The Spirit of the Belltower: Chronicling Urban Time in an Age of Revolution

Abstract

Many scholars argue that Age of Revolutions wrought a new sense of time, in which the gap between past and present had widened, and the future became unpredictable. Urban chronicles offer good evidence for temporal fissure, yet the genre also points to the persistence of traditional cultural strategies to deal with change. Using chronicle evidence from the Low Countries this chapter argues that for many ordinary people political change was primarily a local affair, and experienced in local terms. Because of this, the restoration of some local practices or spaces could signal the restoration of ‘old times’, and allow a sense of closure. In this way phenomena that had once been new, could, within a generation, be perceived as part of an ‘old order’.

In 1831, Sebastiaan van Beringen, supervisor of the mills in the town of Roermond, summed up the political developments of his lifetime.

In forty years, this is the fourth sovereign house that I have experienced [to rule] over Roermond. First we were imperial, then we were French, then we were Dutch and now we are Belgian. Note that if it’s troublesome for a master to frequently have new subjects, it’s no less inconvenient for subjects to have a change of master. Experience has taught us this: governments get into trouble and into debt and the ordinary citizens have to bear with it.¹

By the time he wrote these words Sebastiaan van Beringen had been recording local events of his lifetime for many decades. He was by no means the only contemporary to do so. Throughout much of Europe, the age of revolutions prompted local authors, most often men from the middling ranks of society, to keep records on what they believed were the most important events of their time. Sometimes they did so by keeping diaries or personal memoirs, genres that were to become ever more popular as the nineteenth century progressed. Yet many others, like Van Beringen, also kept records of an older and more traditional type that we know of as a ‘chronicle’, a chronological account of public events in which authors recorded the events of their lifetime in their local communities.

Like diaries, chronicles offer good evidence for the sense of rupture and acceleration of time that pervaded revolutionary Europe. Yet this paper will suggest that this genre also offers us a window onto very different and much more traditional cultural strategies to deal with crisis and change that could be used to accommodate the shock. As they had been in many earlier crises, chronicles in the Age of Revolution were used to harness and domesticate the new. First, they did so by framing events morally, or mnemonically, into familiar, local categories. Secondly, by writing in this familiar genre, that focused on the local public realm, local spaces and local faces, the chroniclers could not only record shock, amazement and outrage, but with time also recreate a sense of public, local and personal continuity. This matters, first, because it helps us to reconsider the impact of revolutionary political change on people’s sense of time and, second, because it highlights that even in a period where political change increasingly came from the centre, the local public realm remained of enormous importance for its acceptance.

Accelerated Time and the Benefits of Hindsight

In recent decades, many pages have been devoted to the sense of change and rupture that characterised the Age of Revolution because this is widely believed to have given birth to a modern sense of time, and therefore to modernity itself.² A modern sense of time, in this context, means that people are aware of differences between past and present, and a sense that time is ‘going faster’. Of course, to some extent, a sense of accelerated time is simply a side-effect of getting older.³ In his study of ‘social acceleration’ and the coming of modernity, Hartmut Rosa argues that there are three levels at which we can study what he calls ‘temporal mediation’ at actor level: the first is that of the everyday routines that structure our life, the second is that of our lifetime as a whole and the third is that of the epoch or generation in which we live.⁴ When people are in their 30s and 40s, it is often easy to feel that the three levels fit together. Yet as we get older, the levels can get out of joint. On the first level, we need to change older everyday routines, not only because new ways of doing things have emerged but also because our bodies or minds can no longer support them. Our lives, at the second level, have changed. At the third level, when we are confronted with changes because our own generation is no longer ‘in the lead’ so to speak, perhaps partly due to second-level changes, it is easy to feel alienated. This is when older people begin to talk of ‘these days’ as if those are no longer their own, because things ‘in my time’ used to be different. They also start to worry about the future as a time in which certain things that used to be self-evident to them are now lost. This phenomenon is by no means unique to the modern age, and is in evidence in the eighteenth century as much as it is in our own.⁵

It is widely believed, however, that a different sense of acceleration of time emerged around 1800. Scholars who make such arguments explicitly or implicitly build on the line of reasoning laid out by Reinhart Koselleck in his famous Vergangene Zukunft essay of 1964.⁶ But whereas Koselleck emphasised the role of intellectuals in the forging of new approaches to the past, many of his readers see the pace of change itself as the catalyst for much broader cultural changes. Indeed, personal records of the period testify to a heightened awareness of change, a feeling of being cut off from one’s past manifested itself along with the feeling that time had accelerated. In this way, the past rapidly grew into a ‘foreign country’.⁷ As Richard Terdiman put it:

