After the Republic: Citizenship, the Military, and Masculinity in the Making of the Dutch Monarchy, 1813–1814

In 1813 monarchy was introduced in the Netherlands. The restoration area, which started with this political change, amounted to a break with,  rather than  a restoration of the Dutch Republic of the ‘ancien régime’. With monarchy came the end for the political languages of republicanism and of radical democracy. The first had been constitutive of the political culture of the Dutch Republic, the second a crucial feature of Dutch politics in the revolutionary last two decades of the 18th century. Both were gendered, masculinized, languages that centered around citizenship. Assuming that powerful political languages do not simply disappear, this chapter explores the persistence of these languages in Dutch political culture of the Restoration. To what extent were notions of - manly - independence, devotion to the common good, willingness to defend liberty, and desire to participate in political life present post-1813 political culture? Were they transformed and re-appropriated in order to provide legitimacy to both a new regime and a nascent, liberal opposition? Drawing on visual and written sources on the political self-fashioning of the monarch and his opponents, the chapter  argues that an appeal to masculinity was part of attempts to ground political legitimacy in a situation that did not allow for strategies of legitimization that appealed to history or tradition.