The Day a Creditor Nation Became a Debtor
One hundred million guldens. That number, written on the treaty paper, summed up in a single line the fall of a nation that had once lent money to the courts of Europe.
The Fall of One Hundred Million Guldens
The Treaty of The Hague of 1795 speaks in numbers. An indemnity of one hundred million guldens to be paid by the newly formed Batavian Republic to France. In addition, the Republic was to bear the costs of the French troops stationed within its borders.
Until recently, this nation had lent money to courts all over Europe. Now, it found itself on the side paying a huge sum. The words of revolution spoke of liberty, but the words of the treaty were written in the numbers of the gulden.
The King Who Did Not Obey His Brother
In 1806, Emperor Napoleon placed his brother, Louis Bonaparte, on the throne, creating the Kingdom of Holland. This king, however, did not act as his brother intended. He repeatedly clashed with the Emperor over the enforcement of the Continental Blockade against Britain and over conscription. Then, in 1810, he abdicated the throne.
At the end of his short reign, he left behind a legacy. The minting of coins, which had been divided by province, was reorganized, and coinage was centralized at the mint in Utrecht. In this country where each province had once struck its own coins, the place for striking coins became one.
The Year Interest Was Cut to One-Third
From 1810 to 1813, the Netherlands was annexed by the French Empire. In the year the country itself vanished from the map, its financial backbone was also broken. This was the Tiercering—a measure to pay only one-third of the interest on the national debt.
For two centuries, it had been a nation of people living on interest. That interest was now cut to one-third. The Tiercering uprooted a way of life built on two hundred years of credit.
The Morning Decimalization Arrived
In 1813, the House of Orange returned. Willem I became Sovereign Prince, and in 1815, king of the new kingdom. In 1814, the bank of issue, De Nederlandsche Bank, was founded. It was a central bank that issued banknotes, different from the earlier banks that transferred deposits on ledgers.
In 1816, the new kingdom's currency law was established. One gulden equals one hundred cents. The old world of one gulden to twenty stuivers came to an end, and the world of the decimal system arrived. The models were the franc of revolutionary France and the dollar of the United States of America. The nation that had taught the world the art of credit now learned decimalization from its conqueror and its former pupil.
However, old words do not die easily. The name stuiver lived on as a nickname for the five-cent coin until the twentieth century.
More in Stories of money
The Wealth of the Realm, and a Handful of Earth
The edict declaring "All the wealth of the realm is mine" continues immediately with "even a handful of earth is welcome." In an age when the country was exhausted by plague and rebellion, copper was gathered to construct the Great Buddha.
Waiting for the War to End, While Printing Counterfeit Money
Adolf Burger, a printer forced to forge British pound notes in a Nazi concentration camp. We trace the inside of Operation Bernhard through his own testimony and the records of museums and research.
The Mint Opened by a Usurper
In 2010, 52,503 Roman coins emerged from British soil. This enormous hoard tells the story of an era when a usurper used coinage as a tool of governance and opened the first mint in London.
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