The (; ) was a period of political instability in the Dutch Republic between approximately 1780 and 1787. Its name derives from the Patriots () faction who opposed the rule of the stadtholder, William V, Prince of Orange, and his supporters who were known as Orangists ().
In 1781 one of the leaders of the Patriots, Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, influenced by the reformer Richard Price and the dissenter Joseph Priestley, anonymously published a pamphlet, entitled ("To the People of the Netherlands"), in which he advocated, like Andrew Fletcher (patriot), the formation of civic militias on the Scottish, Swiss and American model to help restore the republican constitution. Such militias were subsequently organised in many localities and formed, together with Patriot political clubs, the core of the Patriot movement. From 1785 on, the Patriots managed to gain power in a number of Dutch cities, where they replaced the old system of co-option of with a system of democratically elected representatives. This enabled them to replace the representatives of these cities in the States of several provinces, gaining Patriot majorities in the States of Holland, Groningen and Utrecht, and frequently also in the States General. This helped to emasculate the stadtholder's power as he was deprived of his command over a large part of the Dutch States Army. A low-key civil war ensued that resulted in a military stalemate, until in September–October 1787 the Patriots were defeated by a Prussian army and many were forced into exile.
Background
Etymology
The term Patriot (from Greek , "fellow countryman") had previously been used in the 17th century by anti-Orangists, but when French troops invaded the Republic in 1747, "Patriots" demanded the return of the Orange stadtholderate, which ended the Second Stadtholderless Period (1702–1747). From 1756 onward, however, Dutch States Party once again began styling themselves "Patriots". The Orangist party did try to reappropriate the term, but it was forced on the defensive, which became apparent when it renamed one of its weekly magazines to ("The Old-Fashioned Dutch Patriot"). Patriotism and anti-Orangism had become synonymous.
The Patriots can be divided into two separate groups: aristocrats and democrats. The aristocratic Patriots (also called or "Old Patriots"), initially the strongest, can be viewed as oppositional , who either sought to enter the factions in power, or tried to realise the so-called "Loevesteinian" ideal of a republic without Orange; they came from the existing Dutch States Party. The democratic Patriots emerged later, and consisted mainly of non-regent members of the bourgeoisie, who strove to democratise the Republic.
Finally, the term for the historical era is a historiographical invention of 19th-century Dutch historians, comparable to the terms "First Stadtholderless Period", "Second Stadtholderless Period", and "Fransche Tijd (French Era)" (for the era of the Batavian Republic, the Kingdom of Holland and the French First Empire, 1795–1813). Herman Theodoor Colenbrander for instance, used the term as the title of one of his main works: (The Hague, 1897). The term was often used in a pejorative fashion, but lately has acquired a more positive connotation.<ref>Cf. W. van der Zwaag, Patriottenbeweging en geschiedschrijving Bezinning-Achtergrond (1990) in Digibron</ref>