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Summaries
Frans Grijzenhout
The image of exile, or: Belisare in Holland
The iconography of ‘exile’ in the visual arts goes back to Cesare Ripa's invention of ‘esilio’ (Iconologia, Dutch edition 1644), in which secular (banishment, limitation to freedom) and religious aspects (pilgrimage) of exile come together. This article focuses on the representation of exile in the period of the French and Dutch Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. In French art of the 1790s the theme of exile is embedded in anti-revolutionary portraiture, such as Danloux' Portrait of De la Marche, and in representations of the misery of the émigrés (Danloux, ‘La pitié’. Scène de la misère, 1802), inspired by Delille's La pitié. In the French ‘art de l'émigration’ the figure of Belisarius takes pride of place. Gravelot's title-engraving to Marmontel's famous Bélisaire (1767) inspired Gérard's audaciously new representation (1795) of the theme.
Although political exile was a wide-spread phenomenon in the Dutch Republic after the failed patriot revolution of 1786-1787, it does not seem to have left many traces in art. Nicolaas Muys produced a mysterious painting in 1790, on the iconography of which this article concentrates. It may well reflect the merits of an unknown (Rotterdam?) patriot exile and his devoted wife (as Artemisia) and the miseries of exile.
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Gert-Jan Johannes
‘Did you, my fatherland, ever fulfil your duties towards me?’ Bilderdijk, exile for life
The Dutch lawyer, poet and philosopher Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), who in his lifetime was regarded as Holland's poet par excellence, became famous for his eccentric worldview and his ultra-orthodox Calvinism. In this article, excerpts from his poems are used to demonstrate that his experiences during the period of his exile (1795-1806) were instrumental in the development of his presumed eccentricity.
In 1795, Bilderdijk, as a supporter of the House of Orange, was banished from Holland for refusing to undersign the obligatory declaration of loyalty to the new ‘Patriot’ regime. Bilderdijk left Holland for Germany and later England, roaming around for more than ten years in rather precarious circumstances. The experience of banishment and alienation from his home country led Bilderdijk to the insight that the fatherland is not always right, and that the exile does not need to be a traitor or a deserter by definition; a morally justified or honourable exile is indeed possible. His fatherland, Bilderdijk now feels, has not fulfilled its obligations towards him. What is more, in retrospective he now interprets his whole life - and man's life in general - as a kind of exile. The true Christian is never at home in a world where Man does not obey the will of God as much as he should. With this outlook on life, Bilderdijk, on his return to Holland, became the ‘eternal outsider’ in Dutch bourgeois society.
Seen in a wider European perspective, Bilderdijk's worldview does not seem so strange at all. As Peter Fritzsche has argued in his study Stranded in the present, all over Europe people of Bilderdijk's generation lived through comparable experiences of banishment, exile and alienation from one's fatherland and from one's own history. The ensuing sense of profound loss and a fundamental rupture with the past, the ‘melancholy of history’, which
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Fritzsche found in the work of, e.g., Chateaubriand, is perfectly echoed in the work of Bilderdijk.
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Ed Arnold
The heart at the right but wrong place and time
Isolation and exile of Jacob Hendrik Onderdewijngaart Canzius (1771-1838)
Social and political life and times in the Netherlands around 1800 were complicated, particularly for advocates of the ancien regime. As an outspoken Orangist, Jacob Hendrik Onderdewijngaart Canzius from the city of Delft did not go along with mainstream thinking and politics of the Patriotic, Batavian and French periods. He therefore got himself isolated from a full grown political career that normally was bound to be his. After pursuing not too successfully different second-chance careers as a captain of industry and as a lay minister in religious sociability in the Godsdienstig Genootschap Christo Sacrum, Canzius felt himself obliged to go abroad, into exile. The new sovereign of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, King Willem I, showed his loyal subject in 1826 long awaited substantial gratitude, by appointing Canzius director of the National Museum for Industry at Brussels, but ‘all's well that ends well’ was not even then appropriate. In the Belgian Rising of 1830 Canzius again clearly missed good political feeling and eventually found himself in HM's disgrace.
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Myriam Everard
Two ‘dames hollandoises’ in Trévoux
The political exile of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, 1788-1797
This article challenges Joost Rosendaal's recent claim that women Patriot-refugees in France, among them well-known writers Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, did not have a political motive for fleeing the Dutch Republic. They would have been little more than hangers-on of the real refugees (men). Closer examination of the political antecedents of a random sample of women-exiles already shows this to be a questionable claim, but the case of Wolff and Deken definitely proves it erroneous. Wolff and Deken turn out to have been part of a far-flung political network, both before and after their exile. They were evidently well-connected to French revolutionaries during their stay in France. Their publications from this period testify to a continued Patriot partisanship. In fact, the ongoing radicalization of their political views during the exile-period can explain why, after their return to the Batavian Republic, Wolff and Deken set out to publish a purely political weekly.
