At the end of the eighteenth century, the Austrian Netherlands were plagued by politicalturmoil and social upheaval, brought forth by a reaction against the reformatory movementset up by the Habsburg government. The contestation of Joseph II's reformist policywas performed in public, as the region was flooded with polemical pamphlets, ideologicaltreatises and many other types of popular writings during (but also before and after) theperiod of the Brabant Revolution (1787-1789). Pamphlets have stood at the centre ofattention for historiography on Belgian political culture at the end of the ancien régime,yet this wide employment of the source material has not led to a comparative overview ofthe way these writings have been used in historical research. This article will attempt tofill this gap, by first providing a methodological typology of several historiographicaluses of a particular pamphlet, the Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon, written at the end of1789, and signed by the leader of the conservative opposition, Hendrik Van der Noot.Secondly, I will attempt to show how eighteenth-century pamphleteers used a multitudeof discourses at their disposal, by briefly discussing another set of (pre-revolutionary)pamphlets. This has immediate consequences for the current understanding of eighteenth-centuryBrabant political culture, which, so I argue, should not be considered discursivelymonolithic (containing one political language) but pluralist (containing multiple politicallanguages).