Until well into the 19th century, clergy disapproved of reading by the common people. Reading would make lazy, a waste of time or mislead simple people. Novels were especially bad:they had a dulling effect on the conscience and weakened the will.
“No one needs prior leave to express thoughts and feelings through the printing press, save everyone's responsibility under the law.” So it was in the new Constitution of 1848, and so it is still, in exactly the same terms, in the present Constitution. . Freedom of the press was not new in 1848, because formulated in a more complicated way, this right was already laid down in 1814 in the first constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The legally enshrined freedom of the press was then a stark contrast to the turbulent years of French rule, in which there had been a lot of censorship.
Freedom of the press did not mean preventive censorship ('prior leave'), but it did not rule out repressive censorship:the government could ban printed matter once published and prosecute the writer, printer or publisher.
Also, the threat of repressive censorship could be so strong that writers or publishers were cautious in advance, even though they could theoretically publish whatever they wanted. For example, both King Willem I and King Willem II are known to have been able to silence journalists through bribery. For example, Eillert Meeter, a republican journalist who published the wildly popular scandal newspaper De Ooijevaar full, bribed to stop discrediting the court.
The Stork was one of those little 10 by 16 cm papers we call Lilliputians. A high tax on newsprint, the daily newspaper stamp, was the cause of the creation of these newspapers, because they did not have to pay tax. The Lilliputians were mainly magazines with gossip about the court or the elite and juicy tales of murder and manslaughter, but the later socialist pamphlets denouncing the deplorable living conditions of the workers also used this format to avoid the newspaper stamp. For example, this tax, which was only abolished in 1869, was an effective means of preventing excessive dissemination of in-depth critical articles.
'Cologne pot girl'
So the constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, but that doesn't mean that there weren't occasional "issues" about which the intellectual elite got excited and which nicely show us the limits of this freedom of the press. The protagonist in one of those issues was the writer Conrad Busken Huet (1826-1886), who had a great talent for getting into trouble. Under the pseudonym Fantasio, he wrote an article about Queen Emma in 1885 in the Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandch Indië. He found that King William II's second wife had numerous enemies, who were primarily annoyed by her German origin. Busken Huet continued:'They can't bear it that this destitute young woman, whom they call without detours a Cologne potgirl, has thrown away her youth out of ambition to a decrepit man.'
In the Indies, the publisher of the newspaper was immediately prosecuted for lèse-majesté, and when the newspaper arrived in the Netherlands six weeks later, the homeland was in turmoil. Everyone knew that Fantasio and Busken Huet were one and the same person. His reputation, if not all that great, dropped to below zero, but legally he was out of harm's way. It was very difficult to prove that Busken Huet was behind the pseudonym Fantasio. In addition, he lived in Paris and nationals who did not live within the country's borders could not be prosecuted.
At about the same time as the 'Cologne pottemeid' came the most famous issue of the 19th century:that of King Gorilla. At the beginning of 1887 a small brochure appeared, cheap and in large circulation. In an advertisement in the socialist magazine Right for All the brochure was touted as "the biography of King Gorilla, reverently dedicated to our revered King, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday." The tone resembles that of other tributes, but the title of the brochure suggests that the content was completely different. And yes, the brochure depicted King Gorilla's sexual escapades, his frequent drunkenness, his stupidity, his total lack of interest in affairs of state and his indifference to the poverty of the people. The brochure was a great success and went through several reprints.
At first sight it may be surprising that the government did not take action, because the author was known for some chapters of the brochure.
The leader of the socialists, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, had recently been convicted of lese majesty for a much smaller offense. Anonymous was in Right for All written that the king did not make much of his job and as the responsible editor-in-chief, Domela disappeared behind bars for a year for this remark. 'King Gorilla' was probably a revenge exercise by the socialists, because the brochure appeared just after their beloved leader had reported to the Utrecht prison amid massive interest. The socialists knew all too well that the government would not dare to act against this brochure. Implicitly, she would then admit that there was some resemblance between King Gorilla and William III.
Embarrassingly, it wasn't that hard to show that resemblance. For example, in the brochure we read that in a foreign hotel, “he [displayed] naked as a swine in the garden, while ladies passed by.” A Yankee, who had stayed in the same place with his wife and daughters, threatened him for his when he didn't dress properly, and charged him with "assault against morals" to the police. That was stated in the brochure, but it was rumored in court circles that at the king's chambers on Lake Geneva, 'someone stood on the balcony with nothing over the bare body but an overcoat well buttoned up in no parts'. . The government knew better than to draw extra attention to the contents of this brochure by confiscating them.
Brave ancestors?
And what about pornography? The printing of pornography was not prohibited by the government, but its distribution was. In Amsterdam in 1895 the police managed to seize 'a hundred thousand dirty books and photographs'. Themes were preferably monastic and court scandals, white slaves and willing widows. We also know Van Klaveren's Realistic Library, which excelled in titles that leave little to the imagination, such as Love of a fallen woman, Girl Sacrifices and Hercules Eros. Many of these books were on the border of the admissible or just over it. It is difficult for us to determine exactly where the vice squad drew that line.
