Chateaubriand. Geyl clearly adhered to a dramatic view of history as a struggle between protagonists and, in their wake, between historians, who, for all their differences of knowledge, viewpoint and bias, are not outside that history and must, one way or another, take a position vis-à-vis the issue at hand, in this case, the battle of liberalism against tyranny and despotism. And when they do, inevitably this will involve them in discussion. Here we see how Geyl arrived at his well-known dictum that history is ‘a discussion without end’: a truism perhaps, like the French saying ‘Du choc des opinions jaillit la vérité’ (‘Two opinions are better than one’), or the classical ‘Audi et alteram partem’ (‘Listen to the other side’), but still, a very influential view in modern historiography until today.16

This view of history as a discussion without end also informs Geyl’s longstanding correspondence with his friend and colleague Frederik Carel Gerretson, which was not just about sources and their interpretation, about historical knowledge and ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘how things actually were’), but also about current political matters, values and visions, right up to their eventual parting of ways.17 The real point here is a philosophical one. With his critical-empirical approach to historical scholarship, Geyl was linking up with the British tradition from Bacon and Newton to Russell and Popper, where sources and archives provide the investigative material for historians, who then, next, apply their skills of analysis, interpretation, criticism, argument and evidence – not finalistic but open-ended – to prevent the Whig histories we would otherwise end up with.

This is vintage Geyl: his critical-dialectic method of doing history, in his view a basic commitment for the discipline. Geyl’s interest was not so much in creating, developing and projecting historical images but rather in critical examination, playing off one image against another, in a historical discussion without end.18

Geyl’s contribution to the study of the Dutch eighteenth century

Geyl’s eighteenth-century writings consist of several monographs on the political history of the period and a range of critical scholarly articles, all based on authentic sources, the harvest of forty years of hard work, and quite a significant part of his overall output as a historian. Below, their main themes and interests will be discussed.

Geyl versus Colenbrander

First, there is Geyl’s criticism, sustained over many years, of Colenbrander’s influential view of the late eighteenth century as a particularly low point in Dutch national history, and against his presentation of the Dutch Patriots as a bunch of rather ridiculous puppets of the French. That Geyl’s national pride was hurt by Colenbrander’s disdain may have been one of the motives for this critique. Another may have been his desire to free himself of the fetters of the nineteenth-century trinity of ‘God, the Netherlands and Orange’, the national ideology (with its concomitant historiography) of the kingdom. But whatever his motive, Geyl did tackle Colenbrander’s overwhelming dominance of the field with his massive output: his publication of sources in the Gedenkstukken der algemeene geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795–1840 (‘Memorials of the General History of the Netherlands from 1795 to 1840’, 10 vols, 1905–22), as well as a series of monographs covering the same period, from De Patriottentijd (‘The Patriot Period’, 3 vols, 1897–98), De Bataafsche republiek (‘The Batavian Republic’, 1908) and Schimmelpenninck en Koning Lodewijk (‘Schimmelpenninck and King Louis Napoleon’, 1911) through to his Inlijving en opstand (‘Incorporation and Revolt’, 1913).19

This chapter looks at how Geyl developed his critique and, in particular, his critical method. He went into it hard and polemical, attacking Colenbrander wherever he could, on his plagiarism and his carelessness, on errors due to sloppy reading leading to patently unfounded and incorrect historical interpretations of the relevant archival documents. On this basis of historical-interpretive handwork and thorough critical readings of the relevant sources in their context, Geyl dismissed Colenbrander in his De Patriottenbeweging (‘The Patriot Movement’) as ‘no reliable guide’.20

To Geyl, this clearing of the field was a basic prerequisite before he could proceed beyond Colenbrander’s errors and misconceptions to develop a new and different understanding of the Patriots and their time. In this domain, we find some of Geyl’s most impressive scholarly achievements, along two main thematic lines: first, his investigation of the Dutch republic’s ancien régime under the Orange stadholders, and second, the breakthrough of the new era in pamphlets, Patriot ideas and public debate in eighteenth-century Dutch politics and society.

