Isaac Jan Alexander Gogel (10 December 1765 – 13 June 1821) was a Dutch politician, who was the first minister of finance of the Batavian Republic and the Kingdom of Holland.

The French were entering the Netherlands to intervene, and Gogel played a major role in the peaceful takeover of the Amsterdam government for the Patriots.

[7] He became active in the local Amsterdam politics, advocating for unitarism, while his more radical democratic ideas faded away.

[11] After the 22 January 1798, coup d'état by general Herman Willem Daendels, he was appointed agent for finance and foreign affairs (pro tem)[4] under the new Uitvoerend Bewind.

He attempted to reorganize the tax system, but because this entailed abolition of the old, federal arrangements, he met strong resistance.

His motivation was partially developed out of the worries shared by many art lovers in the Netherlands at that time that the French saviors of freedom would take more than just one collection with them to Paris, as in 1795 the entire contents of Willem V's gallery had been installed in the Louvre.

In the Spring of 1804 he approached the then commander-in-chief of the French army of occupation Auguste de Marmont, a confidant of Napoleon's, with information critical of the Staatsbewind of the Batavian Republic, and a project for a new constitution.

At the same time, Marmont happened to be fishing around for information of other discontented Dutch politicians, on the orders of Napoleon.

Soon a coalition was formed around the Batavian envoy to Paris, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck that openly worked to drive out the Staatsbewind.

However, Napoleon made clear that he preferred the unitarist vision of Gogel, and his opinion of course prevailed, when the Staatsbewind was replaced by the regime of Grand Pensionary Schimmelpenninck in May 1805.

Gogel was a member of the Groot Besogne (Grand Commission) that helped to negotiate the transition to the Kingdom of Holland under king Louis Napoleon, however reluctantly.

However, at first he gained the support of the new king, who had been impressed by his warnings about the dire state of the Dutch economy at the time.

Fortunately, the Dutch system for financing sovereign debt, foreign or domestic, was still unparalleled at the time.

[19] A few years later, however, the first benefits of the new system (enhanced revenues, reduced administrative costs, formation of a national fiscal bureaucracy) had finally been realized.

Legion were his attempts to persuade the government in Paris that certain allowances had to be made for special Dutch circumstances.

[24] He returned to the Kingdom of the Netherlands in May 1814,[25] but he refused to take office under the new regime, which he viewed as a restoration of the pre-1795 Orangist clique that he despised (though he relented shortly before his death to become a member of the new Raad van State).