De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005

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Summaries

Margaret C. Jacob
Bernard Picart and the Turn toward Modernity

This article discusses the work of the famous engraver Bernard Picart (1673-1733), who figured prominently in my The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981), along with his friends Prosper Marchand and Charles Levier. More precisely, it is devoted to the French background of his magnum opus, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples de monde (1723), which he published in collaboration with Jean-François Bernard. This article stresses Picart's French intellectual history, with particular attention to Roger de Piles, and finally addresses why it might have been that in November of 1710, so early in his exile in the Dutch Republic, Picart turned up in the company of men he called his ‘frères,’ a small ‘secret’ society of publishers and book sellers. This is article contains an outline about why and how Picart became a devotee of the new science, a Protestant and a comparativist critic of religious mores, thus also addressing his ultimate break from his French, Catholic background.

Ruben Mantels
‘Un écrivain patriot’
Marquis du Chasteler and Historiography in the Austrian Netherlands

The work of the ‘Belgian’ historian marquis François Gabriel Joseph du Chasteler (1744-1789) is not of the same quality as, for instance, historical writing in France or the Northern Netherlands. Nevertheless, when viewed within the broader historical culture of the Austrian Netherlands, the work of Du Chasteler turns out to be of considerable interest because it exemplified a major transformation in the practice of history in the eighteenth-century Southern Netherlands.

Du Chasteler's historical career took off with genealogy and local history. Before he became a member of the Imperial and Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres of Brussels, his research was mainly the intellectual pastime of a nobleman with historical interest. When in 1779 he joined this scientific company, his work underwent an important shift in terms of subject matter and quality. Together with his colleagues from the Classe d'histoire of the Brussels Academy Du Chasteler used his historical talent to introduce the national perspective as guiding principle into eighteenth-century historiography. This national perspective replaced the local and regional tradition that had prevailed until then and was accompanied by an enlightened plea for the incorporation of the history of civilisation into the study of the national past.

The most important achievements of the marquis du Chasteler for the Academy and its historiographical project were the 1779 plan to write a national history of the Austrian Netherlands and his chairmanship of a Comité historique for the edition of the national sources. Both initiatives gained much enthusiasm but much less result. Still, they were of major importance for putting the writing of national history and the edition of the national sources high on the agenda of Belgian historiography during almost the entire nineteenth century.

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Marleen De Vries
Published... and Exploited
On Eighteenth-century Best-seller Authors, Lying Publishers, Sneaky Privileges and Shared Authorship

Little is known about the way eighteenth-century authors and publishers agreed upon contracts or made other business deals. In most cases authors were ‘paid’ in copies of their own work, but their copyright was not protected. Especially poets were supposed to write for fame and glory and not for money. This arrangement seemed fair in case a work didn't sell, but what to do as an author when a work turned into a best-seller? Publishers on the other hand were not protected either. The only thing they could do was to obtain privileges for works they had invested money in, in order to prevent reprinting.

One of the most important Dutch publishers of original and translated literature in the second half of the century was Pieter Meijer (1718-1781), working in Amsterdam, a poet himself and famous for the circle of well-known poets around him. He entered history with a spotless reputation. A document written by one of his best-selling authors, Nicolaas Simon van Winter (1718-1781), reveals nevertheless that Meijer treated him and his even more famous wife, the poet Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1721-1789), badly. The writers handed over their works to him without signing any contract, since their business relation was based upon friendship. This friendship, however, didn't prevent Meijer from giving the poets only very few copies of their works, concealing the print numbers and buying privileges on their works in secret. The friendship ended after twenty-five years when Meijer ‘corrected’ some poems of Van Merken without even showing or telling her. This article claims that these corrections were not made to improve the poems, but to secure Meijer's position as editor of the work. By 1775 it must already have been clear that publishers were likely to lose their copyright on works unless they were themselves the authors or editors.

Henri Krop
Unity in Diversity
New Perspectives on the (Dutch) Enlightenment

In this contribution an outline is given of recent research into the Enlightenment period in general and the Dutch Enlightenment in particular. It is argued that in all recent studies ‘Enlightenment’ is considered to be a uniform European phenomenon. This assumption conflicts with the view, popular since the 1980s, of a plurality of Enlightenments. What is more, in these five studies the traditional approach (advocated by Cassirer) to the history of ideas as a self-contained discipline is abandoned in favour of Peter Gay's conception of a social history of enlightened ideas. Both Israel and Wielema focus on the early Enlightenment, while the last three books deal with the later part of the period (1750-1815).

A general conclusion to be drawn is that in the second half of the period the preoccupations of Enlightenment culture changed to a certain extent. Wielema's account suggests that after 1740 interest in Spinoza among Reformed believers gradually faded away, while Van Eijnatten contends that the changes in the importance attributed to religion were themselves due to enlightened ideas. Religion became an important means to develop the moral self of the individual, to advance his level of civilisation or enlightenment. According to Kloek and Mijnhardt the nation as imagined community of all polite citizens originated in Enlightenment sociability, which in the Netherlands came into existence around 1750.

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Sas deals with the politicisation of Dutch Enlightenment culture after 1780, which requires the identification of a specific Sattelzeit between the Enlightenment / Ancien Régime and modern society. Notwithstanding these different perspectives, the crucial significance of the Enlightenment period for the cultural history of the West is still something that most researchers agree on.

Wijnand W. Mijnhardt
The Limits of Present-day Historiography of Republicanism

This essay consists of three parts. The first opens the debate on the notion of the universality of the so-called Atlantic Republican tradition. It asks the question if the grand republican narrative produced by British and especially American historians should not be considered as the legacy of the traditional writing of national histories. It's capacity to serve as a universal principle for historical development seems to derive as much as from its brilliance as from the dominant position of England and the USA in world politics and the world economy. The second part offers Franco Venturi's European perspective on republicanism as developed in his Utopia and Reform of 1970 as an alternative for republican studies on both parts of the Atlantic. In the last part, the international trajectories of the Dutch republican models of the early modern period are analyzed as an example of this alternative approach.

Daniel Tröhler
Switzerland and the Netherlands in the 18th century
The Republican Discourse of Public Virtues

Despite many parallels between the Swiss and the Dutch republics, there are numerous differences that indicate two very different understandings of the idea ‘republic’. In this article these differences are demonstrated. Two pertinent examples of differences between the Netherlands and Switzerland have been presented, namely Pieter Valkenier and Etienne Bonnot de Mably. The differences between these cases are analyzed in the context of republican theory discourse, with a discussion of the differing political visions of the Patriot movements. As a conclusion, the publicly relevant educational concepts have been presented. Three educational ideologies are distinguished: the ideology of ‘doux commerce’, the idea of public discourse of enlightened and rational citizens, and the elitist, ‘antiquizing’ virtue ideology. All three failed to keep up with modernity, which, in form of modern democracies, nonetheless depend on the existence of some kind of public or civic virtues.