The Low Countries did not remain unperturbed by the political unrest which affected Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Both halves of them were involved in the 1780's in reform movements, some aspects of which were forerunners of the French revolutionary ideas.

Dutch intervention in the American War of Independence (1780–4) had only brought the United Provinces economic losses and a feeling of impotence. The naval reverses they suffered were imputed to the stadholder William V's neglect, and gave new impetus to the opposition against the hereditary stadholderate, restored in 1747. At the same time, certain quarters, inspired by the ideology of Enlightenment, criticised also with increased vigour the inefficiency of the selfish urban oligarchies, upon which the whole system of provincial and federal representative assemblies was based, and demanded actual elections by the substantial citizens instead of de facto cooption of magistrates. Thus, at the very beginning, the ‘Patriot’ movement was split into two wings: a conservative one whose sole aim it was to count the stadholder out and revest the plenitude of authority in the patrician oligarchy, and a democratic one which intended a limited progressive reform of power. The latter was the more active. It even organised militias to resist, if need be, the stadholder's standing troops. The Conservatives used them at first for their own purpose as a pressure group against the stadholder. However, their unnatural alliance could not last. It broke down after the Democrats had seized power in Utrecht in 1785 and increased elsewhere their influence so as to counterbalance the Conservatives.