Abstract
One of most important questions within the historiography of the Restoration Kingdom of the Netherlands has been why Catholics in the Southern Netherlands by the end of the Restoration period supported and joined a liberal opposition. I believe the answer can be found, on the one hand, by situating Catholic political opposition during the Restoration in a longue durée development of political Catholicism.
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Notes
- 1.
The declaration was issued by Eugène-Jean-Baptiste de Robiano (1741–1820), a former member of the Council of Brabant (under Habsburg rule) and the (French) Council of State, who the allied provisional government had appointed as member of the Administrative Council and as substitute Governor-general. See: Terlinden (1906, vol. 1, 10).
- 2.
Second avis aux Notables [unpublished flyer]. There were other publications with a similar kind of argumentation: Chapitre I: Pourquoi il faut une nouvelle Constitution? [title is missing] (N.p., 1815); Les droits de la religion catholique et de son clergé maintenus en Belgique, ou le vrai sens de la proclamation de Sa Majesté le Roi des Pays-Bas, en date du 18 Juillet 1815 (N.p., 1815).
- 3.
For this Mémoire see: de Valk (1998, 573–574).
- 4.
See on Le Spectateur belge: Lissens (2000).
- 5.
Gazette van Gend, 17 November 1814.
- 6.
See on this pamphlet also: Lissens (2000, 18–20).
- 7.
At the time De Foere’s journal was indeed often described as a successor to the Journal historique et littéraire. De Foere uncritically printed numerous articles by Feller in his journal, and gave substantial attention to the republications of Feller’s works. For Feller’s influence on De Foere see also: Lissens (2000, 7, 15).
- 8.
‘Universal justice’ was to be found, not surprisingly, in faith, more precisely the Catholic faith (de Foere 1815a, 7–8).
- 9.
De Foere also denounced the division of Poland, and predicted (quite accurately) a number of national eruptions which would take place in the following decades (de Foere 1816b, 158–159).
- 10.
On Van Ghert : Riberink (1968, 329–342).
- 11.
For the enduring influence of eighteenth-century regalist models on the policy of the government of William I: Roegiers (1982).
- 12.
The author mentioned ‘the Paulo Sarpis, the M.A. Dominis, the Richers, the Jurieus, the Launoys, the Febronius’s…’.
- 13.
Especially in his discussion of Jansenism, Le Surre took a typically French and royalist perspective: ‘Almost every page of the ecclesiastical history of France, during the century before the Revolution and even beyond that, attested to the manoeuvres of the [Jansenist ] sectarians to destabilise and overthrow the Catholic Church.’ Jansenists, Le Surre pointed out, had been the main exponents of republican doctrine in France. They had taught that the parlements received the right to exercise justice from the body of the nation, and that they were the assessors of the throne. They had constantly brought into memory a presumed original contract of the monarch with his subjects, and, under the pretext of defending the liberties of the Gallican Church , obstructed Roman policy and established a monstrous canonical jurisprudence (Le Surre 1816, 38–39).
- 14.
De Volder was primarily important because of his connection with the theology professor at the major seminary of Gent, Augustin Ryckewaert , who was one of the main intellectual spearheads of the revival of ultramontane opposition in Flanders after 1815. To Ryckewaert himself no publications can be traced, and so De Volder’s pamphlet is considered to be an important source of Ryckewaert’s ideas (Roegiers 1984, 14–16).
- 15.
Both in the title and throughout the work, the author made references to Jean Pey’s De l’autorité des deux puissances, and a number of quotes of and references to Bossuet made furthermore apparent to what extent the French Gallican tradition remained part of the canon. This influence has also been pointed out by Jan Roegiers (Roegiers 1984, 286n76).
- 16.
Emo Bos has argued that De Volder’s rejection of the Concordat and the Organic Articles was part of a ‘Stevenist’ political action (Bos 2009, 187). Stevenism was a movement of Catholics who rejected any form of relation between Church and State; which, somewhat mistakenly, saw in Cornelius Stevens its spiritual father (Vercruysse 1975, 257–259). However, irrespective of the question as to whether De Volder was truly part of the Stevenist movement, the arguments presented against the justifications for maintaining the Napoleonic supervision over the Church were entirely situated within traditional Belgian ultramontane discourse.
- 17.
- 18.
Quoted in de Valk (1998, 67).
- 19.
- 20.
The government made its official endorsement of the settlement dependent on the removal of Broglie, but although the latter was forced to leave the country in 1817, he remained officially bishop of Ghent until his death in 1821.
- 21.