Moreover, pornography was not always immediately recognizable as such. This genre was sometimes dressed in a quasi-medical or sociological guise. For example, Van Klaveren's Volksbibliotheek carried titles such as Learning course of sexual science and Theory and Practice of Sexual Love throughout all ages among all nations of the earth. They did not have a purely informative purpose. The elite often read spicy titles in French and a simple officer, if he realized that it was a pornographic work, would wait to speak to a high-ranking gentleman or a distinguished bookseller. This was somewhat hypocritical, because the elite in particular were terribly concerned about the reading culture of the people. Emile Zola's novels were also very popular with the genteel bourgeoisie, while they were absolutely forbidden in popular libraries, except in socialist circles. This brings us to another area, not that of legal censorship, but informal censorship, where some people for religious or moral reasons forbid others from reading certain books or other printed matter.
Reading by the common people
Until well into the 19th century, many Catholic and Protestant clergy strongly disapproved of reading by the common people. Reading would mostly make lazy, a waste of time or mislead simple people. Novels were especially bad:they dulled the conscience, made superficiality, weakened the will, poisoned the heart, aroused the desire for money and self-indulgence, and caused an addiction to reading. Women and young girls, from both the populace and the elite, were vulnerable because of their easily stimulated imaginations and their tendency to nervousness. Too much reading aroused an excessive and unhealthy sensuality in the weaker sex and led to neglect of their caring duties. In short, reading too much, especially of novels, ultimately led to destruction of body and mind for both men and women. The endless repetition of these kinds of arguments suggests that not everyone followed the advice of the pastor or pastor.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, people's views on reading changed somewhat. Because more and more people could read and had some free time to read, it was a struggle. Prominent Catholics and Protestants also realized that reading need not always be a pernicious influence. If the people read the right books, printed matter was an excellent means of inculcating confessional truths or propagating political views on their own supporters. Catholics and Protestants, however, used different methods to protect the people against the wrong and therefore prohibited literature.
Index and inner censorship
The Index of Forbidden Books enjoys widespread publicity, although only Catholics had to stick to it. Less well known is that the Catholic Book Law consisted of the Index that condemned only individual books or the entire oeuvre of writers, and papal laws that listed prohibited genres. For example, Dutch Catholics were forbidden to glance at the socialist newspaper Het Volk or delve into Multatuli's books. But neither The People, nor did Multatuli's works ever appear on the Index. They were forbidden by the papal laws, because they belonged to the genre that undermined the foundations of the Catholic faith.
The Catholic struggle against the forbidden books aimed to protect the flock by building an impenetrable bastion. If only the elite followed the precepts of the Book Law and the people only borrowed from Catholic loan libraries, nothing could go wrong. The library collections themselves were carefully screened:not a book came in that said anything negative about the Catholic faith. Of course, immoral books or books propagating socialism were also definitely out of the question. Lists of recommended books should help the librarian to make responsible choices.
Protestants were equally concerned about the reading culture of the people. As with the Catholics, destructive power was attributed to bad literature. If 'young men' committed themselves to the wrong books, they were lost for no reason. Here too, doubts of faith or even apostasy, socialism and immorality were lurking. Like the Catholics, the Protestants therefore had their own family magazines, popular authors and book series, in addition to a large number of their own folk libraries. Young people had to be protected from the disastrous influence of bad literature, adults had to be so discerning that they would immediately shut a banned book. But unlike with the Catholics, there was no external instrument, but an 'inner censorship' that helped the faithful in the choice of books.
The numerous public libraries of the Maatschappij tot Nut van 't Algemeen were in theory neutral, but when studying the collections it becomes clear what the distinguished library administrators saw as undesirable for the people. Some of Louis Couperus' books, such as The Silent Force or The Mountain of Light, did not make it through, presumably because of the decadent atmosphere, fatalistic tenor and vague homoerotic themes. Zola was also absolutely taboo, like other naturalist writers. In any case, the Eighties were scarcely represented in these libraries.
Commercial Libraries
While the anti-reading culture clearly began to fade towards the end of the century, it was much less so when it came to women and girls. "Women who read" were still seen as dangerous, and the female soul as delicate and easily impressionable. But there is plenty of evidence that neither women nor men of the populace cared much for the admonitions of the clergy. The commercial lending libraries flourished around 1900 like never before. Catholics and Protestants, women and men could borrow what they wanted for little money. Because what did the librarian care if Zola was on the Index? We know that the commercial libraries had very extensive collections of the better kind, associated with renowned bookshops. We know almost nothing about the collections of the smaller commercial libraries. It cannot be ruled out that Van Klaveren's Realistic Library was on the shelves there, alongside the popular sentimental and sensational novels, the Wild West stories and the detectives. If we are to believe the opponents, it was.
And the elite? She had her own books on the shelf at home, or borrowed novels through small reading groups where books passed from hand to hand. Decent reading museums, large libraries for the upper class, mainly housed novels by well-known writers. The