Abstract
This research proposal focuses on the hitherto neglected political world of the Batavian Republic during the turbulent years between1795 and 1801. It intends to reconstruct the genesis of a democratic political culture through the analysis of three topics: the invention of democratic parliamentary practices, the interaction between politics and the new periodical press and the conceptual struggle over the normative political vocabulary. By doing so, it hopes to shed a new light on a period crucial to our understanding of the development of modern Dutch democracy.