This line of argumentation also prevailed in reaction to the prosecution of clergy in the context of their resistance to the constitution and the oath, starting with the prosecution of Broglie. After Broglie was summoned to justify himself before a commission of the Council of State, a first step towards his eventual expulsion from the country, the bishop absented himself but sent a letter (dated 27 November 1816) justifying his actions. When it came to the accusation of stirring up people against the lawful authorities, he argued that it belonged to the freedom of the citizens to choose if they wished to swear an oath on the constitution, and that an episcopal interdiction could not be considered an incentive to civil disobedience. Moreover, Broglie argued that he could not be in violation of the Concordat or the Organic Articles , as the first had been revoked in 1811 by Napoleon himself, and the pope had never agreed with the second; and, furthermore, the declaration of 7 March 1814 had clearly abolished both (Bos 2009, 172–175).
- 22.
The author insisted that the Organic Articles therefore violated the ‘natural meaning’ of the Concordat , which had merely established that the episcopacy would appoint priests that were agreeable to the government.
- 23.
The level of culture and education among the lower clergy had undoubtedly suffered from the hard times experienced by the Church since the revolutionary years. However, it was also the case that the government systematically prevented the Catholic Church from making improvements to its education system (Bos 2009, 197).
- 24.
An anonymous pamphlet from 1829 was attributed to Van Bommel: [C.R.A. van Bommel] Essai sur le monopole de l’enseignement aux Pays-Bas (Antwerp, 1829).
- 25.
This argument was also put forward by Le Sage ten Broeck in the Godsdienstvriend, the most important journal of political Catholicism in the Northern Netherlands (de Valk 1998, 90–91).
- 26.
This strand within political Catholicism has been described as ‘transigent ultramontanism’, at least with regard to the period after 1830. In the words of Vincent Viaene, it was concerned ‘primarily about authority rather than about liberty’ and ‘remained more oriented towards the historical ideal of the “Union of Throne and Altar” inherited from the ancient regime’ (Viaene 2001, 104–105).
- 27.
- 28.
For an in-depth discussion of this source, ‘Opstel des konings’: Bornewasser (1977, 275–280).
- 29.
The most important was a treatise by Alexander Müller, an enlightened Catholic from Münster, titled Beiträge zu dem Künftigen Deutsch-Katholischen Kirchenrechte.
- 30.
The author further wrote that ‘ecclesiastical censorship is a punishment which has temporal effects, since they touch upon the honour of citizens and are indistinguishable from the most terrible evils’. The implication, in the opinion of Van Ghert , was that it was a duty of the sovereign state to defend the citizens where they could not defend themselves, against injustices inflicted by the ecclesiastical authorities (Van Ghert 1827, 57–58).
- 31.
Not surprisingly, Van Ghert referred in support of the legal-historical validity of recursus ad principem to the works of Zeger-Bernard van Espen published in the beginning of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 5). The appel comme d’abus was a procedure of filing a complaint with a secular court about ecclesiastical affairs, resulting in a case being taken from an ecclesiastical court to a secular court, and, as such, constituted one particular type of recursus ad principem. The appel comme d’abus was of French late medieval origin, and, after being abolished during the Revolution, was reintroduced in France by the Napoleonic Law on the Organisation of the Cults of 1802. In the Southern Netherlands, appel comme d’abus was therefore, in the words of Vincent Viaene, ‘the concordat’s successor to Van Espen’s recursus ad principem’. See: van Rhee (2003) and Viaene (2003, 367).
- 32.
The authors admitted that certain edicts interfering with papal decisions had been issued by the councils before the emergence of Jansenism, but Jansenists had exploited them in claiming the existence of a regalist tradition in Belgium. These older edicts, in the eyes of the authors, had only concerned so-called matières mixtes (van Crombrugghe et al. 1827, 54).
- 33.
Raoul afterwards published a pamphlet which contained (fragments of) the articles in Le Catholique des Pays-Bas and his own articles (under the pseudonym M.K.) in the Journal de Gand (Raoul 1827). Our following analysis is based on this pamplet and on another that the Catholic journalists published afterwards in response (see below).
- 34.
At the same time as the prosecution of Broglie , the government also initiated a criminal case against De Foere (as well as his printer Corneille de Moor), which led to his being sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on the basis of the Riot Law of 1815 . After his release from prison in 1819, De Foere revived his journalistic activities, but avoided henceforth direct confrontation with the government (see also Chapter 8). He had already been engaged with a lot of charitable work in Bruges (Le Spectateur belge’s profits had served to finance a lace-making school for poor women), and in 1823 became rector of the English convent in the city. Le Spectateur belge ceased publication in 1824.
- 35.
For the authorship see: Roegiers (1984, 31).
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Marteel, S. (2018). Ancient and Modern Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in Catholic Political Thought After 1814. In: The Intellectual Origins of the Belgian Revolution. Palgrave Studies in Political History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89426-3_6
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