The dynamism and stagnation in the Republic is part of the 2011 History Exam. An important part of this movement was the media. Pamphlets sparked open discussions among the Dutch about the social issues of the time. As a result, those in power had to increasingly take into account the opinions of their citizens. This had positive consequences, such as more participation, but could also lead to murder…
New media in the 17 e century
In the seventeenth century there was a development that we now call the 'information revolution'. The life of the Western European changed radically in all kinds of areas during that period. Culture, literature, science and especially politics gained momentum due to the ever-faster distribution of printed information.
The Dutch Republic was at the forefront of this. The Revolt (1568-1648) against Spanish rule was the first propaganda war in our history. Since the late sixteenth century, hardly a governmental disagreement passed without people expressing their opinion through printed matter. In addition, the Republic was a hub for the European information market, yielding an unprecedented number of printers, booksellers and writers.
Express your opinion with a pamphlet
The main way to express your opinion to a large audience was the pamphlet. Pamphlets are best described as printed matter, written to persuade. These often anonymous, short publications written in Dutch provided commentary on current events. Sometimes this was done in a subtle way by solemn professors. Other times it turned out to be a vulgar name-calling.
The pamphlet took many forms. There were (fake) letters, eyewitness accounts, songs, appeals, government decisions, news stories, commentaries, poems and dialogues. The form, length and content of the pamphlets varied widely. The pamphlets were read by rich and poor and passed on or read to the illiterate. At the market, in the pub or when you went to visit friends:pamphlets were everywhere.
1672:The Year of Disaster
To see how communication in the 17 e century and what the consequences of this could be, the year 1672 is a good example. So much went wrong in this year that the year is now known as the Disaster Year. It eventually led to the gruesome massacre of the politician Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis. Poor people have often been blamed for this murder, but when we listen to eyewitnesses, it turns out not to be true. What preceded this murder?
First, in the spring of 1672, the Republic was attacked by France, Munster, Cologne, and England. From the east, the advance of the French army in particular was so rapid that panic took hold of the Dutch. This panic was largely fueled by all kinds of pamphlets. In 1672 more than 1600 different pamphlets appeared with a total circulation of more than 1 million. Compared to the total circulation of other years – some 10,000 pamphlets – this is enormous.
You can compare these pamphlets with the tweets of today. Bad news is immediately tweeted and in no time everyone knows about it. In 1672 the pamphlets raced through the Republic with unprecedented speed. During the Disaster Year, for example, people in Amsterdam could find out within a day what had happened in most of the Republic. And what they heard was miserable…
Cities such as Nijmegen, Arnhem and Utrecht fell like flies on a hot day. Worse than the fact that the cities and defensive strongholds fell into French and German hands was the fact that there was hardly any resistance. There were even stories about cowardly surrenders, while the Dutch wanted to hear reports of courageous battles in the still free areas. In addition, thousands of refugees were on their way to the present-day Randstad. It seemed done with the Republic.
Betrayal!
“Actually, there could only have been treason,” wrote many pamphleteers. This idea quickly gained popularity in the Disaster Year. In part because it was written in pamphlets, but mainly because thousands of people throughout the Netherlands saw their city and country collapse before their very eyes. And they sincerely thought that their own directors – with Johan de Witt in the lead – were responsible for this. After all, the politicians had hesitated with the construction of the defence, they had kept William III, the Prince of Orange, out of the board. They had cut back on the military in recent years and helped their own friends and relatives find board positions. It didn't take long before the first stone went through the window of a chic home.
Hatred reaches peak
On August 20, hatred against the administrators reached a peak in The Hague. Thousands of citizens murder Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis here. Then the people cut pieces of the corpses, partially ate them and sold body parts to the highest bidder.
According to The Hague lawyer Adriaan van der Goes – an eyewitness who later wrote a letter to his brother about the murder – it was not poor incited slobs who committed the murders, but decent citizens such as silversmiths and shoemakers.
The Prince of Orange released something similar at a meeting two days after the murder, where he explained to the officers present why he thought it was a bad idea to prosecute the murderers. It seemed dangerous to him to prosecute the decent citizens for this.
Pamphlets create killers
So the murderers were civilians, including the most notable. But why did these citizens take such unusual measures just on August 20? Probably because the country's foremost politician – Johan De Witt – and his entourage were held responsible for the poor governance that had caused the worst crisis in the past 20 years. In addition, the men had a very bad reputation:they were corrupt, they had stolen public money, they had messed with the political structure of the Republic by keeping citizens and the Prince of Orange out of politics and they had tried to sell the Republic to France. .
Well, this wasn't all true, of course, but it was in hundreds of pamphlets and there was enough suspicion to make these ideas the predominant opinion of the public. Public debate, conducted mainly through pamphlets, proved crucial to the murders. It is not without reason that more than a million pamphlets appeared during the Disaster Year 1672. You could even argue that pamphlets prepared the citizens for the murder of Johan and Cornelis de Witt.
An eye for an eye…
In any case, these political publications are of great importance in understanding the tensions that had built up in the preceding weeks that made the murder a "right" solution in the imagination of many. The killers felt that they were solving a problem with the murder. It wasn't for them to do blood; they were busy saving the Republic.
Pamphlets show not only what moved the people, but also what the rest of the country thought of the massacre. The murder was an action by (significant) citizens who gave justice. Pamphlets were not the sole cause of the murder of the De Witt brothers, but they do allow us to look at the topics people debated in the weeks leading up to the murder; and how these images, names and ideas relate to the events of August 20.
The pamphlets contributed to a political mood, in which pamphleteers sketched an ideal world without Johan de Witt. They wrote about the 'removal' of Johan de Witt. This would automatically make the problems a thing of the past. By the way, most writers meant the disappearance of the man, but not murder.
These images were soon followed by writers, who wanted a more violent ending. Death simply wasn't enough. The De Witt brothers were to receive their full sentences. So they stripped the corpses and began the next stage of punishment. They cut the fingers, limbs and organs from and out of the corpses to administer justice. In their eyes this was extremely just and sensible. They followed the principle of retribution of the time:an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. According to eyewitness Adriaan van der Goes, the murder proceeded as if it had been a lawful execution. An anonymous witness noticed that everything had gone so smoothly.
Symbolic limbs
The body parts of the De Witt brothers symbolized their (supposed) crimes. That is why someone cut the fingers of Johan de Witt's right hand, the hand with which he had signed the Eternal Edict (the abolition of the stadtholdership). Then arms and legs were cut off, just as the cities and provinces of the Republic had been "cut off" in 1672 as a result of bad government by the enemy. In this way all body parts were killed. Also the genitals.
The fact that the murder of Johan and Cornelis de Witt already played a role in the public debate in the Republic, long before it actually took place, indicates that the murder was not a conspiracy by radicals or a protest that got out of hand by incited paupers. So to better understand the murder, we need to take the killers and their motives seriously. Fortunately, these motifs can be found in the pamphlets.