The Enlightenment

In 1672, Holland was divided among “republicans” who advocated for a new, more democratic government and the “Orangists” who sought to preserve the country’s long-held monarchy.

Johan De Witt was among the most prominent and ardent republicans, a formidable political figure who wielded great influence on the Dutch political system for decades. But 1672 brought what many called a disaster year for the country and De Witt in particular. De Witt’s leadership, while successful and progressive in many respects, had left the Dutch military undermanaged and vulnerable. Soon, France and England attacked Holland resulting in heavy losses and enraging the Orangists.

After an unsuccessful assassination attempt on his life, De Witt resigned from office. But his resignation was not enough for De Witt’s detractors. Two weeks after his resignation, a mob sought out De Witt and his brother Cornelius to enact vengeance. What happened next has been immortalized through Alexander Dumas’ recount in The Black Tulip:

Every one of the miscreants, emboldened by his [Johan’s] fall, wanted to fire his gun at him, or strike him with blows of the sledge-hammer, or stab him with a knife or swords, every one wanted to draw a drop of blood from the fallen hero, and tear off a shred from his garments.

After having mangled, and torn, and completely stripped the two brothers, the mob dragged their naked and bloody bodies to an extemporised gibbet, where amateur executioners hung them up by the feet.

Then came the most dastardly scoundrels of all, who not having dared to strike the living flesh, cut the dead in pieces, and then went about the town selling small slices of the bodies of John and Cornelius at ten sous a piece.

De Witt’s enemies not only murdered him, but tortured him publicly, ripping his flesh from his body, and marched his dismembered carcass through the streets to the glee of the locals. According to some accounts, the mob even cut out and ate his heart mere moments after it stopped beating.

What’s most notable about this event now is perhaps that it’s not particularly notable historically. For millennia, humans engaged and even reveled in such public torture with little moral outrage. Most accepted such torture as a necessary and even helpful part of society,

What was unique about this particular lynching is what it inspired.

Baruch de Spinoza, who lived nearby, heard of the lynching and was incensed beyond measure. He was so devastated from the senseless torture that he had to be physically restrained from posting a placard in the town square decrying the murderers as ultimi barborium – the height of barbarity.

Spinoza was driven by the emerging ideals of The Enlightenment – a European intellectual and philosophical movement that espoused liberty, justice, humanism, separation of church and state, science, and progress. Unlike so many who had witnessed such acts before him, Spinoza saw the lynching as an assault on reason itself. De Witt’s lynching, perhaps more than any other single event, possessed Spinoza to write what are now considered some of the seminal texts in modern philosophy.

What Spinoza could not have known, was that he – along with Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, Voltaire, and many others – was writing some of the early chapters of The Story of Progress.