the area. He worked in the East Indies until 1848, when he received an official reprimand from the Dutch government for publicizing his views critical of colonialism; consequently he was forced to resign. 1848 protest Van Hoëvell played an important part in the short-lived protest in Batavia that has been called the "1848 Batavian Revolution". Partly inspired by the February 1848 uprising in Paris, Batavian citizens began to challenge the authorities; one of their grievances was an 1842 decree that dictated that positions in the upper echelons of the Dutch administration could be held only by those who had received the appropriate certificate from the Royal Academy in Delft. The measure discriminated against both "Dutch-born and creole Dutch" who could not or did not want to send their children to the Netherlands for a decade of education. The measure also discriminated against the class referred to as Indo-Europeans, who were thus barred from promotion above the level of "the lowliest civil service jobs." As a consequence of this discrimination across racial barriers, the May 1848 protest could draw a mixed group of citizens, "identified as 'Europeans,' 'creoles,' and 'colored'" by the authorities. Van Hoëvell emerged as one of the "principal organizers" in the protest and called a meeting, with official approval, to discuss "better access to government jobs for locally born colonizers through expanded educational offerings". Starting on 17 May, van Hoëvell and others met many times with Governor-General Jan Jacob Rochussen to discuss what kind of meeting was to be held and what demands would be made. During this time, van Hoëvell was able to move the proposed meeting place from a private residence to the central hall of De Harmonie, the club house of the Batavian citizen's society, and he organized transportation for whoever wished to come, including his own congregation. The organizers received permission from Rochussen for their meeting since they had argued that their grievances were social matters, not "matters of state," and that they did not form a political threat to the government. However, on 20 May van Hoëvell printed the kind of anti-government rhetoric he had been asked to refrain from in a journal he published. There were also signals at other public events of growing unease among the locally born Dutch population as well as the large Indo-European population, who had held protests of their own and delivered a petition to Rochussen. Taking