ABSTRACT
This chapter describes both rifts and continuity in Dutch administration from the sixteenth century onward. It establishes not only whether the bourgeois elite groups with their regents' mentality maintained their position in the nineteenth century, but also whether the social, economic, political and administrative context had not made fundamental changes to the character of 'schikken en plooien'. The chapter agrees with Stuurman's criticism of Daalder. The small upper-layer of the population formed a close-knit category with a natural prestige often based on historic family ties and solid economic basis. In the south, and particularly in the smaller, more homogeneous Catholic communities, the conciliatory administrative culture of the regents continued to prevail. Pillarisation is thought by some to have been an answer to the 'threat' of modernisation of society at the end of the nineteenth century. Matters the average Dutch citizen had scarcely even thought about until then were now discussed in the public forum.
