Leiden Draft

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.

That argument may be summarized by giving the headings of the sections of the paper (in translation): The argument resulted in an enumeration of twenty numbered articles: A close reading of the Design will teach that the editors of the document revered the existing "constitution" of the Dutch Republic (in the sense of a body of foundational charters and treaties, like the Great Privilege, the Pacification of Ghent, the Union of Utrecht, the Twelve Years' Truce, and the Peace of Münster), but rejected a number of "abuses" that had recently "slipped in" like the so-called Regeringsreglementen (Government Regulations) that had been adopted in the course of the Orangist Revolution of 1747 to give the stadtholder a right of appointment, or at least approval, of city magistrates.

The Patriots soon started to put this program in execution, beginning in the city of Utrecht where the old government was replaced with a democratically elected one.

Soon other city governments in especially Holland, Utrecht province, Overijssel and Friesland went over to the Patriot side, usually, however, by having Orangist regents replaced by adherents of the old States party, whose families had been driven out in 1747, but had taken up the explicit invitation in the Leiden Draft to cast their lot with the democrats.

After this the personnel changes in the city governments and the States were reversed and the post-1747 system restored, in a more severe form, under the 1788 Act of Guarantee that seemed to cast the stadtholderate in stone.

[8] The Patriot Revolution therefore seemed to be stopped in its tracks, and rolled back, but that did not imply that the influence of the Leiden Draft also had forever dissipated.

[10] According to Popkin, who conducted extensive archival research into the matter, this excerpt eventually influenced the formulation of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen of 1789, one of the foundational documents of the French Revolution.

Again, the political method of the Leiden Draft program was used by working ostensibly "within" the old constitution, by taking over the personnel of the old institutions like the States of Holland that was in a "constitutional" way replaced by the Provisional Representatives of the People of Holland, and the States-General that for a while became the States General of the Batavian Republic, before it legislated itself out of existence at the end of 1795 to be replaced by the National Assembly of the Batavian Republic.

One of the first official acts of the Provisional Representatives was the promulgation of the Dutch Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, that was drawn up by a commission, chaired by Pieter Paulus, which certainly took the Leiden Draft into account as one of its inspirations.