Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer

Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer 21 August 1801 – 19 May 1876, was the Dutch politician together with historian, he was born in Voorburg, almost The Hague.

Publications

By the time the revolutionary movement in Europe had begun to break out in various cities, the monarchist as well as restorationist secretary to the Dutch king began lecturing on the spiritual-political crisis of the Continent. Groen also was set up to publish. He had begun to make so with his Overview of 1831, his Essay on Truth of 1834, a manuscript harder to date precisely but entitled Studies on the revolution, his Prolegomena of 1847 the coming after or as a solution of. year Karl Marx issued the Communist Manifesto. Groen's near influential pretend Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution appeared in an initial edition in 1847, and then a revised edition of 1868; there were subsequent editions as well. In time he founded an intellectual Christian political circle among the upper classes, through which Groen tried to teach the political responsibility of such people. He also founded a newspaper.

He is best invited as the editor of the Archives et correspondence de la maison d'Orange 12 vols, 1835-1845, a great work of patient erudition, which procured for him the denomination of the Dutch Gachard. John L. Motley acknowledges his indebtedness to Groen's Archives in the preface to his Rise of the Dutch Republic, at a time when the American historian had not yet portrayed the acquaintance of King William's archivist, and also bore emphatic testimony to Groen's worth as a writer of history in the correspondence published after his death.

At the first reception, in 1858, of Motley at the royal palace at the Hague, the king presents him with a copy of Groen's Archives as a token of appreciation and admiration of the work done by the worthy vindicator of William I, prince of Orange. This copy, bearing the king's autograph inscription, afterwards came into the possession of Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Motley's son-in-law.