Small gestures in a big world: The Hague 1869

Abstract

K Baedeker’s travel guide to Belgium and Holland said of The Hague that no other Dutch city had so many pretty, broad streets, tall stately homes and large open squares.1 A person who had not visited any other major European city might well think that The Hague was a resplendent place, comparable to the grand capitals of nineteenth-century Europe. But people arriving from Paris, London, St Petersburg, Vienna, Brussels, Rome or Berlin – like the foreign guests of the seventh international statistical congress – would have thought they had landed in a provincial town. The city centre must have made a modest, even small-town, impression. According to the census conducted at the end of 1869, The Hague had a population of just over 90,000, far less than the cities where the congress had been held before. You could walk across the entire city in a good quarter of an hour. In those days, Hollandsche Spoor railway station lay outside the city limits. One side of Stationsweg, the road that ran straight to the city centre from the station, offered ‘a free and unobstructed view ... charmingly alternated with tastefully planted pleasure gardens, straight leafy lanes, fertile orchards and opulent fields, ornamented with handsome, gambolling livestock’.2 So much green in and around the city was an important feature of the urban landscape at a time when the pleasure of the respectable bourgeoisie depended on beauty, refined entertainments and fresh air. The Hague was the appropriate setting for the seat of government of a nation that proudly displayed its conventionality and self-restraint, preferably within view of the neighbours. Anno 1869 the city was worthy of its stately full name, ’s-Gravenhage. The population of The Hague grew steadily throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, not because local trade and industry had any particular pulling power but because of the influx of civil servants, diplomats and servants of the Royal Household. From 1830 onward, the government was no longer