Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 127, Nummer 3, 2014

This article focuses on the repression following the Brussels revolt of 1717-19, and reflects upon the sphere of action of early modern governments in composite monarchies. This insurrection has often been presented as a personal struggle between guild dean Anneessens and Minister Plenipotentiary Prié. I argue that in order to understand the curbing of the disorders, many more (f)actors have to be taken into account. Prié could not prosecute the rioters without the cooperation of other office-holders and institutions. Moreover the actions of the government can be assessed only if the distance between Brussels and Vienna and the communication problems between both cities are considered. I conclude that Prié was not and could not have been a vindictive tyrant as has long been asserted in the Belgian-nationalistic myth concerning the Brussels revolt.

The phenomenon of pillarization is a process of social division according to party-political lines that developed at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century in Belgium and the Netherlands. Parties created networks to provide for their supporters from the cradle to the grave. The literature on this subject does not show whether contemporaries were conscious of the so-called pillars. By making a conceptual history of pillarization between 1899 and 1950 for Belgium and the Netherlands, this article tries to give an insight into the experience and thoughts of contemporaries witnessing the development of this social separation. Because the concept of pillarization is problematic, the actual subject of this research will not be the concept, but the semantic field of pillarization. The history of this field shows dynamics of consciousness and sheds a new light on the relationship between the Belgian and Dutch experiences.

This article explores the inner world of the German army of occupation in the Netherlands. To this end it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of German Feldpost letters as historical sources. Feldpost letters have important advantages over retrospective accounts such as veteran interviews. In some cases they reveal otherwise hardly accessible spheres of experience: they record instant processes of sensemaking, early emotions, and shifting frames of normalcy. This study deals with a limited sample of letters, and elaborates questions of identity construction, time/place orientation, and the nature of encounters between Germans and Dutch. Confronted with a supposedly fellow Germanic world, German soldiers recorded feelings of curiosity as well as superiority. However, their writings also reflect much wider European mental maps, in which ‘Dutch’ events always remained foreign and peripheral, even when soldiers served in the Netherlands for a long time.

Seventy years ago, on 6 June 1944, the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. For long, especially during the Cold War, Western historians saw this as the decisive turning point of the Second World War. However, more recent historiography suggests that the fundamental battles were fought between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, on the Eastern Front. It was here that the majority of the Wehrmacht fought, where it suffered most of its casualties, and where it became clear at an early stage that the Third Reich could not win. This article discusses recent publications on the war in Europe and the Eastern Front in particular while at the same time addressing the question why, compared with the fighting in Western Europe, the war between Germany and the USSR was so ruthless and barbaric, a total war or Vernichtungskrieg in the literal meaning of the word.

Until 2013 Dutch biographers neglected the lives of the first three kings of the Netherlands. Three experienced historians have now written well-researched and innovative biographies which raise this genre of historiography to a high level. Within the large United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-30) the autocratic William I presented himself as the father of the national household. William II posed as a triumphant general in Europe, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. They prepared the ground on which the wilful William III could present himself as King of Peace and hero of the Dutch battle against floods, within a kingdom that had been reduced in size. Ministers and parliament intermittently succeeded in directing internal politics at the expense of the king. Notwithstanding the loss of royal power and the ticklish aspects of these reigns, hereditary kingship became sufficiently charismatic for loyalty to the dynasty to be shown by a considerable majority of the Dutch.

Natalie Zemon Davis (1928) is known as one of the most creative and influential historians in the field of academic and popular history. Over the last four decades, she has published nine monographs and over seventy articles, many of which have become classics in the study of early modern history and gender. In this interview, Davis discusses her current research project on the plantations of eighteenth-century colonial Suriname, as well as several themes and research methods from her earlier work, and future challenges for the field of historical research.