Popular sovereignty at the beginning of the Dutch Ancien Regime

Abstract

The Dutch Republic came into being in the sixteenth century, thanks largely to the resistance of self-styled ‘true patriots’ who supported William of Orange and justified their actions by appealing, among other things, to popular sovereignty and natural law. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Republic succumbed to a revolution in which once again popular sovereignty and natural law were of central importance, this time for the anti-Orangist Patriots of the period. By the eighteenth century, however, these terms had come to signify concepts very different from those of the sixteenth century, and were being used in a civil war with aims quite different from those of the Revolt. The intellectual and constitutional developments of two centuries had imbued the old terminology with a meaning so new that the Patriots of the eighteenth century needed a revolution before their conception of popular sovereignty and natural law could be realized within the framework of the powerful state which they wished to substitute for the exceedingly weak state developed by the patriots of the sixteenth century in defence of their conception of popular sovereignty and natural law. In the following pages an attempt will be made to present as concisely as possible a theoretical analysis of this contrast.