to it – Napoleon felt his brother Louis had been too generous in giving out medals. The order was headed by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Nompère de Champagny as Grand Chancellor and the Dutchman Maarten van der Goes van Dirxland as Grand Treasurer and they and the order had a joint base in the Hôtel du Châtelet at Paris. The knights of the Order of the Reunion had the right to bear the title "Knight" and, when they enjoyed an annual income of 3,000 francs, could also receive letters of nobility making them and their descendants Knights of the Empire. Charles-François Lebrun, duc de Plaisance and Napoleon's representative in Amsterdam as "Prins-stadhouder", oversaw the order and its membership numbers. Louis continued to wear ‘his’ Order of the Union throughout his life and old-established nobles did not receive the Order of the Reunion. The Dutch statesmen Godert van der Capellen, Anton Reinhard Falck and Vischer did not accept the Order of the Reunion, thinking it humiliating to the Netherlands. Van Capellen noted that "the [Order's] oath was of such a nature to me that I forever refused it, with better opportunities to cooperate in restoring our independence. All the other Grand Crosses, Commanders and Knights of the Dutch Order of the Union thought the new Order was just [the Order of the Union] under a different name and signed up to it." Knights of the new Order were appointed right up to the end of the First Empire in 1814. On their initial restoration in 1814 the Bourbons neither abolished nor awarded the Order of the Reunion and Napoleon awarded it during the Hundred Days. On 28 July 1815 Louis XVIII of France abolished it, asking its knights to return their gold and silver badges to the chancellery of the Legion d’Honneur. Those returned included few from the Netherlands since the cross was the replacement for the Order of the Union and the Dutch – having seen their country looted and drained of manpower for so long by the French – were unwilling to send their gold and silver awards back to Paris. Numbers The target number of members for the order was at least 10,000 knights, 2,000 commanders and 500 grand cross members, though in the end it only reached 527 (59 from Holland), 90 (21 from Holland) and 64 (29 from Holland) respectively. According to a statement by Van