A Brill Calendar: October 16

The "Battle of Nations"

Few crucial and decisive battles in the history of warfare can compare in terms of far reaching international consequences with the ‘Battle of Nations’ near Leipzig, Central Germany.

The Armageddon between Napoleon’s armies and the combined allied forces of Russia, Austria and Great Britain started October 16, 1813, lasted four days and killed some hundred thousand men & boys in total; roughly fifty thousand in each side. All over Europe people started to believe that Bonaparte’s Empire would now be over and done with real soon.

In Holland the social and political situation was unique. Since 1810 the regions once known as the Republic of the Seven Provinces, for a time ‘Batavian Republic’ and, finally, ‘Kingdom of Holland’ under Napoleon’s brother, Louis, was annexed to France by the Corsican who used to observe that they were nothing more than the emanation of French rivers. By the same token, all Dutch centres of policy and learning, Leyden included, had become subservient subsidiaries to centralized control emanating from Paris; ‘à la Francaise’.

Already, before the battle’s aftermath on October 19, 1813, Dutch intellectuals, officials and regents took action and sounded Willem, Prince of Orange, and son of the last Stadtholder whether he would consider to play a key-role in the liberation, now at hand, as a ‘Sovereign Prince’. It is seldom that so momentous a proposal – implying the birth of a brand-new Kingdom on the remains of an old, derelict Republic, defunct in legal terms, was so quickly accepted. Willem arrived on November 30th, 1813 in Holland, the Province of his birth, eager to modernize a society he saw as his private enterprise awaiting the deft hand of an astute merchant; but only named ‘King’ after Napoleon’s final and crushing defeat at Waterloo, near Brussels, June 18th, 1815.