9. The historiographical legacy of Pieter Geyl for revolutionary and Napoleonic studies

Mark Edward Hay

I am indebted to you, too, now and in the past, for helping me to understand the real history of Holland, Belgium, and hence of European and all historical processes.1

R. R. Palmer to Pieter Geyl, while researching his two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution

Pieter Geyl is one of the most internationally recognized Dutch historians. In his eulogy of Geyl, Arnold Toynbee, his friend and colleague of forty-five years, stated, ‘No one who has a serious interest in history can afford to ignore Geyl’s work, because so much of it has made a lasting difference to our knowledge and understanding of the subjects he treated. […] I discovered this myself when The Revolt of the Netherlands was published,’ and ‘Geyl could not resist the temptation to seize any opportunity for having a fight in any kind of arena that offered itself […]. As a critic, Geyl had a gift that is all too rarely displayed in academic warfare. He could, and did, hit his human target with all his might.’2 The renowned A. J. P. Taylor recollected that ‘Geyl’s practical contribution to history was his fundamental revision in the story of the [Dutch] revolt against Spain,’ but that ‘Geyl was not content to demonstrate how history should be written. He turned also to creative criticism of other historians.’3 These reminiscences are a good reflection of how Geyl is perceived internationally. Geyl is acknowledged as a consummate historian with the exceptional ability to penetrate the problems of the past, but his reputation is based on only a fraction of his research – mostly translations of his research on the Low Countries, and on his frequent polemics with peers, most notably, of course, with Toynbee himself. While Geyl’s contribution to Low Countries history was great, and his encounters with peers were insightful, thought-provoking and amusing, it would not do justice to Geyl to define him in these terms only, for his lifelong dedication to study and research covered a broad spectrum of topics. While the various chapters of this volume touch on different aspects of Geyl’s legacy, this essay explores Geyl’s contribution to revolutionary and Napoleonic history, defined as covering the years 1776–1815. While Geyl may not in the first instance be associated with this field of study, this chapter will show that he had a considerable and lasting impact.

Revolutionary and Napoleonic studies occupy a peculiar place in historical studies. While accepting that defining a historical period is a debate without an end, encompassing just forty years in narrow terms, revolutionary and Napoleonic studies is a small and clearly delimited field of study. In geographical terms, it is limited to the Atlantic world, with a heavy, and understandable, focus on Europe, although, due to the scope of European commercial and colonial empires in this era, this often requires a global perspective. To keep the field of study appealing and relevant within these narrow temporal and geographical confines, historians have pushed the disciplinary boundaries of their research, resulting in a dynamic field where new ideas are floated and recent historiographical developments are readily incorporated. The dynamism of revolutionary and Napoleonic studies is reinforced by the fact that, although the field is narrow and clearly delimited, the period marks the endpoint of the early modern age and the dawn of the modern era, thus providing a common forum for both early modernists and modernists. In fact, it would be fair to argue that, due to the self-imposed boundaries of revolutionary and Napoleonic studies, the field has become a fertile testing ground, or laboratory, for historical studies more broadly. For this reason, the field lends itself to evaluating the breadth and endurance of the legacy of a historian who is internationally recognized as first among his peers.

After Geyl passed away in 1966 a committee of peers was set up to compile an inventory of his writings. They were unable to uncover all his writings. Even so, they logged no fewer than 1,049 publications.4 This includes academic studies, political essays, polemics, correspondence with peers, as well as book reviews, entries in encyclopaedias and newspaper editorials. Geyl’s work is predominantly historical in nature, including historiography and the critical and speculative philosophy of history, but he also ventured into art history, literary criticism and current affairs. His geographical focus was predominantly the Low Countries and its colonies, but to a lesser extent also Britain and its empire, France, Italy, Germany and the United States. As regards his temporal boundaries, he explored affairs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.5 Geyl’s output contains numerous publications relevant to revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. Space does not permit an in-depth examination of all his publications, so a thematic approach will be taken, and Geyl’s historiographical legacy will be explored through discussion of his most impactful contributions.

Reform, revolution, and restoration in the Low Countries

The first publication, which cannot remain unmentioned, is Geyl’s magnum opus, the Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam, which explores the history of the Dutch-speaking peoples from the collapse of the Roman empire to the end of the eighteenth century.6 In the Stam Geyl brushed aside conventional political definitions of the Dutch, that is, as inhabitants of the Dutch state, in favour of adopting a cultural definition based on the geographical spread of the Dutch language covering much of the Low Countries. This allowed Geyl to present the historical experience of the Dutch-speaking people not through the narrow prism of the Dutch state but through the broader prism of the Low Countries. This change of perspective had a considerable impact on the historiography of the Netherlands, Belgium and the Low Countries because it shed a different light on key historical events, most notably the late-sixteenth-century break-up of the Dutch-speaking community into a northern and a southern Netherlandic state. Conventionally, historians in both the Netherlands and Belgium had interpreted the separation of the Low Countries as a natural and logical historical outcome. In Geyl’s perspective, however, the separation was unnatural and nothing but a historical accident resulting from the inability of potential unifying forces to overcome the natural obstacle of the great river barrier dividing the northern from the southern Low Countries.