The ancien régime in the Dutch Republic: Orange and Bentinck

In 1924 Geyl’s first monograph, Willem IV en Engeland (‘Stadholder William IV and England’), written in London, discussed the Orange stadholders, with their hereditary powers and feudal patronage system reaching into all parts of the Republic. The book was much praised: ‘one of the best contributions … of recent years’ (Historisch Tijdschrift), the ‘narrative, both vivid and sincere, is established on solid foundations’ (History), ‘a thorough and finely balanced account of Dutch national history’ (Historische Zeitschrift).21

Then, in 1934, there is Geyl’s edition, jointly with Gerretson, of the first volume of the Brieven (Letters) of Willem Bentinck van Rhoon, the loyal anglophile Orangist courtier, statesman and political operator who had a great reach and was in a pivotal position within the politics of the Republic, and in whose activities we can see the inner workings of the Dutch ancien régime and how this managed to stay in power for many decades through patronage, pressure and, if necessary, by fomenting riots – even a coup d’état.

This 1934 Bentinck edition remains unfinished. The British Library alone held so much source material, previously untouched, that the completion of this first volume was in itself a major achievement. But pressures of work prevented further progress. In 1976, volumes 2.1 and 2.2 were published posthumously, but even then, the edition remained unfinished. Moreover, many other letters and documents from Bentinck lie scattered across archives in several countries.22 A. C. Carter highlights not only this dispersion but also the extremely valuable information contained in the voluminous papers Bentinck left,23 but Carter’s work is not mentioned in the bibliography to this later edition of Bentinck’s Brieven.24

Bentinck’s wife, Countess Charlotte Sophie von Aldenburg, has since been the subject of a fascinating two-volume novel, Mevrouw Bentinck (1978–81) by the Dutch novelist Hella Haasse, based on original letters. An adventurous free spirit with wide-ranging international connections in the Europe of the Enlightenment, Charlotte Sophie appears in Marc Fumaroli’s Quand l’Europe parlait français (‘When Europe Spoke French’, 2001), in a chapter in which she comes alive for the reader, almost jumping off the page with the immediacy of the letters she wrote to her many friends all over Europe. Her letters too are scattered across archives all over Europe, but many thousands have now been made digitally accessible by the Bentinck Archive at Middachten Castle. Her husband, Willem, fought her all the way for a divorce, and in the end won out, but not nearly enough is known about this man and his role in eighteenth-century Dutch politics. To understand him as a statesman in his time, a great deal of work needs to be done: a full edition of the available archive material and a major political biography of the scope and size of Herbert Rowen’s John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672, or David Onnekink’s recent political biography of Bentinck’s father, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite: The Career of Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709).25

Riots, revolts, revolution

In 1936 Geyl published his monograph, Revolutiedagen in Amsterdam (Augustus–September 1748): Prins Willem IV en de Doelistenbeweging (‘Revo-lutionary Days in Amsterdam (August–September 1748): Prince William IV and the Doelist Movement’), in which he analysed the mid-century Orangist riots in Amsterdam. Throughout, Geyl is on top of the action, which can be followed almost hour to hour in a narrative carefully reconstructed (with due attention to the confusion and clutter of the whole episode) from numerous pamphlets, letters and eyewitness reports with incisive source study.26 Geyl argues that already in 1748 the beginnings can be seen of the alienation between the Orangists and incipient democracy, and between the stadholder and the citizenry, an alienation which would eventually result in the Patriot Revolution of 1787. Geyl was quite critical here of the Orangists and their ancien régime operations, blaming their long and slow demise on their political ineptness and inadequacy.27

Words matter, and here we note the use of the term ‘revolution’.28 Geyl indicated that the riots and revolt of 1748 were a precursor to what was to become a democratic revolution towards the end of the century. The fact is, though, that when Bentinck and his friends in the English government, the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Sandwich, spoke of ‘the Dutch Revolution’, what they meant was actually the pro-Orange, court-inspired, anti-republican, anti-French regime change then going on in Holland.29

It was only in the 1970s and 1980s, with the advent of social history, that interest among Dutch historians in riots and revolts was renewed.30 The riots which occurred in Gelderland and Overijssel from the end of the seventeenth century, the plooierijen (‘faction riots’) against the monarchical ambitions of Willem III and Willem IV, were viewed by the Wertheims as leading to the anonymous publication in 1781 of the radical democratic pamphlet Aan het Volk van Nederland (‘To the people of the Netherlands’) by the IJssel patriot Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, an important harbinger of the Batavian Revolution of 1795.

