Patriot Revolution

PATRIOT REVOLUTION

PATRIOT REVOLUTION. The Patriot Revolution (1786–1787) in the Dutch Republic was the first popular democratic revolution in continental Europe. The self-styled Patriot movement grew out of the political and economic crisis (brought on by Dutch involvement [1780–1784] in the American War of Independence), which began when the British discovered a secret commercial treaty between the city of Amsterdam and the rebellious colonies and declared war on the Dutch Republic. The Patriots eventually mobilized a broad interclass and interregional coalition around a program of political reform that demanded the institutionalization of popular sovereignty through electoral representation. The revolution began when the Patriots seized power locally in a series of municipal revolutions, beginning at Utrecht in 1786, and it came to a climax in the summer of 1787 when the Patriots, by virtue of such piecemeal local revolutions, controlled three of the Republic's seven sovereign provinces (Holland, Overijssel, and Groningen), and divided power in two more (Friesland and Utrecht). The Patriot Revolution ended abruptly when British and Prussian military intervention restored the aristocratic Orangist regime in the fall of 1787.

Structurally, the Patriot Revolution mirrored the political decentralization of the Dutch Republic, and in the absence of a clear center of power, the revolution lacked the drama of a single, violent seizure of power such as occurred in France just two years later. And since their movement was crushed by outside intervention, Dutch historians traditionally criticized the Patriots for being insufficiently "radical" or "revolutionary" to prevail against the aristocratic patronage regime that had centered on the princes of Orange since their hereditary appointment to the position of stadtholder in all seven provinces in 1747. More recent accounts have instead emphasized the breadth of the Patriots' popular mobilization in voluntary militias and by means of citizens' committees, following the American example, and credited them for their skillful use of the popular press to shift the focus of Dutch political debate from defense of Old Regime privileges to the assertion of civil and political rights under the constitutional umbrella of popular sovereignty.

Initially the Patriot reform movement attacked the military failures and alleged corruption of the patronage regime of William V of Orange (1748–1806) who, though a political appointee, closely controlled access to political office; in this early anti-Orange phase, the self-styled Patriots were led by political outsiders like F. A. van der Kemp, a Mennonite pastor from Leiden, and Joan Derk van der Capellen tot de Pol, a nobleman from the rural province of Overijssel, who in 1781 anonymously published the famous pamphlet Aan het Volk van Nederland (To the people of the Netherlands). The reform movement also booked its first political successes in the smaller cities, like Deventer, in the interior provinces—rather than in a metropolis like Amsterdam in urban and commercial Holland—by demonstrating the potency of popular petition campaigns led by special-purpose political associations. Eventually in the cities of Holland, too, the Patriots incorporated dissident members of the "regent" political elite into a revolutionary coalition that prominently included lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and even casual laborers.

In the final analysis, the Patriot Revolution brought profound changes to Dutch politics, despite the Orangist restoration in 1787. It permanently fractured the aristocratic political foundations of the Old Regime, taught valuable political lessons to a whole range of political actors who had previously been excluded from public politics, and thus laid the political-cultural foundations for the more successful Batavian Revolution, under French sponsorship, in 1795.

See also Dutch Republic ; Revolutions, Age of .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jacob, Margaret C., and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, eds. The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y., 1992.

Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813. New York, 1977.

te Brake, Wayne. Regents and Rebels: The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth Century Dutch City. Studies in Social Discontinuity. Oxford, 1989.

Wayne te Brake