The reception of the Stam was not without criticism. One point of criticism focused on Geyl’s logical leap from presenting the historical experience of the Dutch-speaking peoples to writing a history of the Low Countries, which marginalized the historical agency of the French-speaking community of the region. More generally, the argument could be made that, particularly towards the end of the work, Geyl shows a bias towards affairs in the Netherlands. A second point concerned Geyl’s arguably simplistic conception of culture. Language is not, or need not be, the sole trait through which one identifies as belonging to a community. In the Low Countries, religion was an important cultural identifier, and the same could be said of class, occupation and regional or provincial identity.7 Finally, Geyl could be accused of, if not making history the hand maiden of politics, then at least bringing the two uncomfortably close, by providing with his Stam the historical substantiation for his conception of the ‘Greater Netherlands’ – the political idea of the community of the Netherlands and Flanders.8 While these criticisms are not without merit, Geyl must at least be credited for taking the understanding of Dutch, Belgian and Low Countries history one step further by challenging long-held conventions and providing a well-researched counterargument, paving the way for a possible synthesis of antagonistic perspectives.

Book X of the third volume of the Stam explores the history of the Low Countries in the revolutionary era from 1780 to 1798. Even though some of Geyl’s research findings have had a considerable impact on revolutionary and Napoleonic history, these parts of the Stam will not be discussed in depth here. The reason for this is that Geyl tended to extract from his Stam and update his research by drawing on new studies before republishing his conclusions through new outlets, occasionally even multiple times. Geyl’s views are therefore better learned from these later publications. Suffice it, then, to make one comment. The endpoint of Geyl’s Stam is the year 1798, when radical revolutionaries in the Batavian Republic forcefully introduced a constitution that resulted in the political unification of the Netherlands. For historians of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era Geyl’s choice of 1798 as an endpoint is an unsatisfying one because the era did not end until the definitive defeat of Napoleon in 1815. For the historian of the Low Countries, indeed, 1798 is an unsatisfactory endpoint too. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the history of the northern and southern Low Countries became more closely intertwined than in the preceding two centuries. Ever since France conquered both the southern Low Countries and the Dutch Republic, the historical experience of both north and south had run broadly in parallel. In 1810, when the northern Low Countries were incorporated into the Napoleonic empire, this parallel historical experience becomes a shared historical experience. This shared experience outlasts Napoleon, the north and south being merged into a United Kingdom of the Netherlands, before breaking up in 1830, with bilateral affairs definitively settled in 1839. So from the perspective of Low Countries history, a later endpoint, such as 1830, or 1839, would have been more appropriate. In Geyl’s defence, he did consider his Stam as unfinished and intended to expand it.9 Even so, it is a shame that in the quarter-century after the publication of the last volume Geyl did not find the time to finish what is perhaps his most important piece of scholarship.

One of the first topics that Geyl touched on was the revolutionary turmoil that plagued the Netherlands in the 1780s – the Patriot Uprising. For historians of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era this uprising is important because it was one of a number of revolutionary movements that swept the Atlantic World in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. To understand these Atlantic Revolutions requires an understanding of the origins of the Dutch Patriot Uprising and how it related to broader Atlantic trends.

Geyl published a considerable amount on the Patriot Uprising. The first publication is a monograph entitled De Patriottenbeweging (‘The Patriot Movement’), of 1947.10 The monograph is not based on archival research but is an analysis of secondary literature, principally the Patriottentijd (‘The Patriot Era’) by Herman Colenbrander, the renowned professor of, initially, Dutch colonial history, and later Dutch history, at the University of Leiden.11 Colenbrander considered the latter decades of the eighteenth century some of the darkest pages of Dutch history, predominantly because of the growing foreign influence – Prussian, French and British – in Dutch domestic affairs. This view is reflected in his treatment of the Patriot turmoil of the 1780s. Colenbrander argued that the Dutch Patriots were not revolutionaries but rather a collection of dilettantes nostalgic for a bygone era: their aims were illusory, they lacked a proper programme of reform, and the execution of their revolution was pathetic. The Dutch Patriots became revolutionary only after they were defeated in 1787, forcing them to seek exile in France, where they were educated in revolutionary politics by their French brethren. The conclusion to be drawn from Colenbrander’s work was that the revolutionary turmoil that plagued the Netherlands in the 1780s was essentially un-Dutch and should therefore not be considered part of Dutch history. Colenbrander’s views remained dominant for the better part of half a century, in part because his work was based on extensive archival research but also because, in the years after the publication of the Patriottentijd, Colenbrander expanded his study of the Netherlands in a series of monographs and an associated publication of primary sources, the Gedenkstukken, which presented a daunting deterrent to any contender.12

