Discord Consensus

describe how Joseph II’s attempted reforms managed to rouse ‘a desperate
spirit of hostility in the priesthood, which soon spread among
the bigoted mass of the people’ (310, 1833: 312). In the original version
of the History, Joseph’s policies were ‘blindly rejected by a people still
totally unfitted for rational enlightenment in points of faith or practices
of civilisation’ (313), their only fault being their ‘attempted application
to minds wholly incompetent to comprehend their value’ (314). The
revised paragraphs describe how in 1833 the same reforms were ‘vehemently
rejected by a people still totally unfitted for rational enlightenment
in points of faith or practices of civilisation, but at the same time
imbued with a powerful hereditary attachment to their national privileges’
(1833: 317 –​our emphasis), and the Belgian resistance to Joseph’s measures
was now also based on ‘the technical illegality of their application’
(1833: 318).
The enlightened emperor of the first version, whose religious
reforms seemed to be endorsed by a supporter of religious toleration like
Grattan, becomes much more suspect in the second edition: ‘the political
and religious reformation desired by Joseph II was one in favour
of monarchical power, not popular right; not meant for the purification
of religious abuse, so much as for the extension of regal prerogative’
(1833: 314). In the original version, ‘deep-​sown seeds of bigotry’ had
produced ‘the fruit of active resistance’ to Joseph II’s policies, which
were described as well-​meant miscalculations (310). Years later, Grattan
modified this passage to relate how ‘the imperial wrath converted
Belgian bigotry and patriotism into rebellion’ (1833: 314 –​our emphasis):
the new emphasis on a patriot element seems meant to foreshadow the
alliance of priestly and liberal parties that would underlie the creation
of an independent Belgium.
At the end of the Austrian period, the impending threat of annexation
to France ‘brought into consistency the heretofore scattered
elements of national existence in Belgium’ which had been absent in
the 1830 edition (1833: 324 –​our emphasis). A new focus on the distinct
identity of Belgium prior to the creation of the United Kingdom
in 1814 similarly mentions ‘that longing for independence inherent
in all nations’ (1833: 347) and states that ‘the people of the Austrian
Netherlands felt great pride in the notion of their separate identity’
(1833: 347–​8). The Belgian people, however, did not have a ‘legitimate
and acknowledged nationality for their inspiration’ (1833: 351).
This, for Grattan, explains why they did not revolt against the French
like Holland did, and why when the Five Powers discussed the settlement
of the Belgian provinces, ‘unquestionably the most important
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000