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Professional Lobbying in Eighteenth-century Brussels: The Role of Agents in Petitioning the Central Government Institutions in the Habsburg Netherlands
Abstract
Abstract Historians have underscored the crucial importance of petitions both in early modern political practice and for relations between rulers and ruled. However, little is known about how formal requests were actually presented to rulers or the role of professional lobbyists. This article describes these individuals, using materials from a well-documented case, namely the court agents who were active in recommending petitions to the central government councils in eighteenth-century Brussels. Via these officially appointed lobbyists, citizens could obtain access to central figures in the decision-making process and express their personal grievances, desires and needs. This article argues that the efforts which court agents had to exert in order to present and recommend such petitions hint at the time- and money-consuming nature of petitioning. Court agents were supposed to offer their services free of charge to poor people, but opportunities for petitioning were in all probability less open to households of modest means. On the other hand, the court agents surely broadened the opportunities for petitioning in general, as—in exchange for a fee—anyone could draw on their expertise and contacts in government circles so as to be heard. Although patronage remained highly important throughout the eighteenth century, government accessibility increased in a more egalitarian manner, due to the work of these agents.
... Hilfe in der Art des »Antichambrierens« beziehungsweise des »Lobbying« 34 war oft auch nötig, wenn es darum ging, mit informellen Maßnahmen -zum Beispiel Vorinformation von Beteiligten, zu denen man Zugang hatte -die Annahme und Behandlung einer Bittschrift durch die Behörden zu beschleunigen, sei es in Bern des frühen 16., im Frankfurt des 17. oder im Paris und Amsterdam des 18. Jahrhunderts 35 . Wer im 18. Jahrhundert in Brüssel seine Supplik beim Weg durch die Amtsstuben »schützen« wollte, musste auf die Dienste der offiziell zugelassenen agents zurückgreifen, die beim Formulieren, Einreichen, Nachfragen und »Sollicitieren« behilflich waren 36 ...
... Such agents ensured that petitions were drafted correctly and reached the appropriate desk. 82 Conceivably, such intermediaries were familiar with the relative prospects of the various types of requests and notified applicants whose requests stood little chance of success. As such, it is feasible that the large collection of approved petitions is somewhat biased. ...
Medieval and early modern rulers commonly proclaimed that protecting the legal entitlements of the personae miserabiles, who included widows, orphans, the chronically ill and the poor, was among their principal duties. The entitlement of the poor to legal services was not a matter of grace but was in fact their good right. For example, widows, orphans, and other personae miserabili had the privilege of being heard in first instance before high courts, so as to save time and costs in pursuing their legal claims. Another example of manifest commitment to legal entitlement for the poor was the refusal of Philip II of Habsburg to consent to measures that would limit the jurisdiction of his Castilian chanceries; the measures had been proposed so as to limit the chanceries' ever-increasing workload, but, because they could also restrict indigents' access to such courts, were rejected by the monarch. At first glance, such inclusiveness appears to have been achieved, particularly in view of the large numbers of petty conflicts brought before formal law courts during the long sixteenth century, leading to a so-called legal revolution. Historians generally acknowledge that broad layers of early modern society made abundant use of civil adjudication in arranging their social and economic relations and interests.
This article argues for the centrality of petitions for colonial administration in the Dutch Atlantic. Moreover, through a study of non-Dutch petitioners, it demonstrates the diversity of individuals that exercised influence on colonial decision-making. This adds an important understanding of political exchanges to the well-established understanding of the Atlantic world as based on inter-imperial, cross-cultural, and multi-ethnic economic exchanges. The colonial inhabitants did not stand idly by as decisions in and from the European metropole or West India Company (WIC) administrators invaded their lives, but instead actively attempted to influence the rules and regulations that governed them. The space that allowed for this on-the-spot negotiation between the colonial government and those individuals it governed was open to virtually everybody and the topics covered were equally as varied, ranging from local decentralized authority to regulations for colonial commodities and issues of religion.
