A Brill Calendar: April 7

The Birth of the Dutch Constitution

Few Leyden Professors shaped the political structure of the Kingdom of The Netherlands as fundamentally as a son of German immigrants, Johan Rudolf Thorbecke: (Zwolle, Overijsel January 14 1798 – The Hague, Holland June 5 1872).

In early spring 1848, almost single-handedly, Thorbecke - in a small stone-house in the backyard of his Leyden residence - authored a new Constitution for his country. And this in the year that many nations in Europe burst forth with a new revolutionary spirit! On Saturday April 7 the document was completed, in Thorbecke’s impeccably fastidious long-hand. Its consequences would be fundamental.

Once adopted, it transformed a parliament of limited influence, (one that pleased a rather uncouth and authoritarian monarch), into an entity controlling national legislation as well as the executive. And to think a lowly scholar had formulated this new blue-print... Thorbecke had been teaching history & law in Leyden since 1831. Before that time, when The Netherlands still included modern Belgium, he had served as Professor at Ghent University, teaching and lecturing on political and diplomatic history as well as on statistics, a new domain of inquiry. His education and ideas had been forged in the historical-juridical Prussian-German School of Karl von Savigny in Göttingen and in Giessen.

When the States of Holland elected the Leyden Professor for office in 1840 - the year the first King Willem of The Netherlands abdicated his Throne - Thorbecke’s career as a politician proper started. His liberal approach to constitutional arrangements as expressed in a published annotation on the existing constitution in 1839, is a prologue to a grand metamorphosis into a statesman. Once more, Leyden University furnished to Dutch Society scholarly and intellectual constituents for renewal.