Geyl took a radically different view. He argued that the Patriot movement had its roots in the oligarchic opposition to the stadholderate that ran as a continuous thread through Dutch history. Traditionally, in this conflict the stadholder relied on the support of the lower classes in society, but in the 1780s, in part as the result of defeat in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the lower classes switched their allegiance to the anti-stadholderate opposition. Initially, the opposition embraced popular anti-Orangist sentiment, but when the oligarchs failed to satisfy popular demands a struggle ensued between the oligarchic opposition and the popular opposition over the direction of the uprising. Fearing an uprising from below, the oligarchic opposition and the Orangists concluded a conservative alliance. In 1787 the conservative alliance called on Prussian arms and British diplomatic support to quell the popular uprising. The conservative alliance managed to restore order, but the popular opposition was not defeated entirely. Many Patriots sought exile in the southern Low Countries and later in France, where they formulated an ideology that was both anti-Orangist and anti-oligarchic. The Patriots indeed adopted ideas from the French revolutionaries, but the Patriot movement was a response to Dutch domestic affairs. In 1795, many of these Patriots returned to the Netherlands to collaborate with French revolutionaries to overthrow the old regime. So, in Geyl’s perception, the Patriot Uprising was an intrinsically Dutch affair and the Patriot era was an essential link in Dutch history connecting the old regime of the eighteenth century to the Batavian Republic and the subsequent modern Netherlands, making it a critical episode of Dutch history that is important to understand.

In a second publication, a review article entitled ‘A detailed critique of Colenbrander’s Patriottentijd ’, Geyl brought out his opposition to the dominant paradigm, as formulated by Colenbrander, even more forcefully. In many ways, this publication is the classic Geyl piece, and Geyl himself seems to have been particularly fond of it, because he included it in an edited volume that was published for him upon his retirement: Studies en Strijdschriften.13 The publication zoomed in on about a dozen aspects of Colenbrander’s research on the Patriots, which Geyl then proceeded to examine in depth by deconstructing the narrative, isolating statements and retracing them back to the source in order to point out how Colenbrander had blundered, before putting forward corrections and his own, needless to say, superior interpretations. Much of Geyl’s criticism of Colenbrander had merit. For instance, Geyl exposed Colenbrander’s selective reading, his bias, his overinterpretation of some primary sources and his deliberate misreading – or even exclusion – of others. It is widely known that Colenbrander tended to make use of primary sources only insofar as they confirmed his views. For example, he viewed the Patriot turmoil predominantly as the result of foreign meddling in Dutch domestic affairs. This preconceived understanding of the Patriot Uprising is reflected in his selection of primary source material. Colenbrander consulted German, French and British archival sources but mostly ignored Dutch archival collections. Naturally, this approach could not but affirm his hypothesis. The detailed critique of Colenbrander did much to promote Geyl’s views on the Patriot Uprising over those of Colenbrander, but one cannot fail to observe that Geyl’s criticism was harsh – perhaps too harsh. In history, there is room for differing interpretations, albeit with the proviso that one is expected always to be willing to revisit earlier findings. Colenbrander’s ideas never seemed fixed. And so, to openly bring into doubt Colenbrander’s academic professionalism and his reputation in 1950, when, having passed away in 1945, he was no longer in a position to defend himself, smacks of vindictiveness. Of course, this attack by Geyl cannot be seen in isolation. It fits into the broader feud between Geyl and Colenbrander, the most memorable episode of which was not the aforementioned publication but an earlier instance in which Geyl and P. N. van Eyck, the London correspondent of the Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC), discovered that Colenbrander had committed plagiarism in an article on William of Orange14 and were determined to pursue the affair until Colenbrander was berated publicly.15

A third publication, which has attracted much attention, is Geyl’s historical parallel of the Patriots and the Dutch Nazi collaborators (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, NSB) in the Second World War.16 Geyl was not the first to draw this parallel, nor did he mean to imply that history repeats itself. The publication was a response to NSB sympathizers who drew the parallel to justify collaboration with the Nazis. Geyl felt compelled to challenge this parallel for two reasons. The first was personal and political. In 1943, when Geyl drafted the piece, he was in Nazi captivity, and this strongly coloured his opinions of the NSB. He felt that the collaboration of his fellow countrymen was unjustifiable and needed to be challenged. The second was historical. Were the parallel accepted, the judgement future academics would undoubtedly pass on the NSB would also reflect on the Dutch Patriots, which Geyl felt unfair. In a well-argued exposé, he acknowledged that, like the NSB, the Patriots were guilty of treason for collaborating with the enemy, but an important difference lay in the fact that where the Nazis and their collaborators overthrew a stable and vibrant regime, the Dutch revolutionaries challenged a regime that was in decay and in dire need of reform. Furthermore, Nazism was foreign to the Netherlands, while the Dutch revolutionary ideology was indigenous and broadly held. Finally, Nazism was incompatible with Dutch political culture, but Dutch revolutionary ideology was not, proof of which lay in the political reconciliations of 1801 and 1813. With this piece Geyl successfully dashed any hope of casting the NSB in the mould of the Dutch eighteenth-century revolutionaries. More importantly, he hammered down his argument that the Patriots were not foreign-backed radicals but domestic revolutionaries.