In Europe in the period of the 1789-1815 Revolution, and particularly in France, the uncertainty of relation with the past became especially intense. In this period people experienced the insecurity of their culture’s involvement with its past, the perturbation of the link to their own inheritance, as what I want to term a ‘memory crisis’: a sense that their past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness.⁸

Terdiman is one among many scholars who argue for the long-term impact of this rupture. In his Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004), for instance, Peter Fritzsche showed how both autobiographical and literary texts in the nineteenth century were pervaded by a sense of a rift and ever faster change and he argued that nostalgia was one of the main results.⁹ Philosopher Frank Ankersmit also maintained that the experience of the Age of Revolutions changed life ‘in every conceivable aspect’:

Undoubtedly these dramatic transformations belong to the most decisive and profound changes that Western man has undergone in the course of history. In all these cases he entered a wholly new world and, above all, he could only do so on condition of forgetting a previous world and of shedding a former identity…. In all these cases having had to abandon a traditional and familiar previous world has been extremely painful and it was always experienced as such.¹⁰

In previous work, I have identified two problems with this line of argument. Firstly, in privileging the Age of Revolutions, it ignores the widespread evidence of very similar sensations of rupture and accelerated time in periods of crisis both before and afterwards. The sense of living in accelerated time can be found in European sources during other periods of evident and major crisis in the Middle Ages and onwards, but also, for instance, in China during the Qing-Ming transition of the seventeenth century.¹¹ Secondly, individuals who reported a sense of crisis and rupture in their youth may, at later stages in their life, look back on those very same days as a period of stability.¹² Together, these observations suggest that feelings of acute change and accelerated time do not necessarily produce a lasting effect, neither personally nor collectively. While changes may be irreversible, the feelings they elicit can be overcome. I will argue in this paper that during the Age of Revolutions, as before, people demonstrated considerable resilience and proved capable of adjusting to change not by forgetting the past, but by recreating a sense of continuity between past and present. I call this the ‘domestication of the new’. I hope to demonstrate here that one of the key factors that played a role in this process of domestication was that the change that people experienced at a local level was the most immediate. Unsurprisingly, it was at this level that change was most evident and palpable. I will show that for chroniclers it manifested itself especially in the changing use of familiar public buildings, public spaces and temporal regimes. Yet conversely this also implied that a sense of restoration at a limited, local level allowed people to rebuild a sense of continuity, and so accommodate change.

Domesticating the New

It is well known that processes of domestication can occur with the benefit of hindsight, through memory practices that allow for the realignment of past and present. Arianne Baggerman studied a large number of autobiographical texts in which people in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century looked back on revolutionary upheaval, political experiments, and French rule between the 1780s and 1815, and she found three important responses. First, she demonstrated that while some of these authors emphasised that they had lived through momentous changes, very few of them actually admitted to having changed themselves. In hindsight, they had all always been ‘subdued’ or ‘moderate’ [bedaard], sceptical of French rule, and averse to revolution. Secondly, she found that many actively destroyed and re-edited older diaries and memoirs, so as to spare their descendants (and themselves) a confrontation with earlier political ideas. Finally, in their autobiographies they depoliticised many of their recollections, recording the consequences, damage, and changes of revolution, upheaval and war, without explaining any of the political background.¹³

Among Baggerman’s authors we thus see all the benefits of hindsight hard at work to recreate moral continuity between their personal past and present (Hartmut Rosa’s second level), thereby also creating and affirming a new narrative about what ‘our time’ (the third level) had been about i.e. a time of turmoil which had now ended. While Baggerman ascribes this trend to individual decisions, it was, of course, precisely what was intended by the various policies of oubli, a longstanding tradition for managing memories of civil conflict in which memories of conflict were not so much ‘forgotten’ as disabled and reframed so as to make them harmless for the present. An informal variant of such policies was in place in the Netherlands from 1813 onwards.¹⁴

Yet, whereas memoirists and autobiographers offer us a retrospective view of events, in local chronicles we can follow personal experiences of change and the process of rupture and realignment from much closer up, more or less as it is happening. There are many such chronicles for the late eighteenth century, when the keeping of chronological urban records was a long-established cultural practice. Chronicling had begun as an institutional practice of urban governments and monastic houses in the Middle Ages, but the genre had gradually democratised. In the late Middle Ages rich patricians had begun to order copies of official chronicles that they had customised with references to themselves and their families. By the sixteenth century these practices had been adopted by non-political actors. Since then, chronicles had been kept by an ever-wider range of literate men (and the very occasional woman) of middling and higher ranks. The authors did so in manuscript rather than print, for an audience of relatives but often also for a wider local public. Chronicles were accepted as evidence in local courts of law, they were sometimes read with friends, and also copied and expanded.

