Willem de Clercq

In 1801, he began to write notes about various events he encountered in his life, which later formed a diary, Dagboek (autobiography), with a total of 36,000 pages that he kept from the year 1811 until his death.

In 1816, De Clercq traveled to Saint Petersburg to report on the landscape and the social and cultural life in the northern German and Baltic ports.

Together with Willem Bilderdijk, Abraham Capadose, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Samuel Iperusz Wiselius, and others, they became the leaders of the Réveil.

De Clercq left the failing family business and traveled to The Hague to become secretary of the Netherlands Trading Society (NHM) in 1824.

In the last years of his life, De Clercq's views diverged from those of Da Costa and were increasingly influenced by Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge.