Alexander Gogel

Isaac Jan Alexander Gogel (10 December 1765 – 13 June 1821) was the first minister of finance of the Batavian Republic and the Kingdom of Holland. He married Catharina van Hasselt in 1800, and had three children.

Gogel was born in Vught, the son of Johan Martin Gogel, a German officer in the service of the army of the Dutch Republic, and of Alexandrina Crul. He had only a limited formal education and went to Amsterdam to apprentice for a career as a merchant at age 16, at the merchant house of Godart Kappel en Zoon. He started his own firm (Gogel, Pluvinot en Gildemeester) in 1791.

Gogel was a typical "self-made man", a product of the petty-broking and merchandising world of Amsterdam. Though later one of the most prominent pioneering Dutch economists, he did not receive a formal education in this field. As a typical self-taught man he tended to borrow his ideas from all the great texts from the day, from Adam Smith to the Physiocrats. He became an adherent of the Patriot party in these years, because of the corruption he saw in the government of Stadtholder William V, and the steep decline of the country, especially in economic terms, that he held that government responsible for. This caused a lifelong enmity toward the rivals of the Patriot party, the Orangists.

Even before the Batavian revolution of 1795 and the proclamation of the Batavian Republic he became involved in revolutionary politics, on a local and later national, level. After the January 22, 1798 coup d'état by general Herman Willem Daendels, he was appointed agent for finance and foreign affairs (pro tem) under the new Uitvoerend Bewind. However, the contraventions of the new, democratic, constitution of 1798 by the Vreede regime disaffected him, and he conspired with the other agents and again general Daendels to overthrow that regime in June, 1798. He then became a member of the Uitvoerend Bewind himself for a short while, till elections had been held for a new Representative Assembly.

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