While initially authors tended to write ‘continuations’ of older texts, chronicles increasingly came to be written as a form of Zeitgeschichte that privileged the lifetime of the authors themselves. The genre was practised across Europe; early modern chronicles from Barcelona, Ghent, Arles and Augsburg all had a similar format and focus. They were local, chronological, with a strong focus on ‘usable knowledge’. They could be very practical and could focus on prices, the weather, government decisions and technical novelties. The purpose of such records was partly to serve as an aide-memoire and thus to establish patterns hence, for instance, the keen interest in the weather and prices (which were closely related) as well as in epidemics. However, they also extended to the moral and exemplary: crime, providential warnings and freak phenomena, as well as political events. Although the perspective was predominantly local, texts would frequently also include information about the world at large, both nationally and internationally. New media and information technologies found their way into chronicle texts, sometimes literally, in the shape of clippings that were pasted into the texts. During the eighteenth century, a growing number of chroniclers also included tables and statistics. In times of crisis the number of chroniclers picking up their pens tended to explode. Just as we saw that the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 led to a vogue for daily recordkeeping, this was also the case in the late eighteenth century.¹⁵

To be sure, scholars have often dismissed the relevance of post-medieval chronicles, deeming them subjective, dull and unanalytical. As an 1884 commentator said of a Lokeren chronicle ‘except for the historical facts in which the “esprit de clocher” is too evident, it has no literary merit’.¹⁶ Yet, if we approach chronicles not as poor attempts at historiography, but as collections of memorable information about the local community, they are extremely useful evidence that can be employed to gauge the reception of new trends and developments. As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, it is precisely because chronicles were written in this parochial ‘spirit of the belltower’ that they enable us to study how people adjusted to political change at the level of local communities, how this helped them to recover a sense of continuity, and therefore come to terms with change. To do so we can take advantage of three features of these texts. First, while the chronicle genre allowed for a great deal of variety in content, chroniclers were highly selective in what they considered significant and ‘notable’ enough to record. This allows us to see what they did and did not find important, and allows us to chart changes over time. Second, the chronological focus in chronicles encouraged a strong focus on events that are repeated every week, month or year. Authors tend to report changes as a disruption of normal patterns. When they stop noticing the disruptions, we may read that as a sign they have adjusted to them. Third they display a strong focus on local public space, where many of the political transitions were communicated.

Most surviving Netherlandish chronicles for this period were written by people who rejected revolutionary change, but there are good reasons to believe that this is not a function of the genre. We do possess chronicles by those who were keen on change, but these tend to break off sooner or have big gaps. This is likely to reflect the self-censorship of those who later regretted their enthusiasm.¹⁷ In any case, for the purpose of this article the conservative slant of the surviving manuscripts is not a problem, since it is precisely those people whom we expect to have been most affected by a sense of rupture.

Public Space and Local Change

If ‘all politics is local’, this was certainly true in the late eighteenth century Low Countries. There, the localities had been and remained an important locus of politics throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dutch Republic was a union of seven sovereign provinces and the towns played a major role in the representative assemblies that ruled the provinces. In the provinces of the Austrian Habsburg Netherlands, the Emperors and their representatives in Brussels left everyday government very much in the hands of local, often also urban, elites. The region was highly urbanised, and cities and even village communities all enjoyed different rights and privileges. They were also the locus of political culture. The towns all had public rituals and lieux de mémoire associated with the secular or religious past. Although not everyone enjoyed the formal status of local citizenship, people had a strongly developed sense of local belonging, also in a civic sense. Through the corporate governance of low-level institutions in their neighbourhoods, most residents had considerable experience of civic sociability.¹⁸ Even among those committed to revolutionary change, there was simultaneously considerable vested interest in local rights, privileges and liberties.¹⁹