The publication for which Geyl is possibly best known internationally is his monograph La Révolution Batave, 1783–1798, in which he extended his thesis on the Patriot Uprising to include the Batavian Revolution of 1795 and its immediate aftermath.17 The monograph does not contain original research. It was the product of Geyl accepting a request by Jacques Godechot, the prominent historian of France and pioneer of the Atlantic thesis, to translate and publish those parts of his Stam that dealt with the revolutionary turmoil in the Netherlands.18 The research is not ground-breaking. Essentially, Geyl synthesized available resources to produce a narrative that introduces the principal historical actors and explores the major events of a tumultuous period of Dutch history. Geyl’s portrayal of the Batavian Revolution of 1795 as a continuation of the Patriot Uprising makes sense. Both the Patriots and the Batavians aimed to overthrow the Orangist regime and replace it with a system of government more suited to the nineteenth century, and there was a great continuity in the historical actors too. Many of the revolutionaries of the 1780s played a prominent role in the Batavian Revolution. However, one could argue that perhaps Geyl overemphasized the continuity and dismissed the differences all too easily. In the years between the defeat of the Patriots in 1787 and the Batavian Revolution a fundamental change in revolutionary principle and outlook had occurred. In short, one could say that the Patriots were backward-looking, hoping to revolutionize Dutch politics and society by reviving and reconstructing the Dutch Golden Age, while the Batavians became forward-looking, aiming to revolutionize Dutch politics and society by constructing an entirely new order based on new principles akin to those voiced in France – though not necessarily because of their exile in France, as Colenbrander argued. A further point of critique could be that La Révolution Batave conflicts with Geyl’s work as a whole and reveals a conceptual inconsistency on the part of Geyl. The monograph deals exclusively with the revolutionary turmoil in the Netherlands, and Geyl’s correspondence shows that he had no qualms about editing out the parts of the Stam that dealt with the revolutionary upheaval in the southern Low Countries, which, one could argue, undercut his ‘Greater Netherlands’ conception of a history of the Dutch-speaking people.19 Those parts of the Stam dealing with the southern Low Countries have not been published as a stand-alone monograph.

Geyl also published an article on the exile of the House of Orange during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era.20 We need not dwell on this publication too long. Unsurprisingly, the piece is a response to a study by Colenbrander, whom he accuses of overemphasizing the divisions within the family and failing to penetrate the mindset of William V.21 It is a narrative that explores the historical experience of the House of Orange from its departure from the Netherlands in 1795 until its return in 1813. It is a good piece, but not ground-breaking. In fact, it could be argued that Geyl falls into the historiographical trap that so many Dutch historians fall into, namely to superimpose the history of the Netherlands onto the history of the House of Orange, leading to the preconceived idea that it was inevitable that the House of Orange would return to the Netherlands after the defeat of Napoleon. In the opinion of this author, the return of the House of Orange to the Netherlands was not inevitable but due to fortunate dynastic connections and luck.22 Geyl’s other publications on Low Countries history in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era include several pieces on the liberation of the Netherlands in 1813, but these are either review articles that serve to emphasize Geyl’s own research or they use the year 1813 as a starting point for reflecting on the commemoration of the liberation of the Netherlands, in which case they fall outside the – arguably arbitrary – scope of this chapter.23

Geyl and comparative revolutionary studies

In addition to publishing on the revolutionary movements in the Netherlands, Geyl published several comparative revolutionary studies. In a first piece, De Noordnederlandse patriottenbeweging en Brabantse Revolutie (‘The North-Nederlandish Patriot Movement and the Brabant Revolution’), Geyl embedded the Dutch Patriot movement and the revolutionary upheaval in the Austrian Netherlands, the so-called Brabant Revolution of the late 1780s and early 1790s, in the broader context of the revolutionary upheaval of the latter decades of the eighteenth century.24 Geyl showed that the Dutch Patriot Uprising was similar to the French Revolution in that an enlightened revolutionary elite challenged a conservative establishment. In the Brabant Revolution, it was the establishment – Vienna, as well as Brussels and other provincial centres, that pushed for enlightened reform, while the revolutionaries resisted change. In two other aspects, however, the Dutch Patriot movement stood apart from the Brabant Revolution and the French Revolution. First was the role played by ‘the people’ in the revolution. In France the people played a significant role in overthrowing the regime. In the Austrian Netherlands, the people also played a significant role, though in this case they successfully halted the regime’s drive for reform. In the Dutch republic, the people were mostly sidelined. They played a role only in the latter stages of the Patriot Uprising but were defeated by an alliance of the oligarchic opposition and the Orangists, as mentioned above. Second was the institutional character of the state and its relationship to the revolutionary challenge. Both France and the Austrian Netherlands were centralized states. In revolution, this proved advantageous to revolutionaries because it meant they could direct their revolutionary action towards a single point – the central authority. If the central authority could be overcome, the revolution had a great chance of succeeding. The Dutch republic, however, was a decentralized state with a weak central authority. Therefore, in the Netherlands, the revolutionaries were forced to overthrow the regime at a local level and subsequently to merge these separate revolutions into a national revolution. This was immensely more difficult and it significantly reduced the chances of success. Proof of the importance of the institutional character of a state could be found in the success of the revolutions: in France and the Austrian Netherlands they resulted in change; in the Dutch republic the Patriots failed to bring about meaningful change.

