The Dutch Revolt Was Europe’s First Bourgeois Revolution

In a certain sense, yes, and in a certain sense, no. This has been a point of contention from the time of the revolt itself: whether it was a revolt primarily for religion or one for political independence. There have been sharp debates over this question right up to the present.

Mainstream Dutch historiography has classically been divided into two currents, which were connected to two main stories that the nation has told about itself since the nineteenth century. One conservative version of historiography claimed that this was a revolt for religion. That was the point of view of Protestant historians.

On the other hand, there were historians who were often equally conservative and nationalist but who said, “no, the prime mover was liberty.” “Liberty” in this sense has a complicated, Janus-faced aspect to it. When sixteenth-century people referred to liberty, they meant autonomy or something very particularist. They were referring to “our ancient freedoms” — the privileges of a city that granted it certain freedoms against the nobility or against a monarch. That was certainly an important element in the revolt.

However, liberty can also mean the liberty of the nation against a foreign power — in this case, Spain. This became a very important perspective for nineteenth-century nationalists who said, “here is a revolt fought for freedom that is the basis of our nation.” But at the start of the revolt, no one expected an independent nation to be the outcome, and no one would have defined freedom in that sense. When you interpret the term “liberty” as referring to national independence, that is anachronistic.

There have only been a handful of radical historians of the Dutch Revolt who, in the fashion of much twentieth-century Marxist historiography, claimed that the prime mover was economic. They argued that it broke out as a lower-class revolt driven by high grain prices and acute hunger. That was the thesis of Erich Kuttner, a German Jewish refugee in the Netherlands who wrote a book called Hunger Year 1566 while in hiding from the Nazis.

The book was published posthumously because Kuttner was caught by the Nazis and murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp. He put up a firm argument that economic reasons, primarily urban poverty, were what led to the outbreak of the revolt. That interpretation has prompted a lot of discussion, including vicious attacks on Kuttner. While marginal, it has remained an influence on thinking about the revolt.

My own view is that the outbreak of the revolt cannot be seen in isolation from the intervention of the lower classes in political life, and that religion was very important as a motive for that intervention, as well as material circumstances. There is still a lot of value in Kuttner’s thesis, but he represented a rather mechanistic-materialist approach to the politics of rebellion that was prevalent among Marxist historians in the 1930s.

The mechanistic approach posed a stark opposition between the ideal motivations, which were religious, and the real motivations, which were economic and had to do with grain prices and hunger. That kind of analysis tends to dematerialize the role of the church in sixteenth-century politics. An attack on the church was not a purely theoretical or idealistic motive that was up in the air, so to speak — it was an attack on one of the main power structures behind the sixteenth-century state.

In many ways, the church was the power structure that people encountered most immediately within their daily lives. They had to kneel for a priest every Sunday. That was a material fact, something that impinged on how people lived their lives. The Catholic Church was an incredibly wealthy institution, and much of the anger expressed in popular pamphlets and in the utterances of people who took part in the rebellion and were brought to trial was directed against the wealth of the church and its crass materialism.

That is the point at which an outburst against inequality can become linked to starkly felt religious motives. We’re talking about a revolt that went through various stages. The first stage was a wave of iconoclastic fury that broke out in 1566 and continued into 1567. Catholic churches were adorned with statues of saints, images of Christ, etc. The Protestant religion turned against that, and people who were mostly from the lower classes would start breaking into churches and smashing the images to pieces.

This rebellion had been growing in the form of small-scale, everyday resistance long before this iconoclastic fury broke out. I did a lot of research myself on the immediate stages before the revolt in the textile city of Leiden in the Northern Netherlands. One of the most fascinating discoveries that I made was the widespread phenomenon of people standing up in churches, walking up to the front, taking the host from the priest, throwing it on the ground, and stamping on it, shouting, “If this is your God, then why doesn’t he intervene?”

The criticism of the Catholic practice of the host was part of the onslaught against the idea of a materialist church that assumed God was present in objects and in earthly wealth. This was in a context where the Catholic Church was everywhere and people were burned at the stake for resisting it. Against that backdrop, it was an incredibly brave form of direct action, one that was happening on a mass scale.

To conclude, I do think that religion was crucial to the outbreak of the revolt. However, religion in a deeply religious society where the church is part of the state is not a purely theoretical issue. It is part of a structure that shapes people’s lives and against which they rebel.