The male population of town-dwellers in the Low Countries was exceptionally literate, and there was a wide array of printed material and news media around. Yet local news did not automatically reach printing presses. Although surveys of news from different localities such as the periodical Nederlandse Jaarboeken had become very popular, newspapers tended to be circumspect about local reporting. This may be one reason why so many authors continued to think that the keeping of local records was both a useful and interesting exercise. This was especially so, of course, in times of crisis, when there tended to be more censorship of printed material, and when it might be risky to express one’s anger, anxiety or partisanship publicly.²⁰

Until recently, local chronicles were used mainly to write local history, but more recently, historians of the revolutionary era have also begun to use them to explore broader issues. Brecht Deseure, for instance, has shown how the Antwerp chronicler Johan Baptist van der Straelen used the memory of earlier historical experiences to categorise the impact of the French occupation of his home town in the 1790s. By comparing the French onslaught on the cultural and religious heritage of the city with that of Calvinists who had purged the city’s churches in the late sixteenth century, Van der Straelen fitted them into a familiar category that also allowed for the expectation of an eventual restoration of the old order.²¹ In a recent article, Joris Oddens used the chronicle that was kept on the small island of Ameland by chronicler Cornelis Pieter Sorgdrager to explore how much people at village level actually understood of wider processes of political change between 1780 and 1815. He noted that well into the nineteenth century, the Amelanders continued to petition authorities as if the formation of a central state had never happened.²²

The work of Oddens and Deseure already suggests that for many ordinary people, the impact of political change became manifest above all when it began to impact local life, public spaces and temporal rhythms. This was partly, of course, because it was through interventions in public spaces that political change was communicated. Obviously, revolutionary regimes dedicated a great deal of thought and energy to political communication. Apart from the liberty trees that emerged everywhere, speeches, music, flags, uniforms, hairstyles and many commemorative and celebratory festivals were used to drive the changing messages of the new regimes home.²³ To judge by the chronicles, such messages were well understood, even if they were disliked. The Louvain wig-maker Jan-Baptist Hous, who kept a chronicle between 1780 and 1829, for example, understood very well that the removal of the red cap from the local liberty tree in April 1795 signified the end of Jacobin power.²⁴ Keeping a careful watch on public space was one way of reading the news, and chroniclers were finely attuned to such changes, which were also subject to local speculation. In 1799 Hous noted that because there had been no bell-ringing for Bastille day, ‘it is said that the Republic is floundering and is about to collapse’. In Bruges in 1800, the chronicling grocer Jozef van Walleghem decoded the political significance of the messages that the regime sent by bells, flags and greenery:

On 30 April at 1 p.m. a tricolour banner was raised on the tower of the Halls. It was decorated with a May branch. It’s a novelty the like of which we have not seen for some time, since most of the foolish French festivals are in abeyance. People expected this apparent sign of joy to be followed by the ringing of the carillon, but all were disabused of this view, and without the ringing of the carillon the same banner was taken down in the evening.

Such interpretations were also the subject of public discussion:

From which people are concluding that the victory that the French armies were supposed to have won over the Imperial armies can’t have been as great as has been alleged in some newspapers. Indeed, others claimed that there had been great victories for the allied armies over the French…. Whichever of these contradictory messages may be true will come to light shortly, and perhaps the days are close that we are to be released from our misery. Because of the May branch on the banner, the common people said it was because of the Eve of Mayday, even though there have been no entertainments, such as the ringing of the carillon on Mayday and so on.²⁵

City-dwellers such as Hous and Walleghem proved highly attuned to the meaning of the new regime’s symbolic communication and adept at reading its messages, precisely because such forms of communication had for centuries been used as instruments of local power, propping up civic identity and urban memory. Long before they were presented with fêtes révolutionnaires, Europeans knew how to interpret the raising of flags, ringing of bells, covering and uncovering of balconies and windows, not to mention processions, fireworks, Te Deums and special days of prayer and penance. State authorities had long used flags and bells to declare war and peace, and to mark royal marriages, births and deaths to subjects. Most frequently and importantly they had been used to mobilise residents to pray for local causes, better weather or an end to epidemics, as well as to commemorate local victories, miracles and other lieux de mémoire. This practice was, however, not just about the representation of power, or a one-way street. There were many stakeholders, because the corporate culture of the cities, guilds, shooting companies, confraternities and parishes revolved around such civic-religious festivities, and without their collaboration they tended to fall painfully flat.