Cambridge Core - Global History - Citizens without Nations - by Maarten Prak
is devoted to properties of solid citric acid and aqueous and organic solutions of it. Detailed phase equilibria in the citric acid + water system (melting, freezing, boiling, solubilities and vapour pressures curves) are presented, correlated and thermodynamically analyzed. Dynamic and other physical properties (viscosities, diffusion coefficients, thermal and electrical conductivities, surface tensions and indices of refraction) are examined. Solubilities of citric acid in organic solvents and ternary citric acid + alcohol + water and citric acid + tertiary amine + water systems are also discussed.
Using the example of the military, the article examines the question of the mediation of power in the Austrian Netherlands during the 18th century. Referring to the requests of subjects to join foreign armies, the article shows, on the one hand, how the prohibition to join and the therefore compulsory duty to obtain dispensation helped the Habsburg monarchy to consolidate its supremacy and to control local elites in the southern Netherlands. On the other hand, the analysis reveals clearly how a systematic inclusion of the elites from the southern Netherlands into the Habsburg domain failed despite the attempts to underpin their claim to power through a prohibition to join foreign armies. The latter turned out to be a general norm which was flexibly treated in practice and which enabled the elites from the southern Netherlands to carry on choosing between different armies.
Current accounts of the capitalist and Protestant origins of the democratic public sphere are inconsistent and speculative. This empirical account explains the transition in political communication from norms of secrecy to appeals to public opinion. Popular communicative change in the English Revolution anticipated, in practice, the democratic theory of the public sphere when printing transformed a traditional instrument of communication-the petition. Petitions had medieval origins and traditions that upheld norms of secrecy and privilege in political communication. Economic and technical properties of printing-namely, heightened commercialism and the capacity to reproduce texts-demolished these norms by changing the scope and content of communication by petition. This practical innovation appears in all factions in the revolution. But among radical groups, the political use of printed petitions led to novel theories and to democratic speculation on constitutional provisions that would ensure the authority of public opinion in politics. This analysis contradicts key assumptions on communicative change that fuel pessimistic assessments of the modern public sphere in postmodernism and critical theory.
The article concentrates on the process of state formation rather than on problems of definition. Starting from this presumption it goes on to consider how social change might have affected political development in early modern England. Historians concerned with this problem usually concentrate on politics rather than on government, identifying the state with the institutions of central government. Here it is argued that a consideration of this problem should include a consideration of the organs of local government. These local institutions were often informal in structure and deeply embedded in local networks of social relations. In seeking to relate state formation to social change this aspect of the seventeenth-century state should be included. The article then goes on to suggest how this might be done and to illustrate some of the ways in which this would contribute to the field of seventeenth-century studies as a whole.
This article offers the thesis that petitioning by collective groups, whether occupational, regionally constituted, or simply the body of people called the commons, was an important form of political communication in the early sixteenth century which, although poorly documented and consequently overlooked by historians, allows us an entry into the world of popular politics. The article offers illustrations of the way in which petitions were employed within the city of York, by groups such as weavers or by the commons of East Anglia in 1549 and 1553. The right to petition could not be denied, but mass petitioning was viewed with apprehension by government. Nonetheless, petitioning may be seen as a conservative form of behaviour when compared to calls for insurrection.
73 ARAB, GR, 58/A, Dossier with request from Mertens Dossier with request from Villette to obtain commission as agent
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69 D'Huys, B.J. Dotrenge, 15.
70 D'Huys, B.J. Dotrenge, 10.
71 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Request from Albert Gambier, 1755.
72 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Extrait du protocole, 23 March 1791.
73 ARAB, GR, 58/A, Dossier with request from Mertens, October 1757.
74 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Request from Robert Antoine Leterme, 1744.
75 ARAB, GR, 58/A, Dossier with request from Villette to obtain commission as agent,
June 1785; GR, 1291/B, Report, 22 July 1784, signed by De Külberg; A rapporter au
grand bureau, 13 July 1785.
