Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis

A romantic revolutionary.

Few politicians in the Netherlands and Belgium have captured the imagination as much as Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. Workers saw him as a savior, a hero who renounced the high society to which he belonged. Wherever he spoke, the halls were packed. He founded the magazine Recht voor Allen (Justice for All), and under his leadership, the Social Democratic League grew into a national party. His books and brochures were translated into many languages. The elite did not spare him. Domela was imprisoned for lèse-majesté, and Belgium and Germany banned him from entering the country. International intelligence agencies hunted him down.
Jan Willem Stutje dwells extensively on Domela's charisma. He presents him as an international luminary without whom socialism and anarchism would have had a less utopian image. Domela believed in the emancipatory power of knowledge and education. But he was also a romantic revolutionary driven by the need to restore unity and community. Fellow fighters and rivals like Multatuli, Pieter Jelles Toelstra, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Cesar De Paepe, and Edward Anseele come to life in this book. The tragedy of Domela's private life is also not left untouched: the man lost three wives and five children.
 

Jan Willem Stutje
Houtekiet/Amsab-ISG/Atlas Contact, Antwerp/Ghent/Amsterdam, 2012, 551 p., ill., hardcover