No wonder then that chroniclers were also very much attuned to the civic calendar. Every August in Louvain for instance, local people who were blind awarded a ‘civic crown’ to the inn whose patrons had collected most for charity (one of the few traditions that was not abolished by the revolutionary municipalité). Every year, the event was faithfully recorded by Hous, a wig-maker. Hous used changes in such civic rituals as a type of barometer for the state of his city. Every year he also recorded details of the annual Feast of Our Lady of the Siege, which celebrated the anniversary of the lifting of a siege during the Dutch Revolt. In 1793, during the war, he noted that the image of the Virgin had been carried around ‘without a throne, without a crown, without a golden sceptre, in a poor dress, with the greatest poverty in the world’. Once the revolutionary regime had banned the procession, he recorded that local people nevertheless, and in protest, continued to walk its traditional route.²⁶ Other local festivals were also abolished but not forgotten: ‘it is now the 11^th year that we have been doing without a mascarade’, he noted in the carnival season.²⁷

The revolutionaries were thus not the first to ‘politicise everyday life’.²⁸ The urban calendar, urban space and urban values, were already closely connected, and they were all full of political and religious significance. City gates and walls marked the territory and ‘liberty’ of the city, while town halls, churches and towers, weighing houses and charities were sources of local pride. Neighbourhoods and streets were organised around parish churches that had their own feasts and patrons. Public inscriptions, fountains and imagery reminded the residents of their duties as Christians and as locals. Bells were not only used to call people to church, mark deaths and raise the alarm when necessary, but were also consecrated and widely believed to ward off evil.²⁹ In the Low Countries, moreover, urbanites also cherished their carillons, which were and are used to play songs appropriate to the season or public events. Quite how important these traditions were is evident from chroniclers’ responses to the revolutionary regimes’ attempts to change them. Chroniclers devoted many entries to the changing soundscape of the cities. Jan-Baptist Hous, for instance, kept an exact record of the use the new authorities made of the bells and the carillons. He carefully noted the removal of most local bells from the conventual churches, making sure to record the name of the men who had been prepared to undertake this hateful task, and noting details of the sale of the bells with a desultory exclamation: ‘oh the things we see happen’.³⁰ He also resented the use of the remaining bells by the new regime. On 30 September 1796, he noted for instance that ‘the bell was made to ring because it was the anniversary that we were united with the French Republic, what luck!’. By emphasising that the bell was ‘made to ring’ for this victory, or that anniversary, he suggested that the bells, like Louvain’s citizenry, were operating under duress.³¹

Hous was not alone in his interest in bells. On New Year’s Day of 1799, Bruges grocer Jozef van Walleghem noted:

Instead of the joyful sound of the carillon, which we used to hear for several times on this day of the year, to the sorrow of all we heard the sombre sounding of the working bell, which is being rung thrice every day, with no exception for the feast days of the Holy Church, and which is silent only on the decadi-days’.³²

The changes in bell-ringing were closely related also to the temporal regimes that the French imposed, and which became a focus of resentment and much resistance. The abolition of the Sundays and introduction of decadi-days as a day of rest met with much passive resistance. Thus an anonymous chronicler in Brussels noted with indignation how the new regime tried to force street-traders to observe decadi-days by threatening to revoke the licence to trade for the rest of the week. In Louvain, Hous was delighted when the decadi-days were at last abolished. He noted that ‘the Sunday won the case and was awarded costs’, a pun he repeated a few months later.³³

Chronicling Change

Although chroniclers in the Low Countries tended to have a fairly large geographical horizon, for many contemporaries national political change in the Age of Revolutions registered primarily in its local manifestations. This is what brought it home and made it real. None of the four local chroniclers who kept notes during the French rule of the Southern Netherlandish city of Roermond, for instance, recorded the date of the French takeover, or referred to new official roles or institutions. Instead they all structured their comments around the impact of Austrian, French and Dutch rule on local religious life and on local space.³⁴ Attitudes were not so different in other cities. In 1787, the Bruges chronicler Michiel Allaert recorded the authoritarian reforms of the overlord of Flanders, Emperor Joseph II, exclusively by charting their impact on the public realm of the city of Bruges. Without ever mentioning the origin of the reforms, he meticulously recorded changes in traditional procession routines, the emergence of a new graveyard, sales of goods, the removal of images and the demolition of local buildings. He did so without comment, and at first sight his notes look innocent enough, but he knew full well that they were interrelated. On 5 June 1787, he noted with satisfaction that ‘the authorities’ had at last announced a change of heart; things were to be as they had been ‘before the introduction of the novelties’.³⁵ In Louvain, Jan-Baptist Hous was well aware that much of what happened in his city depended on decisions made in Vienna, Paris and Brussels and the outcomes of military operations across Europe. Nevertheless, such changes became relevant and noteworthy only when they had an impact on the streets of Louvain.

