Burghers into citizens: Urban and national citizenship in the Netherlands during the revolutionary era (c. 1800)

Abstract

Citizenship, Charles Tilly has said, is "a continuing series of transactions between persons and agents of a given state in which each has enforceable rights and obligations uniquely by virtue of 1) the persons' membership in an exclusive category and 2) the agent's relation to the state rather than any authority the agent may enjoy."1 Three elements are crucial to this definition: the nature of the "persons," i.e., citizens, the nature of the authority that Tilly foreshortens as "the state," and finally the reciprocal relationship between these two actors. The importance of this definition is that it allows for variation, through time and space, and presents the bond between citizen and state as one that provides both parties with entitlements on the other. The problem with such a wide definition, however, is that it makes it difficult to distinguish between various types of ties between state officials and inhabitants of the state. In other words, when we let go of the formal aspect in the definition of citizenship, it tends to blur into a very wide range of issues indeed.2 Instead, this article will define the "exclusive category" from the outset as "citizenship" in the legal sense. Thus, the "people" discussed in this article are citizens. The other party presents problems, too. Under the Old Regime, no such thing as Dutch citizenship existed. The state, i.e., the Dutch Republic, was a federation, composed of seven sovereign provinces. These provinces did not have citizens either, at least in the formal sense. Citizenship in the Dutch Republic was a local, more specifically an urban phenomenon.3 There was nothing unusual in this: urban citizenship was the norm throughout early modern Europe.4 This changed radically during the Napoleonic era, in the Netherlands as much as in other European countries.5 The French revolutionary regime, and its collaborators in the occupied territories, centralized government and administration, and created new ties between themselves and their subjects, in the form of modern citizenship.