a triumph for the outnumbered rebels and the Austrians suffered a "shameful defeat". The rebel triumph broke the back of the Austrian forces in Belgium and many local soldiers within the Austrian force deserted to the patriot cause. Swelled by new recruits and supported by the population, the patriot army advanced rapidly into Flanders. On 16 November, Flander's major city, Ghent, was taken after four days of fighting and the Estate of Flanders proclaimed support for the rebel cause. The rebel armies penetrated further into the territory, defeating Austrian forces in a number of small skirmishes, and captured the town of Mons on 21 November. By December, the Austrian force, fully routed, withdrew to the fortified city of Luxembourg in the south, abandoning the rest of the territory to the patriots. Historians have pointed to the deliberate parallels between the entrance of the rebel army into the Austrian Netherlands in 1789 and Louis of Nassau's invasion of Frisia in 1566 which acted as the trigger for the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule. United Belgian States With fall of the Austrian regime, the revolutionaries were forced to decide what form a new revolutionary state would take. Figures within revolutionary France, such as Jacques Pierre Brissot, praised their work and encouraged them to declare their own national independence in the spirit of the American Revolution. On 30 November, a Declaration of Unity was signed between Flanders and the Brabant states. On 20 December, an actual declaration of independence was signed proclaiming the end of Austrian rule and the independence of the states. After the rebel capture of Brussels on 18 December, work soon began on a new constitution. In January, the rebels re-called the States-General, a traditional assembly composed of the provincial elites which had not met since the Middle Ages, to discuss the form the new state would take. Its 53 members, representing the states and social classes, met in Brussels in January 1790 to begin negotiations. The constitution eventually devised by the States-General was inspired by both the Dutch Verlatinge of 1581 and American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The liberals were disgusted that members of society from beyond the guilds, clergy and nobility should not be consulted. They also saw the closed sessions of the States-General as ridiculing the idea of popular sovereignty. The declaration of the independence was not supported by Britain and the Dutch who believed that