Further north, in the successor state to the Dutch Republic, French rule was less invasive to start with. The new Batavian Republic that had been founded with French support to replace the older republic of the United Provinces and its stadholderly regime was formally independent. In 1795 the French invasion had been accompanied by Dutch ‘Patriots’ who had been exiled in 1787, at the end of a civil war that the Prince of Orange had been able to win only with support from the King of Prussia. Yet not everyone was happy with the outcome of the Batavian Revolution. In Leeuwarden, political upheaval in 1796 prompted the female chronicler Elisabeth Buma to end her chronicle with the words ‘finis Frisiae, yes, finis patriae’.³⁶ Her compatriot Roelof Storm lost his position as burgomaster as result of the Batavian Revolution and kept a record of the changes as they reverberated locally: massive unrest over control of the local government, worrying troop movements and quartering, but importantly to Storm also, no more bell-ringing on Sundays or clerical dress on the streets. The city gates were now opened on Sunday mornings, local churches were stripped of coats of arms, government benches and Bibles. There was the public burning of the portraits and furniture from the local Orange palace, and the desecration of the graves of the Orange family. There were petty bans on placing orange flowers behind local windows and the wearing of liveries. Even the stones, poles and chains on the Heerenpaadje [Gentlemens’ alley] had to be destroyed, ‘because it was found that it had been made as a memorial by [stadholder] William IV’.³⁷ At no point did Storm feel moved to reflect on the bigger picture, the nature of the Revolution or the discussions about the Constitution.

A similar focus on the local public realm is evident in a chronicle from the town of Enkhuizen, a small town that nevertheless had a vote in the representative assembly of the States of Holland, the body that dominated the Dutch Republic. The impact of the Batavian Revolution of 1795 that was forged by French-supported Dutch Patriots, many of whom had been in exile in Paris since 1787, was recorded there as follows by chronicler Luijt Hoogland.

October 1794:

the queen of France has been beheaded

March 18, 1795:

the gallows on the beach was removed

In the year 1795 Liberty trees have been placed, but the one before the College was the last and that one was good.

March 27:

Brought money to the militia house for the maintenance of the French [soldiers], and signed for 6 weeks, a guilder every Friday, because the citizenry complained that they were expensive in the upkeep. Then the French were sent to board at the pensioners’ home—that was what the money was for…

July:

All the Orange banners [associated with the previous regime] before the Prinsenhof were burned, for all too see

In April of that year 1795 the cartwright in the Nieuwsteeg was whipped indoors [i.e. not in public] and banished, because he had housed [French] émigrés and had sold their goods.

August:

the benches [for the elites] around the columns in the church have been removed

September:

after the 1st of September there was no more bell-ringing and the Ministers had to go to Church without their gown and bands, and they put them on in Church.³⁸

Apart from his terse entry on the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette in France, Hoogland does not explain the background or wider national context for any of these developments. Neither the flight of the stadholder to Britain nor the French invasion was relevant for him to record. Similarly, he never noted the calling of a National Assembly, the elections that were held in 1796, the quarrels about the new constitution, the coups and countercoups in The Hague or the wider war efforts.

For Hoogland the main political change was local and personal because as a centre for the navy, shipbuilding and fishery, Enkhuizen was suffering terribly from the war and the loss of the Dutch colonies to the British. In 1800, one of the Patriot exiles who had returned with the French bought the ropery where Hoogland was employed and proceeded to fire him; the same man was buying up and demolishing property throughout town. In a rare outburst, Hoogland noted in 1802 that this Bart Blok had been nicknamed ‘the wrecker’ and asked rhetorically ‘so does this fellow have no other idea than to bring Enkhuizen down altogether, what do you say? Is that not a master-wrecker? He would have done better to stay in France, then he wouldn’t have brought so many here to ruin’.³⁹

