Background
The final days of the Dutch Republic were quite eventful. Due to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War that went disastrously for the Dutch, the Patriot party staged a revolt against the authoritarian regime of stadtholder William V that was struck down through the intervention of William's brother-in-law Frederick William II of Prussia in June 1787. Most Patriots went into exile in France, while the Ancien Régime strengthened its grip on the government through the Orangist Grand Pensionary Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel.
Only a few years later, the French Revolution began, which embraced many of the political ideas that the Patriots had espoused in their own revolt. The Patriots enthusiastically supported the Revolution, and when the French revolutionary armies started to spread that revolution, the Patriots joined in, hoping to liberate their own country from its authoritarian yoke. The Stadtholder joined the First Coalition of countries in their attempt to subdue revolutionary France.
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Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)