ABSTRACT
In January, 1795, in a memorable operation, the French cavalry rode into Amsterdam on the ice, and Dutch revolutionaries proclaimed the Batavian Republic. The Batavian Republic underwent a succession of changes, turned into the Kingdom of Holland under Louis Bonaparte in Napoleon's empire, and then in 1814 into the Kingdom of the Netherlands with the last stadtholder's son as the first Dutch king. The French victories in the Helvetic and Batavian Republics blunted the danger. The Helvetic Republic, in fact, differed from the other sister republics, and from France itself, in that the rural population tended to be more radical than the formerly privileged cities. The Italian universities were more alive than those of France or England. Thus the modern Italian tricolor, like the Polish national anthem, first sung by the Polish Legion, appeared in the Po valley in 1796. An Italian peculiarity, the use of castrated men as singers, was prohibited as an indefensible outrage to human dignity.
