Excises, Postal Services, Oaths of Office and Property Taxes: How Small Administrative Adjustments Led to Large Changes in Intergovernmental Relations

Abstract

Before the French Revolution, the choice between centralization and decentralization was between being able to reach down to the individual citizen, and having the ability to make policy on a national scale. Scholarly orthodoxy has it that it was French revolutionary armies that would serve as the great reconciler of these two mutually exclusive choices. By exporting the so-called “Napoleonic administrative model,” they not only triggered stark centralization all over the European continent, but also caused much deeper penetration of central government into the lives of individual citizens. Yet recent research has made it clear that in most countries these two tendencies had long indigenous roots as well. In this article research is presented into pre-Napoleonic centralization and administrative penetration in one of those countries: the Dutch Republic. It is an exploration into the question of how central government came to reach down to the spaces we, as individual citizens, used to cultivate almost on our own, only a few centuries ago.