The Return of the Golden Age

Yet precisely because the pain of political change was perceived through such a local lens, any positive local developments could also be read as a sign of real improvement and lead to acceptance of change at a national level. In 1802 Luijt Hoogland recorded that because a peace had been agreed, it was at last possible again for local fishermen to take to sea. In August he noted that he had served sea-fish to a 15-year-old seamstress who had come to work in his household for the day; she had never tasted a seabass before. A few months later, the night watch was discontinued. Some rebuilding now also began. The church tower was strengthened and in 1804 the appearance of a ‘brand new’ weathervane on the south tower of Enkhuizen’s main church was a source of pride for Hoogland. Although he noted the news of the death and burial of the former Dutch stadholder in far-away Brunswick, the 1807 visit to Enkhuizen of Louis Bonaparte, the new King of Holland, was clearly seen as good news. The south tower of the church had been illuminated for the occasion. The King had visited the naval shipyard, the hospital and a new school. He had offered 75 ducats to the Catholic church and the orphanage, and he had made it known ‘that anyone who has complaints about the evil times, or because of his circumstances, should put that to him in writing on the 28^th of April in Alkmaar’.⁴⁰ The evil times were still there, but the King might put them right. Just as the consequences of the Batavian Revolution had been felt most through their impact on the local realm and urban fabric, Hoogland used phenomena in the town’s fabric and public space (particularly phenomena related to the local tower) as markers of a return to order.

We can see similar phenomena among chroniclers in the former Austrian Netherlands. Compared to Enkhuizen, the people in the frontier town of Wervik endured more difficult times. This town on the French-Netherlandish border had to contend with constant warfare, a violent French occupation, the loss of the church and all ecclesiastical property, and bans on all local festive and corporative traditions. Yet even there, after almost a decade of disaster, chroniclers seized upon signs of recovery. In August 1801, a local chronicler noted that the four guilds of the town had reassembled for the first time in seven years. They did so to celebrate the acquisition of new banners for the shooting guilds of St. Barbara and St. Sebastian. Their old banners had been destroyed by the French, but they had gone to fetch the new ones that had been made for them in Lille. When the guilds entered the town on their return, they were ceremonially welcomed by the two other guilds in Wervik, which had retained their banners by hiding them during the earlier years of the occupation. The four guilds then processed with their banners through the town ‘in full triumph’ to the sound of drums and musicians in ‘which the citizens took great pleasure’.⁴¹ A year earlier, Jozef van Walleghem in Bruges had rejoiced at the return of a local fair, which he saw as ‘sure sign that the French have been unable to destroy the old habits’.⁴² Meanwhile, a chronicler in Brussels thought that the resumption of the civic shooting competition signified the ‘revival of the golden age’.⁴³ Long before there was any sign of structural political change these chroniclers thus interpreted the return of some traditional local practices as a form of closure.

The eventual demise of the French regime was observed and recorded by Jan-Baptist Hous in the same way as its arrival, through careful observations of changes in public space. In October 1811, Hous observed: ‘on the night of 3–4 October, the tree of so-called liberty was removed. In the morning it looked as if it had never been there’. Anticipating the day that this knowledge would no longer be self-evident, he added: ‘It stood in front of the city hall’.⁴⁴

In the summer of 1814, while armies were still crossing through Louvain and the arrival of the new sovereign William of Orange was expected, the citizens began to reclaim public space in their city. All through July and August 1814, Hous recorded how images of the Virgin and the Saints were restored, chapels reopened, crucifixes raised, streets decorated, garlands hung, flags flown, houses decorated, all to the sound of trumpets and tymbals and, of course, the remaining bells and the carillon. Along the roads householders had posted cronicae i.e. topical verses. ‘If Diogenes returned to light up the earth, he would find many with two or three faces’, posted one local about the turncoats in his community. Or, in memory of the quartering of German troops: ‘Praise and thanks be to Heaven/For the liberation of our lands/But the cost in schnapps was high’. On 28 August, Hous noted that the tricolour and weathervane were removed from the tower of St. Peter’s. The next day, a cross was erected on the tower of St. Gertrud. The day afterwards, cronicae were banned, apparently because the messages were getting too inflammatory. Two months later, working on Sundays was, once again, forbidden.⁴⁵ In public space, the old order had been restored, or so Hous suggested.

