In historiography, the Dutch Restoration era (1813–1848) has long been characterised as dominated by political passivity. While recent studies have contested this image of lethargy, the question why the Northern Netherlands saw such low voter turnouts, lack of an organised political opposition to the autocratic monarchy, and no revolutions in 1830 and 1848 has not been sufficiently answered. This chapter investigates political culture and civil society at the urban level—focusing on the provincial town of Dordrecht—from the mid-eighteenth century onwards to come up with a new explanation: state and civil society elites from about 1800 on actively promoted the depoliticisation of society in response to the upheavals of the revolutionary era. While state elites limited the options for citizens to express political discontent, associational elites fostered higher-class reconciliation and social stratification. Paradoxically, this constituted a political activity in and of itself: navigating the memory of revolutionary crisis, ‘cancelling’ those who spoke up, and promoting civil society as a panacea to political strife, associational elites now employed enlightened patriotic discourse—that had once been used for opposition—to discourage dissent. This chapter shows that depoliticisation can be a vocal, explicit, and organised activity, while civil society through depoliticisation can contribute to autocratisation.