Netherlands history in the 19th century was marked by a combination of extreme territorial-constitutional instability and firmly entrenched collective memories. The memories went back mainly to the period 1550-1680: the Reformation; the arduous but ultimately successful revolt, led by the stadtholders from the house of Orange-Nassau, against the Spanish Crown; and the ensuing “Golden Age” period of colonial expansion and artistic flourish. These memories had throughout the 18th century been kept alive mainly at municipal level, in Holland’s robust city cultures. Under the centralizing kingship of Louis Bonaparte (1806-10) and William I (1814-40) they were transformed into a nationally Dutch cultural canon.

The names of Louis Bonaparte and William I indicate the discontinuities of what “Holland” stood for at successive moments. The old federation of the United Provinces was broken up in a French-style republican revolution in 1795, leading to a short-lived “Batavian Republic” under French tutelage. Napoleon imposed his brother Louis on what he reconstituted as a “Kingdom of Holland” in 1806; Louis’s kingship put in place many of the central cultural institutions that marked the transition from a loose ancien-régime federal republic into a 19th-century centralized monarchy. After an interlude during which the kingdom was incorporated into Napoleon’s empire (provoking a great deal of increasingly patriotic and nationalistically Dutch disaffection), William I, son of the last Orange-Nassau stadtholder, was reinstated to rule as king over a mid-size buffer state between France and the German Federation: the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. This United Kingdom initially covered the entire territory of what is now the Benelux (Belgium, Luxemburg and the present-day Netherlands successor state).

William counted as a restored prince and a reaffirmation of the country’s ancien-régime independence only in the northern, Dutch half of that United Kingdom. In the south (the erstwhile Austrian Netherlands and Prince-Bishopric of Liège), he was a fresh imposition of foreign rule, and while there was some support for him in “Orangist” circles in Flanders, the Hollandocentric imposition of Dutch as an official language, even (in part) for the Walloon and French-speaking provinces, provoked disaffection. In addition, the country was deeply split along confessional lines, with a Protestant majority only in the north, a dominant Catholic population in the southern parts and a Liberal, often masonic or Saint-Simonian bourgeoisie in the southern cities. The United Kingdom fell apart following the Belgian secession in 1830, which was grudgingly accepted in the North in 1839. Territorial compromises meant that the Netherlands has an uneasy relationship with its eastern neighbour, since some territories under the Dutch Crown were also member-states of the German Federation: Limburg and Luxembourg (over which crises occurred in 1848 and 1867). The process of Prussian expansion led to a growing climate of apprehension as to the continuing viability of an independent Dutch state, fanned also by the threatened extinction of the Orange-Nassau dynasty. The succession was only secured in the person of a young and late-born princess, Wilhelmina. When she succeeded to the throne in 1892, the personal union with Luxembourg was severed (since succession in the female line was constitutionally impossible there), and the Netherlands gained its present-day territorial outline.

Meanwhile, the country, unilingually Dutch since the Belgian secession (with the exception of Frisian in the north-east, which however, remained a regional subsidiary and never developed serious emancipationist or secessionist ambitions), was deeply riven along confessional lines. The country’s Protestant Church underwent a series of doctrinal splits from 1834 onwards, and with political leaders like the historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer developed a type of conservative nationalism heavily predicated on the country’s Protestantism and its historical ties with the house of Orange-Nassau (“God, the Netherlands and Orange”). Conversely, the sizeable Catholic minority became more assertive and Ultramontanist from the mid-1840s onwards. Towards the end of the century these confessional divisions would harden into party-political lines over the issue of secular or religious-based education, and the country’s public sphere fractured into separate circuits for the country’s different world-views: Protestant, Catholic, Liberal, Social-Democratic, each with their own organizational and social infrastructures. This compartmentalization also affected historical memories: the centenary commemorations of the various key events of the Revolt against Spain, from the 1860s onwards, were burdened by antagonistic interpretations fed by contemporary confessional loyalties.

Even so, cultural nationalism in the mid- to late-19th-century Netherlands continued to focus on the glory days of the Revolt, the colonial expansion and the Golden Age of painting and poetry; also, the dynastic charisma of the house of Orange-Nassau, as a present-day continuation of the leaders of the period 1550-1680, fed into a sense of Dutch nationality (in which the Protestant tradition continued to enjoy a privileged position). By 1880, the national anthem written in 1816 (“Netherlandic blood”) began to be ousted by the revived 16th-century party hymn “Wilhelmus”, originally a vindication of the rebellion leader William “the Silent”, prince of Orange.

Cultural nationalism was largely confined to the bandwidth of this official historicism. Later on in the century an ethnolinguistic sense of linguistic solidarity developed with the Flemish Movement in Belgium, and also with the beleaguered Boer colonies of southern Africa in their resistance against British imperial expansion. Flemings and Boers were celebrated alongside the Dutch themselves in verse and novels, and in 1895 a “Pan-Netherlandic Union” was established to promote a transnational ethnic Dutchness. This Greater Netherlandic movement enjoyed elite support in the decades after 1900, and developed a populist and, later, Fascist wing, both in Flanders and in the Netherlands, after 1918.