According to Geyl, it was because of the prominent role played by the people in the Brabant Revolution, and because this revolution resulted in more change, that historians tended to place it in the same category as the French Revolution and oppose it to the Patriot Uprising. Geyl contested this. In his view, the Patriot Uprising and the Brabant Revolution were akin to one another as both movements sprang from similar societies and both were united in their aim of changing a system of government and a society which they felt was no longer fit for the late eighteenth century – and both were quite distinct from the French Revolution. The differences in the way the revolutions in the northern and southern Low Countries panned out were, according to Geyl, the result of local conditions rather than deeper-lying causes. Geyl’s comparison of the Patriot, Brabant and French revolutions is pioneering and insightful, but any historian will find it difficult to be convinced by Geyl’s final conclusion – the historiographical alignment of the Patriot Uprising and the Brabant Revolution – for it seems based more on his desire to produce a coherent narrative of the history of the Low Countries than on historical fact.

In a second study, Geyl applied the methodology of his comparative study to the Batavian Revolution of 1795. The study was originally prepared for a lecture given in 1956, but it was subsequently published several times, including in English.25 In it Geyl criticized historians for their apparent unwillingness to investigate objectively the historical agency of the Batavians. Unsurprisingly, Geyl reserved special criticism for Colenbrander, though Colenbrander was of course the authority on the Batavian Revolution at that time. According to Geyl, a flaw in Colenbrander’s research was that he viewed the Batavian Revolution in the shadow of the French Revolution. And, compared to the French revolutionaries, the Batavians appeared indecisive and incompetent. Geyl further criticized Colenbrander for judging the Batavians by the outcome of history rather than with an open and objective mind, by which he meant that Colenbrander had taken for granted the unification of the Netherlands and had not sufficiently recognized the efforts of the Batavians in achieving it.

Geyl argued that any comparison between the Batavian Revolution and the French Revolution was unfair because they were different in two critical aspects. First, the institutional character of France and the Netherlands meant that the chances of a successful revolution in the decentralized Dutch republic were considerably smaller than in France. Second, whereas the people played a major role in the French Revolution, in the Batavian Revolution (and, for the same reason, in the Patriot Uprising), the people played a minimal role.26 The only period in which the people exerted any real influence was after January 1798, when radical Batavians seized power through a coup d’état and ruled in the name of the people. Radical Batavian rule lasted for only six months but, crucially, it was the radical Batavians who granted the Dutch their first constitution, which allowed for the political unification of the Netherlands and contributed greatly to building the Dutch nation state. The conclusion to be drawn from Geyl’s study is that the Batavians had played a crucial role in the establishment of the modern Netherlands, and that therefore the Batavian Revolution deserved to be studied objectively and in its own right.

The impact of Geyl’s research on the historiography of revolutionary and Napoleonic studies

Geyl’s research on revolution in the Low Countries is highly relevant for revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. His work on the Patriots successfully challenged the old narrative, espoused most prominently by Colenbrander, replacing it with his own views, which rehabilitated the Dutch Patriots and presented the Patriot era as an essential transitional period in Dutch history. As such it marks a turning point in the historiography to this day.27 Geyl’s work on the Batavian Revolution is a corollary to his study of the Patriot Uprising. In it he takes a similar approach by focusing on the institutional character of the Netherlands and on the role of the people. His conclusion that the Batavian Revolution deserves to be studied in its own right remains undisputed to this day. Another of his conclusions, that the Batavians played a crucial role in the state building and nation formation of the Netherlands, however, has in recent times been questioned. The influential Amsterdam school of thought, including historians such as Frans Grijzenhout, Niek van Sas and Wyger Velema, maintains that the Batavians played a crucial role in the establishment of the modern Netherlands.28 Others, such as Henk te Velde from the University of Leiden and Ido de Haan from the University of Utrecht, argue that the more important role was played by the post-1813 Dutch regime, through maintaining the best elements of the previous regimes, including the various Batavian regimes.29 Geyl’s comparative revolutionary studies highlight the uniqueness of revolution in the Low Countries, and have helped historians to gain a better understanding of the complex revolutionary movements in the region. From a historiographical point of view, Geyl’s comparative studies are interesting because, at the time they were published, comparativism was uncommon, so it is reasonable to see in Geyl a pioneer of comparativism, or of transnational approaches to history in revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. Where Geyl frequently published on revolutionary movements in the northern Netherlands, he did so only rarely on revolutionary movements in the southern Netherlands, which might betray a bias towards events in the Netherlands in his broader conception of the history of the Dutch-speaking people, though perhaps understandably, as he was based at a Dutch university.

Even though Geyl’s research was highly relevant for revolutionary and Napoleonic studies, its impact on the historiography is not immediately visible. Partly this was because of a limited interest in the Low Countries in international revolutionary and Napoleonic studies, partly because only some of Geyl’s research was published in languages accessible to a broad audience. It would take a historian with a broad historical interest and a willingness to learn Dutch to fully appreciate Geyl’s contribution to the historiography of revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. It was not until the 1950s that such a historian emerged: Robert Roswell Palmer (1909–2002).

