In 1795 a coup d’état, supported by military assistance from the French revolutionary army, brought an end to the existence of the seven independent provinces, and led to the founding of the ‘one and indivisible’ Batavian Republic. From that moment, the Netherlands became a nation state with a ‘modern’ political culture. This fundamental transformation formed part of an ‘Atlantic Revolution’; the new state was carried on the waves of a global development, one that had become particularly manifest in the United States and France. At the same time, it became clear that the Netherlands was profoundly dependent upon power relationships over which it had little influence: the Kingdom of Prussia had managed to prop up the revolution in the Netherlands by military means between 1787 and 1795; and Napoleon would subsequently bring the country under French influence and even annex it in 1806, after which independence was restored in 1813 in large part thanks to Russian soldiers and British politics.

The Netherlands had about two million inhabitants at this time, and thus had limited opportunities to gather large sums by taxation or raise a formidable army through conscription. As a result, the country could no longer play a meaningful role in international ‘Great Power politics’. This had already become clear in the course of the eighteenth century, but now it was undeniable: the Netherlands was a small country, described in parliament in 1796 by the representative Schimmelpenninck as ‘our tiny spot on the earth’.

That ‘tiny spot’ would sigh many a time in realization of its smallness, but with some regularity it would transform this awareness into the notion that it had a task in the world: whilst it was no longer the great power that it had been in the Golden Age, it was an exemplary nation, a guide that would show other countries the way to a world in which power and interests no longer played a decisive role, where law and justice dominated, and where the climate was determined by tolerance.