Establishment of the Batavian Republic
The Dutch Republic was replaced by a French client state in January 1795 with considerable Dutch enthusiasm. The Patriot movement had attempted a revolution of its own in the 1780s against the stadtholder William V, had been suppressed by a Prussian invasion in 1787, and had spent seven years in exile in France. They came back with the French army, which crossed the frozen rivers in the winter of 1794 and 1795 — a campaign in which French hussars are said to have captured a Dutch fleet iced into the Texel, which happened in a modified form and has been improved in the retelling. William V left for England on 18 January and the Batavian Republic was proclaimed the following day. What it did in its first years was substantial: the first national assembly elected by something close to universal male suffrage in 1796, a written constitution in 1798, the separation of church and state, the abolition of the guilds and of the provincial vetoes that had paralysed the old republic, and a unitary state where there had been seven sovereign provinces. The costs were also substantial. A hundred million guilders indemnity, an occupying army to be fed, the loss of the Cape and Ceylon to Britain, and a decade of blockade that destroyed the carrying trade. Napoleon converted it into a kingdom for his brother in 1806 and annexed it outright in 1810. The unitary state it created is the one the Netherlands still has. The provinces never recovered their sovereignty, and the constitution of 1798 is the ancestor of the present one even though the republic that wrote it lasted eleven years. The stadtholder's son came back as a king in 1813.
- Year: 1795 CE
- Category: Political