Rudolf Dekker complained in 1982 that the dominant image of the eighteenth century in existing historiography represented the Dutch Republic as a calm and quiet society, whereas in fact there had been a multitude of revolts throughout the entire history of the republic. He blames Geyl for sharing this blind spot on riots with many other Dutch historians. Based on his own investigation of the Netherlands, in combination with a European-wide comparative perspective posits that ‘every country has its own pattern of social unrest’.31 The particular pattern which Dekker saw in the Netherlands was that there had been a multitude of riots in the Republic in between the two near-civil wars (the first religious, in 1617; the second political, in 1787): in the first half of the seventeenth century riots were mostly religious in character; there were frequent tax riots throughout the seventeenth though not in the eighteenth century; food riots dominated in the first half of the eighteenth century; riots occurred in years of crisis (1653, 1672, 1747 and 1787); and Orangist upheavals, which, due to pressure from the rioting populace, in 1672 and 1747 led to regime change.

Regarding Dekker’s complaint, this chapter takes the position that his conclusion would have been very much to Geyl’s liking. To put it in Toynbee’s terms: here too, Geyl, with his pioneering monograph of 1936 on the Amsterdam Doelisten riot of 1748, had set in motion a lasting modification of traditional historiography.32

The coming of the new: the pamphlet war of 1757 and the political history of the Patriots

Geyl’s next monograph was his Wittenoorlog (1953), an analysis of the exchange of pamphlets in 1757 concerning the place of the statesman John de Witt in Dutch history. Based on an extensive collection of original documents, this study of Dutch political thought in mid-eighteenth-century public debate is one of the highpoints in Geyl’s œuvre.33

From a political and ideological point of view, Geyl in this monograph rediscovers the Staatse tradition in Dutch political history since De Witt while at the same time linking up with the eighteenth-century historiography of Jan Wagenaar, a leading participant in this debate.34 The book about the afterlife of De Witt and his place in Dutch political history and thought over the last three centuries has not yet been written but, as Rowen signalled, Geyl was a pioneer here, with the indications he gave of De Witt’s importance in his writings.35 Gerretson may have joked about what he saw as ‘the staatse historiography from Grotius up to Your Honour’,36 but as Geyl himself wrote, ‘It [the Wittenoorlog] is a work that has enormously fascinated me, but that will not attract many readers – so complicated, so deep into the mindset of those strange eighteenth-century characters.’37

In other works, such as De Patriottenbeweging (‘The Patriot Movement’, 1947), Studies en Strijdschriften (‘Studies and Polemics’, 1958) and the final volume of his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (‘History of the Dutch People’, 1959; translated into French as La Révolution Batave, 1971), Geyl continued to develop this idea and offered a re-evaluation of the anti-stadholder movement and its resistance to the monarchical-absolutist ambitions of the Orange stadholders, their patronage and despotism.38

Geyl had not hesitated to describe the Doelisten revolt of 1748 as a precursor to revolution. Now, in his Patriottenbeweging, he described this revolt as a democratic movement of national political significance, an important mainstay in Dutch history, descended from the staatsgezinde tradition, which he thus put centre stage. In this way, Geyl produced a new vision of the Patriots and their Batavian Revolution, emphasizing a continuity that had been obscured by Colenbrander but was now rediscovered by Geyl’s critical historical research. As C. H. E. de Wit concludes, ‘In this study, Colenbrander’s view of the period after 1785 and his method have been investigated, and that resulted in a confirmation of Geyl’s critique.’39