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Peter Altena
‘ô Ondankbaar vaderland’. Gerrit Paape en de ‘verbeterende’ ballingschap
In the early days of the French Revolution, the prolific Dutch writer and patriot Gerrit Paape (1752-1803) considered the revolutionary banishment of the French clergymen and prostitutes as a ‘bettering exile’. At that time Paape was in French exile, being banned by the Dutch authorities after the Prussian intervention of 1787. In this paper the question is posed whether Paape looked at his own exile as a bettering one.
Already in his youth, Paape was obsessed by martyrologies and martyrdom. After 1787 he fled to Dunkirk and in his autobiography Mijne vrolijke wijsgeerte in mijne ballingschap (1792) he portrayed himself as a merry philosopher in exile. Nobody had to feel pity for him. But when he came back to the Netherlands book to the NL along with the French and the reception
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lacked the warmth and the compensation he had expected, he lost his temper. His public appearances - in politics and in literature - were dominated by the demand for compensation. As compensation for the victims was postponed and punishing of those responsible for the repression was thought to be in conflict with the necessary fraternization, former exiles as Paape turned more radical. In his novels a lot of forgotten and poverty-stricken heroes in exile are depicted. When in 1798 Paape was ‘rewarded’ and got a job at the department of education, he looked back on his exile again. More than ten years after his banishment started, he began to think of the banishment of the patriots as a possible blessing in disguise. By making their way in pre-revolutionary France they had visited the University of Patriotism and Revolution. Also in a more moral sense Paape, who had used to see the use of bad luck, considered the years of exile a school: misery and misfortune made him a better man.
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Ellen Krol
De ‘vrijwillige’ ballingschap van Hebelius Potter
The Frisian vicar and writer of travel stories Hebelius Potter (1769-1824) is said to have been an ardent traveller and wanderer. Aside from his travel madness, however, the immediate cause for his first trip to a congregation in South Africa was that he felt forced to yield to the large numbers of militant Jacobins who controlled the North West of Frisia after 1795.
Being in the position of a vicar of the officially privileged Reformed church wasn't very favourable in the revolutionary period, but Potter suffered also from an unfortunate location of his vicarage bordering on the most militant area of Frisia, called Barradeel. Nocturnal raids and sessions of revolutionary tribunals made life bitter, so Potter choose for voluntary exile. Bad luck dogged his footsteps: his trip to the Cape ended in naval combats with English and French warships. And as vicar of Hanau from 1809, he was an eyewitness from the tower of his German church of Napoleon's battle of Hanau on October 30th 1813.
Potter overcame his problems and devoted the rest of his years to a mixture of pastoral care and ‘wandern’. Twelve travelstories made him in his time a famous writer, but he was forgotten in the period of religious revival in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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Sjoerd Faber and René Lombarts
A legal-historical contribution on the banishment of Willem Bilderdijk in 1795
This contribution deals with two reactions on crime that as such don't exist anymore in today's western world, banishment and transportation. The latter, meaning deportation to far oversea possessions, reached its zenith in England (and Australia) at the end of the eighteenth and in de first decades of the nineteenth centuries. A Dutch ‘Botany bay’, however, did not come to existence. Banishment, on the contrary, was put into practice very frequently in the Netherlands up to 1811, although at the end of the eighteenth century was seen as a way of evading the real problems. The Napoleonic Code Pénal, that came into force in the Netherlands in 1811, when the Netherlands were merged in the French empire, knew transportation and banishment as punishments, the latter only for political crimes. After the revival of the Netherlands (1813), the Code Pénal was maintained with some modifications. Consequently, banishment and transportation fell into disuse.
Some other distinctions have to be made. Reacting on crimes, in the first place, is not always to be seen as punishment. In some cases we should speak of precaution, taking measures in order to prevent damage that someone could do to others, to the public order or to
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himself. Secondly, both punishments and measures can be imposed by judges, but also by other officials such as public prosecutors and other public servants.
These notions and distinctions we applied to the exile Bilderdijk: in 1795 he was banished from the Hague. This measure was taken by a public prosecutor, in name and by order of the fresh representatives of the Batavian people of Holland.
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