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Typically, he continued to hedge his bets. On the incorrect assumption that his exile would not be long-lived (in fact it was but the prelude to a further exile from France), Calonne made some provisions for a return to I'aris society. On the very day of his disgrace he asked a monastery situated on the rue Saint-Dominique near his house if it would rent him enough space to keep a thousand bottles of wine. He would never get to sample its riches.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Suicides
1787-1788
i THE REVOLUTION NEXT DOOR
In the summer of 1787 it was possible to travel two days northeast from Paris and arrive in the midst of a revolution. The setting for this turmoil was deceptive: the gabled squares and placid canals of the Dutch Republic that had long been a byword for political stability. And the element of spontaneous and, later, managed violence that would be the distinctive sign of the French Revolution was largely absent in Holland. There would be no cartloads of condemned aristocrats nor baskets of severed heads in Amsterdam. But the turmoil of Dutch politics in the 1780s was no less revolutionary for that. Utrecht, Leiden and Haarlem were patrolled by regiments of armed citizens' militia: the Free Corps. Parading and drilling beneath banners extolling "Liberty or Death" they engaged in ceremonies of oath-taking by day and patriotic bonfires by night. At a great assembly in Leiden in 1785 thousands of these Patriot militiamen came together to swear an "act of federation" that bound them in common defense.
To what were they committed? In the principal square of Utrecht, a "Temple of Liberty" had been erected to proclaim the defeat of dynasticism and aristocracy and the victory of representation. And it was in the same town that the Free Corps had used their muscle to mobilize crowds against the sitting patrician regime of the Town Hall. In its place were installed "people's representatives" elected directly, as were the officers of the militia themselves. A radical manifesto published in Leiden in 1785, and strongly reminiscent of both the American Declaration of Independence and the
Bordeaux lawyer Saige's Catechism of the Citizen, made the same point even more forcefully. "Liberty," it insisted, "is
an inalienable right of all citizens
71. Reinier Vinkeles, engraved portrait of Otto Dirk Gordon, captain of the Utrecht Free Corps, 1786
of the commonwealth. No power on earth much less any power derived truly from the people . . . can challenge or obstruct the enjoyment of this liberty when it is so desired." Likewise, "the Sovereign is none other than the vote of the people."
Within five years, politics in Holland had exploded from the realm of a politely circumscribed elite to a chaotic and impulsive mass activity. An uncensored, radical press was directed at a readership among shopkeepers and the petty professions. The two most popular weeklies, the Post van Ncder Rijn and the Politieke Kruijer, both reached at least five thousand readers with each issue. Their pages denounced Prince William V of Orange as a drunken imbecile and his Prussian wife as a haughty termagant. And before long the targeted enemies extended to recalcitrant "aristocrats" (the traditional "regent" classes of the towns) attempting to preserve systems of nepotism and oligarchy in local government. Efforts to muffle the
outspokenness of the Patriot press only resulted in its editors and publishers becoming overnight popular heroes.
Hespe, the editor of the Kruijer in
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Amsterdam, cultivated his celebrity as a political prisoner by having visiting cards printed with broken fetters as his personal emblem. Invective Mowed from the printed page to the world of images: caricatures pillorying Oran-gists and "aristocrats" and counter-caricatures against the Patriots circulated in coffeehouses and taverns. Rival establishments decorated their premises and signs with appropriate emblems: the Orange tree and ribbons for the supporters of the Stadtholder, the black cockade and the Patriot keeshond for their opponents. The tone of these polemics could be aggressively vulgar. One Patriot print showed the keeshond with its leg up against the Orange tree. Even domestic life retreated before the onslaught of sloganizing. Snuffboxes, engraved goblets, beer tankards, porcelain dishes were all covered in partisan mottoes. Even baking boards and pudding basins were carved so that loaves and puddings could emerge bearing the appropriate devices of the family line.
This saturation of daily life by political contention directly anticipated the climate of the French Revolution. There were many other similarities: the transfer of patriotic sentiment from Prince to Citizens, the imputation of sinister foreign motives to the Prince's consort, the creation of clubs to "educate" people in their rights and an emphasis on public ceremonies and parades to dramatize the "armed freedom." And although the conflict had begun as a protest against the power of the Stadtholder's government in controlling local appointments, the radical means used to press those claims had themselves generated new ends. From attacking the House of Orange, the journalists and Free Corps leaders had turned sharply against the entire traditional system of officeholding in the Netherlands by which "regents" were installed for life and replaced by co-opted members of the same clique. Against this "aristocracy," described in the polemical literature as a "Gothic monstrosity7" and a "tyranny," a democratic system of direct and frequent elections was supposed to purify Dutch politics and re-create the Republic in the imagined vigor of its origins.
Though Dutch Patriot rhetoric was mostly expressed in the standard late eighteenth-century idiom of universal rights, there would have been much about this miniature revolution that would have seemed bewilderingly parochial to the French visitor. In the appeals to the memory of dead heroes like Admiral de Ruyter and Johan de Witt he would have found echoes of the past rather than auguries of the future. It would have seemed more like a quarrel of factions than a war between "aristocracy" and "democracy." Yet although the Patriot tumults were never treated by French
governments with anything like the seriousness given to American affairs, there were complicated ways in which the fate of each oi the two countries was tangled up with that of the other.
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72. Teapot with Patriot revolutionary emblems
73. Dutch breadboard with caricature of William V
Since the American war the Dutch Republic had been an ally and an important if rather hapless element of the anti-British coalition put together by Vergennes. Increasingly, too, the Amsterdam money market had become a vital source of short-term loans and annuities, much of it supplied through syndicates that were themselves Patriot rather than Orangist in their sympathies. Money and "American" Patriot politics seemed to march in step. Since the House of Orange was traditionally pro-British, the more acute its embarrassment, the better the chances of establishing a Francophile Patriot regime in its stead. But this golden opportunity was by no means risk-free. The confrontation in the Dutch Republic was rapidly turning into an all-out civil war. As street tactics became rougher, the level of alarm at Versailles rose correspondingly. A French envoy from Holland reported that "the ferment here has made terrifying progress and if it is not stopped it is to be feared that it may cause an explosion which will have incalculable consequences."
The militarization of the conflict, however, intensified during the spring of 1787. In May the first pitched battle took place, albeit on a small scale, near Utrecht, with the Patriots getting the better of the action. At the end of June, Princess Wilhelmina was apprehended by Patriot guards while attempting to travel from the Orangist stronghold of Gelderland to The