However, De Wit went on to criticize Geyl for his views on revolt and revolution, which were still far too much those of a ‘popular riot’.40 So now the critic had been criticized, and with his own weapons of careful investigation of sources, critical interpretation and polemical discussion. One of the key pieces of evidence for De Wit’s case was his discovery concerning the origin, purpose and especially the political significance of Grondwettige Herstelling (‘Constitutional Repair’), published in two volumes in 1784–6.41 Here, De Wit gave a valuable clarification of terms and concepts, showing how the label of ‘Patriot’ covered on the one hand pro-oligarchic but anti-Orange regents and on the other revolutionary democrats such as Van der Capellen, the author of the fiery pamphlet Aan Het Volk van Nederland (‘To the People of the Netherlands’) of 1781.42

Going further, De Wit (1974) came to see the second half of the eighteenth century as a struggle between aristocrats and democrats.43 In this, incidentally, he was reverting to Robert Fruin, who used the same conceptual distinction, though in practice the two scholars applied it rather differently: to Fruin, Schimmelpenninck was a democratic patriot,44 whereas De Wit did not really see this patriot as a democrat. This unhelpful terminological confusion was increased later when De Wit (1978) lumped Geyl and Colenbrander together as ‘the conventional view’.45 Against this, however, the difference between the views of Colenbrander and Geyl has been set out clearly by Haitsma Mulier.46 De Wit also criticized Geyl for his ‘bourgeois-conventional’ views, in contrast to the more radical views of Thorbecke. But here, De Wit fails to appreciate the Staatse, republican, anti-monarchical tradition to which Geyl belongs just as much as Thorbecke, and ignores the fact that Geyl, like Willem Verkade and Jan Drentje, saw those radical patriots and their Staatse traditions as precursors to nineteenth-century Dutch democracy and liberalism.47

Taking stock: Geyl and his legacy

Looking back, the following lines of approach can help us to take the measure of Geyl as a historian of the Dutch eighteenth century.

Openings

It is characteristic of Geyl that he could be quite open about what he did not know. For example, towards the end of his Revolutiedagen in Amsterdam (Revolutionary Days in Amsterdam, 1936) he remarks of one of the people involved: ‘Rousset de Missy – perhaps someone else will someday find out some more about him – to me, he remains an unfathomable entity; one guesses, rather more an adventurer than a statesman; and in any case, could a Frenchman really be leading an Amsterdam popular movement?’48 His friend Gerretson, on reading the book, had this response: ‘He is more important than you think and you do him a bit of an injustice. More about this some other time when we speak.’49

The past as a foreign country

As a historian, Geyl had a healthy distrust of generalizations and formulas proposed in theoretical systems and perspectives as developed by Toynbee and Romein. Furthermore, Dutch eighteenth-century history to Geyl was not just the local variant of a universal system or pattern. That is, the historical narrative, the sui generis of the Dutch eighteenth century, had to be elicited from the sources, via careful and precise reading, analysis and criticism. This, then, is Geyl’s key question: what is the specific and unique character of the eighteenth century in Dutch history? What are its peculiar features? How and why is it special, different, unusual, interesting, remarkable or unique? It is this question that is and will remain of enduring importance to students of the period.

Finally, when Geyl went looking for answers he was operating from a deep sense of how strange those eighteenth-century characters were and precisely for that reason, one suspects, he found them intriguing. From Bentinck to Luzac, from William IV to Wagenaar, from Van der Capellen to Rousset de Missy, there was no end to the fascination their unique mentalities and mindsets exerted over Geyl.

Narrating revolutionary times

What emerges from Geyl’s writings is that, back then, the world was very different indeed. The Republic’s distribution of sovereignty was strongly regional, at times even completely local, in character. There were lines of distinction and demarcation everywhere, often in unexpected places, and often there was a totally different situation on the other side of these lines: different laws and freedoms, different rules and exceptions, different social obligations and power relations, different sanctions and protections while, simultaneously, not very far away, there might be a safe haven or sanctuary where new and alternative enlightened, universalist ideas and a national sense of politics might exist and could be disseminated.50

Geyl was well aware of this particularist situation and did his best to do justice to its complications and dynamics. But it clearly constitutes a challenge to the historiographer. So how did he go about this?

