Jean Baptiste Cloots was a Baron. He liked to call himself Baron of Gnadenthal, or Val-de-Grˆace in his preferred language, French. His family had been noble, he claimed, for more than 450 years, and had produced barons for five generations. Most of this was untrue. Gnadenthal was in Cleves, a tiny German principality bordering on the DutchRepublic. Since 1666 Cleves had been ruled from Berlinby the Hohenzollerns. Cloots’s birth there made him a subject of Frederickthe Great, King of Prussia; but his family was of Flemish extraction and, until his father bought Gnadenthal in 1748, they had all been merchants in Amsterdam. The richest of them had died unmarried in 1747, leaving his fortune to Jean-Baptiste’s father, a great-nephew. He also bequeathed social ambitions. [download]
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