It is not known how Geyl and Palmer met. Quite possibly, they became acquainted in 1949 when Geyl visited Princeton, where Palmer worked.30 What is certain is that in late 1950 the two men started a correspondence that lasted until Geyl’s passing in 1966 and evolved into a close personal friendship, the two men hosting each other and their families during research visits and holidays. The Geyl–Palmer correspondence touched on a range of historical topics, but the one interest both men shared was revolutionary history. In 1950, Geyl was fifty-three years old and had published extensively, including most of the studies mentioned above. Palmer was twelve years Geyl’s junior and had started off as a historian of France, thereafter exploring European history on the longue durée. The publication of his acclaimed A History of the Modern World, however, signified a return to revolutionary history.31

In 1952, Palmer confessed to Geyl his desire to embark on a broad study of revolutionary turmoil in Europe and America:

What I should like to do some day in a general survey of the revolutionary era, is to have an early chapter on the movements before 1789 – in Holland, or Geneva in Switzerland, in Belgium (granting that that was initially a ‘privileged’ revolt), in Ireland, and of course America. Then it could be shown how all this merged into the agitation of the 1790s under the future and decisive stimulus of the revolution in France.32

The research Palmer speaks of is of course the research that would lead to his acclaimed two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution.33 In it, Palmer drew together the various revolutionary movements of Europe, including those in the UK and the Americas, into one coherent, overarching ‘Revolution of the West’. Palmer’s innovative thesis, which came to be known as ‘the Atlantic thesis’, is a watershed moment in revolutionary studies first because it meant that the field broke free from the narrow confines of national historiography, facilitating international collaboration and transfer of knowledge, and second because it allowed for transnational comparison on an Atlantic scale, greatly enhancing the understanding of individual revolutionary movements as well as trends in Western history more broadly.34

The Geyl–Palmer correspondence demonstrates that while Palmer was developing his Atlantic thesis, Geyl exerted considerable influence on his thinking. In the pre-digital age, when bibliographical research on the history of small, faraway countries was difficult, it was challenging to gain insight into national historiographical debates. What Palmer needed was, as he stated, ‘a study that takes me into Holland […] and other countries whose history I do not know well’.35 Geyl was the right person to ask for such assistance. He recommended various works on revolution in the Low Countries to Palmer and provided him with several of his own studies and reviews.36 The most valuable to Palmer were Geyl’s comparative study of the Patriot Uprising and the Brabant Revolution, his historical parallel of the Dutch Patriots and the NSB, his work on the Batavian Revolution and his critique of Colenbrander’s Patriottentijd, which ‘help[ed] to give me [Palmer] that sense of sophistication and critical consciousness that are so difficult to acquire in a new field’.37

Geyl also offered valuable feedback on Palmer’s evolving research. For instance, on an early article in which Palmer clearly floated a rudimentary conception of an Atlantic Revolution,38 Geyl commented:

Two remarks. You missed a point that might have strengthened your argument, when in mentioning the Revolution in Holland you did not point out that it had had a crisis even before 1789 in the Patriots’ Movement of the middle eighties. The great principle of the sovereignty of the people was proclaimed quite emphatically by the leading ‘democratic’ Patriots. Their use of the word ‘democratic’, too, in contradiction to ‘aristocratic’, is significant.

At the same time I do not think that classical-Christian tradition, to which you allude can be brushed aside so cavalierly, nor do I think that the medieval idea that government rose out and represented the community is irrelevant, although undoubtedly it is not ‘the same’.39

The critique is revealing, and it was not a one-off. On a second publication of Palmer’s, ‘Much in little’,40 which is often referred to in the Netherlands as the moment when the significance of the revolutionary turmoil in the Netherlands became known to a broader international public, Geyl remarked:

Of course the Dutch historian will notice little points which show a certain lack of familiarity with our history. Hogendorp never was a burgomaster (he was pensionary of R[otter]dam); he ‘came forward’ in 1813; de Witt was murdered by a Hague mob.

In the main part of the article I question your saying that Gogel as ‘a man of the 18th century’ ‘lacked national feeling’: I don’t think his attitude was as typical as all that. In the story of the endless delays in the coming into existence of the first constitution you ought, I think, to have mentioned the reglement of 1796 [the regulations for the convening of the First Dutch National Convention]. Also, I think, and this is of more importance, the traditional suspicion of the overwhelming power of France cannot be altogether omitted when the negative policy of the Prince of Orange is addressed, this hidebound conservatism which prevented an active co-operation with ‘democratic’ elements in his party is a point which, I think, will deserve much fuller treatment, and it has, of course, a long history. The religious question, too, seems to me to have been of greater importance than you make out.41