To begin with, he demonstrated how the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century was anything but a calm and placid bywater. On the contrary, as we have seen, it was a time of riots, pamphlets, patronage, manipulation and repression; of revolutions, coups d’état, wars, invasions and shifting alliances; of the long and slow demise of the House of Orange; of intense factional strife behind an outward pretence of neutrality; a time when the Dutch East India Company was on its way to bankruptcy and the Netherlands was losing out in the world-wide colonial rivalry between the French and the English. Geyl’s history ends with the destruction of the old republic, which coincided with the revolutionary birth of the new Batavian Republic, in 1798, a constitutional democracy that had been envisioned and fought over throughout the late eighteenth century, well before the Netherlands ever became a kingdom.51

Geyl’s central interest was in political history, and his focus was national in character, yet in the period he was investigating both these notions, ‘politics’ and ‘nation’, were only just emerging and did not have the clearer sense and meaning they have today, two hundred years on. Thus, when Geyl came to the story of how the revolution came about, he captured the clashes and dynamics of this drama in two clearly conflicting storylines. The first is the story of how the ancien régime, the Orange stadholders, the States General, the Grand Pensionaries and all others with vested interests in the old republic managed to hold on to and maintain their positions almost to the end of the eighteenth century, with gentle pressure, patronage, compromise, appropriation and rewards wherever possible, but if necessary through repression, riots, revolts and violence. The second story was that of the enlightened, democratic, public-minded and national sense of politics that was developing among the rising bourgeoisie of the time, which appeared victorious in the end and of which Geyl, as was his bias, saw himself as an inheritor.

Geyl superseded?

Geyl’s significance can also be measured against the innovations in historiography that came after him. The generations after Geyl have, over the past half-century, produced an enormous range of original studies, catering to emerging interests, investigating contemporary questions and offering fresh perspectives in historiography. So too in the field of eighteenth-century studies. These have gone beyond the scope and limitations of Geyl’s political history, exploring different cultural, social and economic dimensions and taking on various themes of interest, such as civil society and the processes of modernization.

A bird’s-eye view of the field of eighteenth-century studies reveals innovation in many different areas, and as a result of this we know (and also can know) so much more today about cultural and intellectual history, the history of the book and reading, about book towns such as Zwolle, Groningen and Leiden and publishers such as Lugtmans and Luzac, about literature and texts, translation and the dissemination of ideas across Europe through correspondence networks, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, reading clubs and other societies. Today, we also have so many more biographies of leading personalities, such as Belle de Zuylen, Gerrit Paape, Jacob Haafner, the Van Hogendorp brothers, Justus van Effen, Admiral van Kinsbergen and grand pensionary Van de Spiegel, among others. There are many new subdisciplines today, in historiography, in social and economic history, women’s history, regional and local history, in the political history of the Patriots, their ideas and theories, their riots, revolts and revolutions, in colonial history and the history of slavery, and so on, right through to the grand new syntheses that have since been published: Blauwdrukken 1800 by Joost Kloek and Wijnand Mijnhardt and Metamorfose by Niek van Sas.52

The combined effect of these developments has been a sea change in our knowledge and understanding of the Dutch eighteenth century. It is not just that we now have new answers to the same old questions, we also have totally different and new kinds of questions, and fresh approaches to finding answers to them. In the process, the field has been completely transformed since Geyl. In that sense, Geyl has been superseded. No one today does, like he did, only political history, purely of Holland and that particular era, in his unique and characteristic way: committed staatsgezind, democratic; an old liberal, committed to Madame de Staël’s political values; and to critical, Multatulian polemics. Today, Geyl would most likely be standing intrigued and puzzled before all those new multidisciplinary subfields with their specialist techniques, perspectives and vistas which came to the fore only after his time.

But the question is: has Geyl really had his time? Or, conversely, what can we say is of enduring value in his eighteenth-century studies, and why?

