PATRIOTS (FACTION)

'The Patriots' (in Dutch: Patriotten) were a political faction in the Netherlands in the second half of the eighteenth century. They struggled for the removal of the corrupt Stadtholder regime , and its nepotistic way of governing. Discontented with the decline of the economy after the Dutch Golden Age, the middle and upper classes looked towards the American Declaration of Independence, and started to reclaim their rights. Ultimately this culminated in the formation of paramilitary groups who sought to overthrow the government. After being defeated, by a Prussian intervention army in 1787, many of the patriots fled to France. In 1795, a few years after the French Revolution, they returned and founded with French help the Batavian Republic.