77 ARAB, GR, 60/B, Acte de taux pour l'agent Henrion contre ceux du Ban de Musson,
27 mei 1750; Rolle general du Restant des depens, 5 May 1749.
78 ARAB, Consults of the Privy Council, 418, 30 July 1750.
79 ARAB, GR, 60/A, Letter from the bailiff Jourdain to Henrion, Namur, 13 February
80 ARAB, Council of Finance, 2362, Taxes des droits d'expédition, 1733 Audiëntie en secretarie van de Geheime Raad (1413-1794)
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Acte de taux pour l'agent Henrion à charge de l'avocat Martin Joseph Gobert, Brussels, 30 March 1753.
80 ARAB, Council of Finance, 2362, Taxes des droits d'expédition, 1733; Hugo De
Schepper, " Audiëntie en secretarie van de Geheime Raad (1413-1794), " in De centrale
overheidsinstellingen van de Habsburgse Nederlanden (1482-1795), ed. E. Aerts, M. Baelde,
et al. (Brussels 1994), 370.
Edit de l'Impératrice Reine sur les titres et marques d'honneur ou de noblesse, le port d'armes, d'armoiries et autres distinctions
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CAL, Oud Archief, 154, Spécification des honnorairs et débourses.
60 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Report on meeting of Privy Council, 16 June 1756. On status
symbols, see Piet Lenders, Gent, een stad tussen traditie en verlichting (1750-1787): een
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In this document, he claims to have been "chief clerk" of the two agents mentioned. 66 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Cover letter Philippe François Gerard
- G R Arab
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ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Cover letter Philippe François Gerard, 14 July 1784. In this
document, he claims to have been "chief clerk" of the two agents mentioned.
66 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Cover letter Philippe François Gerard, 14 July 1784.
67 ARAB, GR, 1291/B, Mémoire sur un règlement à porter, 29 May 1758.
De Ambtenaren, V, Wethouders en stedelijke functionarissen in de 16 de , 17 de en 18 de eeuw
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R. Boumans, "De Ambtenaren, V, Wethouders en stedelijke functionarissen in de 16 de, 17 de en 18 de eeuw," in Flandria Nostra: Ons land en ons volk.
Zijn standen, beroepen door de tijden heen, ed. J.L. Broeckx, C. de Clercq, J. Dhondt et al.
(Antwerpen, 1960), 418.
Audiëntie en secretarie van de Geheime Raad (1413-1794)
- E Aerts
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Schepper, "Audiëntie en secretarie van de Geheime Raad (1413-1794)," in De centrale
overheidsinstellingen van de Habsburgse Nederlanden (1482-1795), ed. E. Aerts, M. Baelde,
et al. (Brussels 1994), 370.
60/A, Envelope with letter from Philippe Louis Desaze to agent Saint Martin
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 60/A, Envelope with letter from Philippe Louis Desaze to agent Saint
Martin, 1740.
60/A, Envelope with letter from Gobert to agent Henrion
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 60/A, Envelope with letter from Gobert to agent Henrion, 26 August
1750.
60/A, Testimony by clerks Tomson and Savary
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 60/A, Testimony by clerks Tomson and Savary, 16 August 1751.
58/A, Dossier with request from Mertens
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 58/A, Dossier with request from Mertens, October 1757.
58/A, Dossier with request from Villette to obtain commission as agent
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 58/A, Dossier with request from Villette to obtain commission as agent,
June 1785;
Acte de taxation pour l'agent De Chentinnes contre les échevins de la keure de Gand
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 60A/B, Acte de taxation pour l'agent De Chentinnes contre les échevins
de la keure de Gand, 2 August 1737.
Acte de taux pour l'agent Henrion contre ceux du Ban de Musson, 27 mei 1750
- G R Arab
ARAB, GR, 60/B, Acte de taux pour l'agent Henrion contre ceux du Ban de Musson,
27 mei 1750; Rolle general du Restant des depens, 5 May 1749.
78 ARAB, Consults of the Privy Council, 418, 30 July 1750.