A turning point in historiography

Geyl’s three basic principles – the importance of an empirical base in sources; his emphasis on critical scrutiny and interpretation; and his view of historiography as a discussion without end – present us with a coherent and effective methodological perspective for critical-historical historical research that remains influential and of continuing relevance today.

By practising these principles, Geyl explicitly adopted the discipline of historical and empirical testing of interpretations and hypotheses against the available evidence – as did, before him, the eighteenth-century historian Jan Wagenaar.53 Of prime importance here is the quality of the critical investigations Geyl undertook in this rather under-researched period and the paths he cut for himself through the jungle of eighteenth-century Dutch historiography.

This makes Geyl’s work a decisive turning point within Dutch historiography, between on the one hand the tradition of Fruin and Colenbrander before him, and that of his critic De Wit on the other. It is a turning point also in the sense that Geyl’s critical approach was the necessary precondition for the development, after Geyl, towards the flourishing, multifaceted, innovative and often surprising field of eighteenth-century studies which we have today.

Geyl versus Huizinga

In Geyl’s view, it is through the critical study of existing conventional images that scholarly progress in our discipline is made possible. In contrast, Huizinga consciously invents, creates and explores historical images, coming up with often remarkable and original findings and insights.

Geyl’s forte was his critical, forensic examination and testing of ideas, interpretations, conceptions, findings and images against the available evidence in the historical sources. He did so with unprejudiced polemical sharpness, as evidenced in his Napoleon, a book that Huizinga could never have written. Huizinga’s talent, by contrast, was of the imaginative-interpretative kind, concerned more with Giambattista Vico (and Benedetto Croce) than with political facts. What Edmund Wilson said of Vico and Jules Michelet also applies to Huizinga: they made ‘a whole new philosophical-artistic world: the world of recreated social history’.54

Huizinga may have been more of a genius than Geyl, certainly in his Homo Ludens, but he did not have time for uncomfortable findings – not in his Dutch Civilization of the Seventeenth Century, from which Coen and the Dutch East India Company are strikingly absent, nor in his In de schaduwen van morgen (‘In the Shadows of Tomorrow’), which lacked a truly humanistic policy of reconciliation with the Indonesians, as their social-democrat leader Soetan Sjahrir wrote from his prison on Banda island.55 As a method for historical research, this author much prefers Geyl’s critical approach over Huizinga’s embarrassed silence concerning the Dutch colonial past, which is not fit for purpose in serious scholarly investigation. That is my bias.

Geyl’s legacy

As we have seen, Geyl certainly had his limitations and his blind spots; also, his writings are dated, but not passé – one can still learn a lot from him. In conclusion, this chapter would like to highlight what its author has found most stimulating and what remains of enduring value in Geyl’s work. First, Geyl’s eye for the specific character of Dutch history, with its particular patterns and dynamics, which historians have to uncover and reconstruct through the painstaking detective work that is their craft: that is, not simply a template or copy of French, German, British or other international models, tendencies and influences. Second, Geyl’s thorough and critical studies of the Dutch eighteenth century have restored the thread running from John de Witt, via Joan Derk van der Capellen and Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp to Johan Rudolf Thorbecke. This is the Staatse historical lineage, the democratic-liberal-enlightened-national-political tradition in Dutch history. It is in this context that we must see Geyl’s re-evaluation of the Patriots. Third, with this analysis, Geyl effectively rebutted and rejected Colenbrander’s view that the Patriot era was one of French dominance and an all-time low in the history of the Dutch nation. Fourth, with his writings on this period, Geyl has not only stimulated interest and investigation but also pointed the way forward, as for example in the preface to his De Patriottenbeweging, 1780–1787, in which he emphasizes the need for critical study of the available sources and the testing of existing images and assumptions concerning Dutch history against these data from history.

To investigate the dynamics and patterns specific to eighteenth-century Dutch society should be Geyl’s epitaph. For that is what he put on the agenda for historians, nationally and also internationally, as we can see in Robert Roswell Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959–64). He inspired historians to take the eighteenth century seriously and to engage in further research into the many fascinating facets of the period, which the generations after him have taken on with such zest, scholarship and imagination.