This PhD thesis has studied the meeting practice of the Dutch States General to address the role of tradition and culture in times of political and institutional transition in the first half of the... Show moreThis PhD thesis has studied the meeting practice of the Dutch States General to address the role of tradition and culture in times of political and institutional transition in the first half of the 19th century. Dutch revisionist historians of the Revolutionary Era have emphasized the sense of rupture surrounding the year 1800. The Batavian revolutionaries, together with French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, caused a clear break between the ancien régime of the Dutch Republic and the 19th-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. Modern constitutions replaced the de- centralized government system of the Dutch Republic with a unitary state from 1798 onwards. When the Dutch regained their independence after the fall of Napoleon in 1813, the new state did not turn the clock back to 1795. In that respect, the Netherlands has been studied as a fine example of Reinhard Koselleck’s concept of Sattelzeit. Continuities, such as the name States General for the bicameral parliament, were merely invented traditions to hide the new institutions of the Restoration state. Notwithstanding obvious evidence of discontinuity, in political practice there was more continuity in the Netherlands during the transitional period from the 18th to the 19th century than historians have assumed. Show less
