The Dutch Revolt: What Kind of Revolution?
ASPECIAL PLACE IN HISTORICAL STUDIES belongs to those great events that everyone knows of, but few know-at least, know deeply and accurately. In such cases, received notions of sequence, character, causes and results continue to be passed on, unchallenged by any requirement that the explanation fit the facts and that the facts receive explanation. One such great event is the Revolt of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. This is an event whose course and significance are treated as obvious in textbooks and even in more advanced syntheses. It waswas it not?-the uprising of the deeply Protestant Northern Netherlands against the tyranny of imperial Spain' on behalf of three Freedoms-political, religious, economic. For decades, indeed for centuries, debate swirled about the meaning of these terms, or at least of the first two. Political freedom: was it national independence from Spain or the creation of a republican regime? Religious freedom: was it the right of all religions each to practice its own faith, which it believed alone true, alongside others in the same status, or did the right belong solely to the "true" religion? In the language of the 1570s, was the struggle primarily libertatis or religionis ergo?2 When economic liberty was added in the nineteenth century, it was even asserted that economic liberty, equated with capitalism, was paramount. In our own century an alternative picture has emerged, in which the Dutch Revolt is seen as an anticipation of the French Revolution, and it is this picture that I wish primarily to discuss. Out of the myth of the French Revolution (how much out of its reality is a different question) there took shape a generally accepted defini-