E. Hagen

'"As awkward and deficient as his wife is amiable and accomplished": the Character Assassination of the Dutch statesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825)'.

In history Dutch politicians have a longstanding reputation for their tendency of always avoiding conflict, adhering to a certain kind of tolerance that historians have subscribed to the influence of the age-old phenomenon of the consensus-based “polder model.”2 However, early modern politics in the Netherlands is definitely a rich source of striking examples of character assassination. In 1672, for instance, hostile rumors and royal propaganda spread via numerous pamphlets resulted in the character assassination of the brothers De Witt, two leading statesmen of the Dutch Republic and opponents of William III, the Prince of Orange from 1672 to 1702. The accusations against them (of betraying the fatherland and conspiring against William) even led to their actual physical assassination. Both were dragged out of prison to be killed, hung, and mutilated by an angry mob.3

Fashioning the Emotional Self: The Dutch Statesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825) and the Cult of Sensibility

This article proposes a combined perspective of Greenblatt’s famous concept of ‘self-fashioning’ and Reddy’s well-known theory of ‘emotives’ as a possible new approach to the study of Dutch political culture, and more specifically to political figures. Exploring emotions as an aspect of public self-fashioning, it focuses on the Dutch statesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck as an early modern example. Schimmelpenninck, like his fellow revolutionaries, radicals and moderates, was familiar with the vocabulary of the French political version of sensibility (Reddy’s sentimentalism) with its strong emphasis on sincerity. However, in contrast to France, emotions in Dutch revolutionary politics remained of crucial importance thanks to the emergence of an alternative calm style developed by the moderates, most fully embodied by Schimmelpenninck. Helped in part by his republican friends, he promoted himself by stressing his ‘meekness’ as the virtue of his political leadership, but it was precisely this aspect of his public persona that his Dutch political enemies equated with ‘weakness’. Emotionele ‘self-fashioning’. De Nederlandse staatsman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825) en de cultus van het gevoel Dit artikel beoogt een nieuwe impuls te geven aan het historisch onderzoek naar de Nederlandse politieke cultuur door aandacht te vragen voor de historiografische verrijking die mogelijk besloten ligt in een verbinding van Greenblatt’s beroemde concept self-fashioning en Reddy’s bekende theorie van de emotives. Als eerste verkenning van de mogelijkheden van deze gecombineerde benadering wordt een analyse gemaakt van de manier waarop de Nederlandse staatsman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck emoties inzette voor de cultivering van zijn politieke imago. Schimmelpenninck was net als zijn mede-revolutionairen goed op de hoogte van de Frans-revolutionaire cultus van het gevoel (door Reddy sentimentalisme genoemd) maar ontwikkelde als Nederlandse moderate republikein een eigen, kalme en gematigde stijl. Geholpen door zijn politieke vrienden promootte hij zichzelf als een politiek leider met een uitgesproken zachtaardige natuur. Zijn binnenlandse opponenten grepen juist deze (voorgewende) eigenschap aan als het bewijs van zijn beginselloze zwakte.

DUTCH CIVIC VIRTUES, PROTESTANT AND ENLIGHTENED: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND EARLY CULTURAL NATIONALISM IN THE NETHERLANDS AROUND 1800

This article investigates Dutch manifestations of anti-Catholicism as a constitutive aspect of early forms of cultural nationalism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these decades the process of Dutch nation-building entered its formative phase. The new national consciousness arose in close connection with successful spread of Dutch Enlightenment ideas. Notions and conceptions such as virtue, reason, inner piety and tolerance merged into the idea thatenlightened citizens should be morally committed to the nation. In this, the role of religion was considered to be crucial: it provided individual citizens with the ‘right’ kind of moral consciousness, a keynotion in fighting the decline that was thought to be the main problem of the Republic at the time. These upcoming nascent representations of the nation state gave rise to a new anti-Catholic ideology, which was to grow in importance after the 1760s. Long existing religious prejudices thus were reproduced in other more modern forms.