Although it is difficult to pinpoint with precision how much and where Geyl influenced Palmer, certain parts of Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution clearly reflect Geyl’s views, and those amendments suggested by Geyl were taken on board. And after finalizing the manuscript that was to be published as the first volume, Palmer admitted: ‘My own book, which in one chapter rests so heavily on this little book of yours [Geyl’s De Patriottenbeweging], is now completed, and will I hope be published by the Princeton University Press in 1959.’42 The greatest acknowledgement of Geyl’s influence, perhaps, is that Palmer gained such an understanding of affairs in the Netherlands that he considered the Dutch case most suitable for explaining the origins of the revolutionary turmoil, and the reaction to it, that swept the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth century.43

In sum, it is fair to say that, through his personal contact with Palmer in the formative period of his ground-breaking study, Geyl had a greater impact on the historiography of revolutionary and Napoleonic studies than hitherto thought. That said, one must also take care not to exaggerate Geyl’s influence on Palmer. Despite Geyl’s severe criticism of Colenbrander’s interpretation of the revolutionary turmoil in the Netherlands, Palmer still regularly made use of Colenbrander’s studies. Nor should it be assumed that Geyl was the sole person revealing the potential and importance of transnational approaches to revolutionary studies. Kramer has shown that Palmer’s supervisor at Cornell University, Professor Carl Becker, encouraged his students to examine historical issues from a transatlantic perspective.44 Moreover, Palmer was not the only historian who argued for taking a transatlantic approach to revolutionary studies. A second historian who pioneered the Atlantic thesis was Jacques Godechot (1907–89).45 Godechot has already been referred to in relation to the translation of Geyl’s research on revolution in the Netherlands. However, Jacques Godechot’s writing was no reason for Geyl to engage in a debate on transnational revolutionary studies, though perhaps Geyl’s old age and failing health simply did not permit it.

The French Revolution and Napoleon

Geyl also explored French history of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. As usual, among his publications there are short, opinionated pieces from which his views can be deduced. However, Geyl’s forays into the French Revolution are best studied through a lecture he was invited to give at Oxford in 1956 entitled ‘French historians for and against the Revolution’, which he delivered elsewhere on subsequent occasions and which was published widely, including in English.46 The paper was a historiographical exploration of the study of the French Revolution in France. The study is informative but its relevance is limited. More significant perhaps was Geyl’s reasons for choosing the French Revolution as a topic for this lecture. He firmly believed that the French Revolution was a major turning point in western history, and with his lecture he tried to redirect academic attention, which he felt was waning, towards this turning point. Considering the steady stream of high-quality research on the French Revolution, a positivist could argue that Geyl was wholly successful in his aim, but anyone else would concede that it is impossible to assess Geyl’s influence in this matter. However, at least he mounted a stout defence of revolutionary studies and, in giving the paper at the University of Oxford, he did find the right forum. With historiographical studies, one does hope that more in-depth research of the topic will follow, but this did not happen for Geyl in this case. He did publish a lengthy review article of Jules Michelet’s seven-volume Histoire de la Révolution française, but its impact was not great.47

Geyl’s most important contribution to the French history of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era is his monograph Napoleon: For and Against.48 Initially, he had no intention of studying Napoleon, but it was a welcome distraction from finishing off more pressing work. Soon Geyl found himself immersed in his topic, mainly because, from the books in his library, it proved difficult to gain an understanding of the man. By mid-1940 he had drafted an article, but it was rejected for publication because the editors felt that the public might draw a comparison between Napoleon and Hitler, something that was undesirable at that point as the Netherlands was under Nazi control. On several occasions when Geyl presented his paper in Rotterdam he noticed that the link between Napoleon and Hitler was indeed readily made. It had not, however, been Geyl’s intention to imply such a comparison. In fact, he was quite adamant that no comparison was possible, since Napoleon, despite all his flaws and faults, came nowhere near to being as bad as Hitler. Anyway, he then left the topic until 1944, when he started writing up the article into a monograph.49

Napoleon is a controversial figure and has always drawn a huge amount of interest. As of 1997, it was estimated that 400,000 books and articles had been written on him.50 In such a field it is difficult to stand out, let alone contribute to the historiography, but Geyl did just that by studying not so much Napoleon himself and his impact on the course of history but rather the representation of Napoleon as deduced from the French historiography.

Geyl showed that Napoleon was a controversial figure even in his own time. He was admired but he also drew heavy criticism, most notably of course from the formidable woman of letters Madame de Staël. Under the restoration regime Napoleon was admired as the pragmatist who had tamed the revolution and restored order to France. Opposition against the French Second Empire, a Bonapartist regime, reverberated in the perception of Napoleon. No longer was he portrayed as having subdued a revolution that was spiralling out of control but instead as having betrayed its principles, suppressing freedoms and resorting to violence and in so doing bringing France nothing but misery. In the polarized political climate of the Third Republic, adoration for Napoleon was taken to new heights. He was depicted as the embodiment of the will of the people, as a politician who challenged the established elites and drew admiration for his no-nonsense style of government with an emphasis on a strong executive. This near-godlike figure was defeated only because of his betrayal by his peers. In this context, it is interesting to mention that Geyl initially intended to include a chapter in his monograph on the historiographical representation of Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, whom Geyl considered the principal betrayer of Napoleon. However, he decided against it, presumably to retain the main focus of the monograph.51 Around the turn of the nineteenth century there was room for a diversity of opinions, mainly because a shift in the study of Napoleon had occurred, from studying the Napoleonic legacy in general towards studying just one aspect of his legacy. By the mid-twentieth century, where Geyl’s book ends, the debate continued to evolve, but generally academic historians were shown to hold negative or mixed views of Napoleon, while among intellectuals more broadly the opinion was more positive.

