Dutch patriots fled the country in 1787 after the restoration of the Orange regime. How did they endure their exile? The further they moved away, the more they clung to their old political and bourgeois ideals, according to their letters.
In 1787, the Democratic patriotic uprising was crushed in the Republic. Stadholder William V received support from the Prussian army, regained control and many political opponents of the old regime sought refuge abroad.
Some went to German principalities, the Southern Netherlands and even the United States, many others to France. The French government recognized them as political refugees and gave them financial assistance. Most patriots lingered in northern France. Several hundred, including many journalists, publishers and craftsmen, settled in Dunkirk and Grevelingen (Gravelines), while the refugee colony in Sint-Omaars (Saint-Omer) formed a community of about a thousand refugees.
Letters
How did they experience this exile? To find out, we have several sources at our disposal. A number of autobiographical writings have appeared in print by the exiles who settled in the Southern Netherlands and France. They only have a limitation:most were written afterwards and mainly by men. However, we also have several correspondences, including many letters from the wives of the political refugees. Their messages on the home front bring us close to what people thought and felt at the time and what effect the flight had on family and family life.
The exchange of letters was the only possible form of contact with the friends and relatives left behind. The pen liberated the writers from homesickness for a moment. For example, Emilie Fijnje-Luzac, wife of the publisher and editor-in-chief of the patriotic Hollandsche Historische Courant, combated her feelings of loss by extensively reporting her family about her flight from Delft to Amsterdam and from there to Antwerp and Brussels.
She describes how, in the hold of a stuffy barge, with her fat pregnant belly and two children wedged between her luggage, she sails away from Rotterdam to Antwerp, a city she detests for its filth. And how later, at the castle of Watten near Sint-Omaars, she has to arrange the sale of their house and furniture in Delft with pain in her heart, consumed by longing for everything she should have parted with.
All alone
There is a striking difference between the letters of the patriots who stayed relatively close to the Netherlands and those who chose America as a political refuge. For the latter, the farewell was more final and emotional. Moreover, it turns out that at least for some the motto was:not to adapt, but to keep their own standards high, now that they were cut off from their country of origin.
Those who went to America at that time rarely had the intention of returning. The crossing that lasted four weeks – sometimes even two months in bad winds – was also too heavy and too dangerous for family visits. As a result, the network of family and friends threatened to continue to exist only on paper and in memory, as an imaginary reality, in which family members only 'hug each other in thoughts' in writing. With packages with cans of pickled eggs, newspapers or fabrics for making clothes and the like, they tried to maintain the relationship with those left behind.
All alone
The sadness about the final farewell remained natural, not least with the relatives left behind. The sister of Antje Mappa (also from Delft), wife of military and patriotic leader Adam Gerard Mappa, who made the crossing from France to America in 1789 with her husband, describes the deep emotional pain she feels now that she has been separated from her family for good. only sister:'Now I have lost everything. Now I don't have a human anymore. I must say:now I am like a stranger in this world.”
The often faltering communication through lost letters made it completely unbearable. They only heard in Delft that their relatives had arrived in New York in good wealth and had even been temporarily housed with the American politician John Adams, who had tried to get support for the American revolutionaries during the patriot era in The Hague as an envoy in Delft. months later. 'Have I wings,' wrote another family member who stayed behind desperately, 'I have already flown there'.
Meanwhile, the Mappas had to deal with a real culture shock. The New World confronted the couple with a reality that seemed partly unfilled and at the same time much more diverse than they ever dared to dream. There was a world to discover, but also one in which, to Antje's horror, Indians were walking around. The Iroquois, a confederacy of several Indian peoples, looked to her as fearsome "black savages," like warriors "covered with colored feathers, painted faces and rings in noses and ears." In America, a pristine wilderness awaited the migrants to be conquered.
In this adventurous environment, the Dutch patriots did not hide their national and political identity. The Mappas settled in the settlement Barneveld (now Trenton) named after their political hero Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Deep in the wilderness of the barely-developed Oneida County (New York), they now earned a living as farmers. Devoid of any urban form of civilization, they nevertheless clung to the decorum of the educated and well-dressed citizen. Because, as Antje wrote, 'beautiful in the woods, we nevertheless constantly associate with the most decent people in the country. And without being grandiose, it is always good to keep one's decency.”
Frisian cap off
Things were different for many refugees in France. It was clear to them that it was a temporary farewell, even if it could take a long time. They would return to a liberated Republic! They often experienced their status as political refugees in France as enhancing their status. They did not cling to the old like the Mappas, but assimilated the French culture they looked up to. It was the politics that inspired – after all, this is where the great French Revolution broke out in 1789, whose motto was Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – but also the French savoir vivre. .
The Frisian Aukje Poutsma, the wife of the patriot Coert Lambertus van Beyma, was of humble origin and did not speak French, but she effortlessly conformed to French customs. She said she struggled with the difficult language as best she could, took off her Frisian hood and eagerly took part in the many 'balls and parties' without her husband being allowed to become jealous. Because that is, she wrote triumphantly in one of her letters to Friesland, 'no fashion here'.
The refugees successfully lobbied the French to help them unleash the revolution in the Republic after all. They succeeded and in 1795 most of them returned to the Netherlands. The first democratically elected parliament, founded in 1796, the most important achievement of the Batavian Revolution, had many former exiles, including Coert Lambertus van Beyma. He had practiced political debate with the other refugees in Sint-Omaars so often that he became one of the most frequent and gifted speakers of the new Dutch parliament. To him it had been a "high school of revolution." It is not without reason that he referred to his "seven years of exile" in one of the many heated debates. He looked back on 'that blessed time' with nostalgia, he confessed.