A Brill Calendar: February 1

The Napoleonic Kingdom of Holland

Few periods in the history of Leyden University and activity associated with it have been less fertile for education and scholarship than the years known as ‘Napoleonic Era’.

Bonaparte, harnessed the achievements of an unprecedented national revolution for his personal dreams, plans and campaigns in the first years of the 19th century, ending on June 18, 1815, on the blood-drenched fields of Waterloo. He was seen by most contemporaries outside France as an ogre, devouring Europe. The subcontinent suffered ubiquitously under the toll of his military machine, which fed itself on men, money, materials, food supplies and live-stock.

The very size of the Corsican’s feverishly growing imperial domain saw to it that each European region – a number dwarfing the number of European national states – suffered in its own way from Napoleon’s strategy. In the country that became a ‘Kingdom of the Netherlands’ due to the Congress of Great European Powers in Vienna after Waterloo, the situation was specific as well. The Corsican saw the Low Countries as a mere effluence of French rivers, Rhine included; and annexed that land-mass in 1810 to France in its entirety, after he had allowed Louis, one of his brothers, since 1806 to rule a short-lived ‘Kingdom of Holland’.

In a Napoleonic mind-set, bent on grand military operations, it stands to reason to concentrate scholarly troops from the new accretion to France in its strategic head-quarters: as from February 1, 1812, the year ending in Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, Leyden University was officially incorporated in the one of Paris.