PARIS.- The exhibition L’Âge d’or hollandais, organized in the Pinacothèque de Paris in the fall of 2009, around the treasures in the Dutch royal collections, provided a spotlight on that unique period in Europe during which a very important human revolution had taken place a century and a half before the one in France. That first middle-class revolution occurred thanks to the arrival to political power of a merchant class, which had turned the little territory of the Republic of the United Pro¬vinces of Holland into an autonomous country based on an incredible economic wealth, and had made of the country, uniquely in Europe, one of the few places where war was not waged, without any Inquisition or intolerance. It also transformed Holland into a refuge for the artists, thinkers, writers and philosophers who could find nowhere else such freedom of expression. Thus was born what is usually described as the Dutch