So, what was the historiographical relevance of Geyl’s monograph on Napoleon? Before Geyl, the debate was polarized. Historians took a teleological approach to studying Napoleon. They were either for him or against him, and they rearranged their facts accordingly. Geyl rejected this approach. He viewed history as a debate without end.52 The aim of the historian was not to pass judgement but to present facts. And the fact was that Napoleon was a complex character and his influence on history was diverse and at times contradictory, so it was only natural that the representation of Napoleon reflected this complex historical agency. By moving away from studying Napoleon’s impact on history as deduced from his actions and instead studying the way in which he was represented, Geyl avoided the teleological pitfall of coming down on one side of the argument or the other. As such, Napoleon: For and Against marks a turning point in the historiography.

The impact of Geyl’s study is more challenging to assess. If one goes by some recent biographies on Napoleon, one must conclude that he continues to divide historians and that the debate is a polarized as ever. Philip Dwyer’s monumental study presents the man as a product of his age, and not one who had a particularly good influence on his time.53 Michael Broers’ ground-breaking work, of which the first two volumes have so far been published, presents Napoleon as ‘the force of destiny’ who did much to usher Europe into the modern age.54 Alan Forrest’s biography portrays the man behind the myth, though by focusing mostly on his achievements, a rather positive picture emerges.55 Andrew Roberts, finally, has no qualms in starting his study of Napoleon from the perception that he was a great ruler of men.56 Thus one could argue that Geyl’s attempt to push the historiographical debate beyond a bifurcated portrayal has failed. That said, almost without exception Geyl’s monograph is referred to in studies on Napoleon, usually in reference to the prejudiced ways of portraying him in the past, only for historians to subsequently present their own representation. Perhaps a better way to understand the impact of Geyl’s study is to view it as disclaimer that permits historians to continue the uninhibited study of Napoleon. So even if historians have not followed Geyl’s methodology, then at least they adhere to his conception of history as a debate without end.

Conclusion

In sum, it is fair to conclude that Geyl’s impact on revolutionary and Napoleonic studies was great. He re-evaluated the revolutionary era of Dutch history and restored both the Patriots and the Batavians to their rightful place in the history of the Netherlands. He was at the forefront of historiographical development within the field through his comparative revolutionary studies and his influence on Palmer. His study on the House of Orange and on the French Revolution had a limited contribution to the historiography, but he did shine a light on these topics, which is what one would hope for from one of the brightest minds in Dutch academia of the age. Geyl’s monograph on Napoleon is unique in the study of Napoleon and it has kept its relevance to this day. One point of criticism of Geyl’s work could be said to be the relationship between his constructive historical work and the polemical work for which he became known internationally. The primary source basis of Geyl’s work in revolutionary and Napoleonic studies is quite narrow; historiographical research aside, only the Stam is based on primary sources. Many of Geyl’s publications were polemics for which the research was drawn from the Stam, updated so as to emphasize his opposition to a particular historiographical development or the views of a particular historian. In revolutionary and Napoleonic studies, it was Colenbrander who frequently found himself at the sharp end of Geyl’s pen.

In reflecting on Geyl’s legacy, Lodewijk Rogier, Geyl’s contemporary and a professor at the University of Nijmegen, suggested that all polemical work, Geyl’s included, loses its value sooner or later for the simple reason that over time the ideas that are contested either end up being rejected entirely or become commonplace.57 The viewpoint of this chapter is not, however, that Geyl’s polemical work has served only to amplify the significance of his contribution to revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. First, Geyl’s polemical work ensured a lively interest in his historical research, and deservedly, as it was of good quality. Second, Geyl’s polemics allowed him to continually revisit and refine his research conclusions and ideas. For that reason, Geyl’s polemical work not only offers the best insights we have into his views and opinions, it also means that his research has withstood the test of time admirably. Third, Geyl’s polemical work raised his profile as an academic and public intellectual, which contributed to his fame and in turn facilitated the dissemination of his research and ideas. That said, Toynbee’s assessment that ‘Geyl’s most valuable contribution to the world’s stock of intellectual capital was his constructive work’ is beyond debate, and Toynbee’s regret, and that of many subsequent historians, that Geyl did not ‘find time to finish the writing of his epoch-making history of the Dutch-Flemish-speaking peoples’ must be shared.58 A final volume, which would have taken the history of the Low Countries beyond 1815, would have been of particular value to historians of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era and would possibly have rectified some of the bias towards Dutch affairs in the Stam and thus also enhanced Geyl’s legacy for the history of the Low Countries.