Yet by chronicling the recovery of the traditional features of the urban land- and timescape, Hous was at the same time signalling his tacit acceptance of many changes that had profoundly transformed urban life and that were there to stay. As we saw, in the early years of the occupation, Hous always said of bells that they had been ‘made to ring’ by the revolutionary regime. Yet gradually the new normal set in and sometime in 1797 he reverted to saying: ‘the bell rang’. As so many others he had been fascinated with Napoleon and captivated by the endless sequence of victories. For all his criticism of the French, he had reported in great detail on the local glorification of the Emperor. He had also noted real improvements in urban life. He acknowledged that the founding of an invalid-hospital in the abandoned colleges of the university once again brought some jobs and money into the town. Conscription was hated, but also increased local identification with the Napoleonic armies. Hous noted that the groen-wijven, the women who sold vegetables, and frequently took the lead in popular protest, took the initiative to collect money for the wounded.⁴⁶ By such signs, great and small, the local reversal of some of the political changes that had been considered most disruptive, had at the same time enabled the tacit acceptance of other features of the new order, and a return to a sense of normality. Like Hoogland in Enkhuizen, Hous had not only rejected change, but also adjusted to it. It was their local lens that allowed these men to do so.

Conclusion

While early modernists such as Maarten Prak have recently stressed the continuous importance of the culture of civic republicanism for eighteenth-century political practice, they have also argued that the destruction of the corporate institutions in the Age of Revolutions signalled an end to the culture of local citizenship.⁴⁷ Yet as Michael Rowe and Katherine Aaslestad have suggested for the German lands, the political culture of urban communities proved more resilient than we used to think, and long outlived the institutions that were destroyed by the new regimes. The chroniclers studied in this essay were not just reactionaries who resisted change; they were assessing its impact on the local environment in which they lived.⁴⁸ Although they disapproved of much of it, they were not unwilling or unable to change as such; rather, they were committed to the civic values and notions of public order and good government with which they were familiar. Studying the Rhineland, Rowe emphasises that, after the chaos of the 1790s, many welcomed the semblance of order that the Napoleonic regime seemed to bring and indeed approved of the transparency in the new administrative and legal procedures, which is why they wanted to retain them. It would be worth investigating this further in a Low Countries context.⁴⁹

Yet what is already clear from our analysis of the chroniclers’ response is that the destruction of civic corporate institutions did not put an end to the ‘spirit of the belltower’, or to the civic habit of observing local public space as a barometer for the state of their community, and implicitly also for the bigger political framework in which that community functioned. Using their very local barometers, chroniclers in the Low Countries judged at around 1801 that the worst was over. Temporarily, at least, there was some prospect of peace. I have highlighted that in celebrating the restoration of some older routines, especially the restoration of the Catholic Church in the Southern Netherlands, the authors implicitly came to accept that other changes were there to stay. I have argued that this, in turn, helped them to deal with the disruption in their sense of time. The focus on local space allowed chroniclers to absorb and domesticate the new, as well as maintain a sense of coherence and continuity with the civic community of the past. This meant that they ultimately accommodated change much more effectively than theorists of modern time have alleged. By selectively remembering in a local context, it was possible to realign past and present and therefore face the future.

When a blasé Sebastiaan van Beringen noted in 1831, that it was ‘inconvenient’ for subjects to have a change of master, because ‘governments get into trouble and into debt and the ordinary citizens have to bear with it’, he suggested that political change had made little difference to the people of Roermond. Thirty years earlier, when describing the consequences of French rule on the religious life in his city, he had sung a very different tune. Then, he had with anger and outrage described the French attacks on the local church, the flight of many priests, the anger and fear about the loss of church space, the harassment of local Catholics, the bans on bell-ringing and damage to the local fabric. He had seen it as a form of divine punishment, and thought he saw Jesus’s words in Matthew 6:31 being realised: ‘I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered’. Yet in the course of 1800, after a few horrible years, he had come to believe the worst was over. Priests returned, some churches reopened, and although there was a terrible drought as well as floods, recovery did seem to persist. On 26 August 1802, ‘after 4 years, 5 months, and 21 days’, the ‘cross was re-erected on our parish church’. On the following day, a Te Deum was sung, ‘all the authorities in the service of the Republic attended, and the citizens’ joy was such that many did not work, and closed their shops’.⁵⁰ In subsequent years, political change disappeared from his records; his notes focused on the building of new mills, on prices and on floods, the local realities that mattered. Sebastiaan van Beringen had experienced a limited recovery of the old order in Roermond as a return to a normal state of affairs. Of course, much of the pre-revolutionary world had gone, and change continued apace. Yet locally, some of the gap between past and present had been bridged. Any subsequent regime change, by comparison, was apparently small beer. Given that some local traditions had been salvaged, it had become easier to adjust to new political developments and therefore to domesticate change.