Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy by Katherine Astbury & Mark Philp

Author:Katherine Astbury & Mark Philp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

18 June 1815: Triumphant Brothers

A second peak in publications occurred after the battle of Waterloo . As in other countries, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo led to an explosion of propagandistic writings in the Netherlands. Authors celebrated the restoration of peace in Europe and highlighted the particular contribution of Dutch and Belgian troops to the victory over the French. Only nine days before the battle at Waterloo, the allied troops had signed the Final treaty of Vienna , officially making the Kingdom of the United Netherlands a new European state.

To what extent was this union part of the celebrations taking place after Napoleon’s defeat? Which national identity was being celebrated in the flood of publications? It must be said that in the majority of pamphlets, no reference was made to the union: most northern authors expressed their happiness without referring to their fellow countrymen in the south. However, a handful of writings explicitly referred to the union, and they reveal a gap in the northern and southern reactions. They differ in three respects: the description of the battlefield, the references to the national past, and the choice of national heroes.

First, southern poets laid much more emphasis on the actual fighting, the wounded people, and the horrors, whereas the northern poets refrained from sketching too detailed a picture of these scenes. This difference may be explained from the fact that the northern poets literally were further from the battlefield. The northerners reflected upon the events in more distant, abstract terms than the southerners. H. A. Spandaw , a poet from the upper north in the Netherlands, celebrated the victory in much more general terms than his fellow-poet in the south, P. J. Rembry :

(Spandaw:) I saw that fatherland elevated;

Belgian and Batavian united;

And the royal crown given

To him who gives the crown lustre.

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