‘Old Citizenry’ in a New State

Abstract

Historians have studied the regime change of 1813 in the Netherlands mainly from a national perspective, as the invented new beginning of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, research on Northern Germany has shown that an urban perspective on the regime change of 1813 reveals continuities with the early modern period. The civic initiatives to preserve urban security remind of the civic commitment found in early modern corporate society. Students of the history of The Netherlands generally assume that urban citizenship withered away soon after the introduction of national citizenship in 1795 and so did the civic discourse on the importance of urban society and the civic commitment to the urban community. But did this really disappear together with the early modern political system? This article takes an urban perspective on the regime change of 1813 and studies the appearance of voluntary civic militias in Haarlem and Groningen. Their actions remind of practices and traditions of early modern civic republicanism. Was ‘1813’ a final upsurge of practices of civic republicanism and local authority or just one example of a broader persistence of urban civic traditions in the nineteenth century?