The Leiden Draft is the translation used in Anglophone historiography of the Dutch-language concept Leids Ontwerp, a draft-manifesto discussed by the Holland congress of representatives of exercitiegenootschappen (Patriot militias) on 8 October 1785 in Leiden in the context of the so-called Patriot revolution of 1785 in the Dutch Republic. This draft resulted in publication of the manifesto entitled Ontwerp om de Republiek door eene heilzaame Vereeniging van Belangen van Regent en Burger van Binnen Gelukkig en van Buiten Gedugt te maaken, Leiden, aangenomen bij besluit van de Provinciale Vergadering van de Gewapende Corpsen in Holland, op 4 oktober 1785 te Leiden (Design to make the Republic inwardly contented and outwardly feared by a salutary union of interests of Regent and Citizen). It contained an exposition of the Patriot ideology and arrived at the formulation of twenty proposals of political reform in a democratic vein.
The ideas were only realized to a large extent under the Batavian Republic, when they inspired the Dutch Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but they were earlier also influential in the intellectual history of the French Revolution thanks to the French translation the journalist Antoine Marie Cerisier, a collaborator of Mirabeau, published in 1788. According to American and British historians Jeremy D. Popkin and Jonathan Israel this French translation may have influenced the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Background
The American Revolution made a deep impression in the Dutch Republic of the 1770s. Intellectuals like Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol and his friend François Adriaan van der Kemp disseminated the ideas of Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Andrew Fletcher and Joseph Priestley, and generally news about the accomplishments of the American revolutionaries. On the one hand this helped convince Dutch public opinion to support the American Revolution, but on the other hand undermined the autocratic government of stadtholder William V and his Orangist party of Regenten. The public support of the American revolutionaries helped bring about an armed conflict with Great Britain, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, which was mishandled by the stadtholder to such an extent that the criticisms of his regime gained wide support under the population. His opponents were found in circles of the old anti-Orangist ("States party") faction among Dutch regents, and among adherents of democratic ideals. These came together as a political movement that called themselves "Patriots". As the stadtholder controlled the armed forces: the Dutch States Army and the Dutch Navy, the Patriots started to arm themselves by forming citizen militias, known as exercitiegenootschappen (so-called, because they liked to train themselves by the performance of military drills). These were local militias, overlaid by a federal association that bound them together and made them a national force to be reckoned with. The regime saw this as a threat and tried to discourage their operations where possible. On 23 July 1785 (as one example) the city government of Leiden prohibited the activities of the Leiden exercitiegenootschap and fined its drill master. This elicited a reaction by both the local and the provincial militia: they organised a congress of representatives of Holland militias that convened four times between 4 and 8 October 1785 in Leiden in the meeting room of the Society Kunst wordt door Arbeid verkregen (Art is the result of Labour), one of the Patriot clubs in Leiden