Southern Netherlands - French Annexation

French Annexation

In the course of the French Revolution, the entire region (including territories that were never under Habsburg rule, like the Bishopric of Liège) was overrun by France in 1794 then annexed to the Republic (October 1, 1795), ending the separate existence of this territory as Spanish/Austrian Netherlands.

Only a minority of the population - mostly the local Jacobins and other members of "Societies of Friends of Liberty and Equality" in urban areas - supported the annexation. The majority were hostile to the French regime, above all because of the imposition of the assignat, wholesale conscription, and the ferocious antireligious policies of the French revolutionaries. The opposition was first led by the Catholic clergy, which became an irreducible enemy of the French Republic after it dissolved convents and monasteries and confiscated ecclesiastical properties, ordered the separation of Church and State, shut down the University of Louvain and other Catholic educational institutions, regulated church attendance and introduced divorce. In 1797, nearly 8000 priests refused to swear the newly-introduced Oath of Hatred of Kings ("serment de haine à la royauté"), and went into hiding to escape arrest and deportation. The situation, particularly in the religious field, eased with the rise to power of Bonaparte in 1799, but soon, the intensification of conscription, the police state and the Continental System, which brought ruin to Ostend and Antwerp, reignited opposition to French rule. During that period Belgium was divided into ten départements:

• Deux-Nèthes
• Dyle
• Escaut
• Forêts
• Jemmape
• Lys
• Meuse-Inférieure
• Ourthe
• Roer
• Sambre-et-Meuse

Austria confirmed the loss of its territories by the Treaty of Campo Formio, in 1797.

In anticipation of Napoleon's defeat in 1814, it was hotly debated inside Austrian ruling circles whether Austria should get the Southern Netherlands back or, in view of the experience gained after the War of the Spanish Succession about the difficulty of defending non contiguous possessions, whether she should not instead obtain contiguous territorial compensations in Northern Italy. This viewpoint won and the Congress of Vienna alloted the Southern Netherlands to the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands. After the Belgian Revolution of 1830, the region separated to become the independent Kingdom of Belgium.