Batavian Republic

The Batavian Republic was the successor state to the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. It was proclaimed on 19 January 1795 after the Batavian Revolution and ended on 5 June 1806, when Louis Bonaparte acceded to the Dutch throne; from October 1801 it was known as the Batavian Commonwealth. Both names reached back to the Batavi, the Germanic tribe that had lived in the same river delta. The republic grew out of a genuine popular revolution against the stadholderate, but it needed the support of the French Revolutionary Army to survive, and it became the first of the client sister republics and later part of Napoleon's empire. French pressure helped produce three constitutions and a sequence of coups that brought the factions Paris favoured to power, yet the building of the state was largely Dutch work. The loose confederal structure of the old republic was replaced by a unitary one; a constitution adopted in 1798 had an openly democratic character, with universal manhood suffrage at first, later replaced by census suffrage and then by an authoritarian order after the coup of 1801. Officials became salaried and removable, the guilds and internal trade barriers were broken down in the name of economic liberalism, and the old provincial tax shares gave way to national taxation, leaving reforms that lasted.