Democratic Enlightenment

Small-State Revolutions in the 1780s 875
showed little sign of abating, and as the mounting uproar in the neighbouring
Austrian Netherlands and France gathered momentum, the Prussian delegate—
who happened to be Dohm—left with a remarkably free hand by Berlin, found
himself able to propose more sweeping changes.
Dohm instigated the scrapping of more and more of the old Aachen constitution
and, with the spectacle in France unfolding before his eyes, eventually, in April 1790,
drew up an entirely new draft constitution, going so far as to remove virtually all
reference to charters and traditional privileges and proclaiming ‘all the citizens are
equal’ and possessing equal rights in voting and standing for civic office. The effect
was to sow even sharper divisions than before, most people being readily swayed
against this attack on tradition. From the viewpoint of the Aachen oligarchy and
neighbouring princes, a further drawback of the new constitution was that, with the
Revolution in France now in full swing, French publicists began claiming Dohm’s
principles had been inspired by the French National Assembly and that despite
concessions to local ‘préjugés populaires’ and dealing with a people ‘infinitely less
enlightened’ than the French, he had espoused an approach enlightened, ‘vraiment
démocratique’, and essentially that of their Revolution. 82 The clash between tradition
and la philosophie in this way fuelled an irresolvable crisis.
Concerted opposition to Joseph’s reforms, meanwhile, attained significant proportions
throughout Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault. Local opinion opposed especially
his toleration decree, marriage reform law (1782), abolition of pious confraternities,
closing of some monasteries (1783), sweeping changes to guild regulations, and reform
of Louvain (Leuven) university. The rebellion began as a vigorous movement of
protest, headed by a Brussels lawyer, Hendrik van der Noot (1731–1827), commissioned
by the States of Brabant to formulate their legal objections to the reforms. By
the summer of 1787, the ambitious Van der Noot, busily intriguing in Paris, London,
and Berlin, was already being dubbed ‘le Franklin des Pays-Bas’, an epithet to which
Georg Forster, who was in Brussels when Van der Noot’s supporters took over the city,
in 1789, roundly objected as it seemed obvious from any enlightened or libertarian
perspective that he in no way deserved it. 83 The basic charge against Joseph’s measures
was that they overturned a centuries-old constitution and charters of privileges.
Support for the protests was broad-based. But it was the solidly anti-reform fervour
of the middle-class population of Antwerp and Brussels, the world of trade and
business, that most astounded and shocked both the radical-minded and the imperial
authorities.
A lively pamphlet war ignited, with Xavier de Feller, the anti-philosophe editor of
the Journal historique et littéraire, helping stir popular sentiment to the utmost
against Josephism, la philosophie—routinely blamed by Feller for causing the revolutionary
upsurge in the world—and Enlightenment generally. 84 Another of the
Counter-Revolution’s spiritual leaders, and equally tenacious as an adversary of
82 83
Ibid., pp. xxvii, xxxi, 26, 30. Gorman, America and Belgium, 184–7.
84
[Feller], Journal historique (1784), 107–8, and (1792), 21–6.