Never the twain shall meet?

Over de onevenredige verdeling van ambten tussen katholieken en protestanten in Noord-Brabant aan het begin van de negentiende eeuw

Samenvatting

Never the Twain Shall Meet? The Unequal Distribution of Public Offices between Catholics and Protestants at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

The year 1581, when the Netherlands broke away from Spain, marked the beginning of a statutory discrimination of the Catholic population in favour of members of the Reformed Church. This church became the formal church of the new Republic.

New rules, made public through placards, put a ban on religious meetings for Catholics, the distribution of Catholic writings, and Catholic education. In addition, Catholics were banned from public office.

This article shows that the exclusion of Catholics from public office in the Republic was effective only to a certain extent. This was due to the tolerant attitude of the regents and a lack of suitable reformed officials.

In 1795 the French invaded the Netherlands and the Batavian Republic was proclaimed. Under the influence of Enlightenment ideas, all citizens were made equal before the law. The placards with commandments and prohibitions against Catholics were annulled, and capable Catholics regained the right to pursue public office. As a result, the administrative influence of Catholics grew during the period 1795-1798, but after 1798 the Catholics were again disadvantaged. The reason for this was that the ‘enlightened’ Protestants considered Catholics insufficiently capable of performing the duties of public office.

In the southern province of Brabant, however, the situation seemed different. According to Count Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, who travelled through Brabant in 1818, Protestants were excluded from public office to the benefit of Catholics. An argument ensued between the Catholic lawyer Jan Hendrik Sassen from ’s-Hertogenbosch, who did not agree with Van Hogendorp , and Pastor Jacobus Justus Scholten from Haarlem, with each accusing the other of intolerance. The discussion took place with each side issuing pamphlets and was therefore a public matter.

The content of these pamphlets is subject of this article. The pamphlets provide us with insight into the views Catholics and Protestants held of each other at the beginning of the nineteenth century.