ABSTRACT
In the long run one of the major effects of the events of 1830 was to be the intensification of new and bitter social divisions. This was not apparent at the time, particularly to the statesmen of Europe. Nor, one suspects, would they have been terribly impressed with the idea that in the main the revolutions of 1830 were limited ones, caused by the inept dealings of governments with a complicated mixture of politically frustrated members of the professional middle classes and generally aggrieved artisans. Statesmen tended to be obsessed by the whole phenomenon and did not see that, although both groups were necessary for revolution and political change, they did not gain from it equally. The political effects with which they were, understandably enough, concerned seemed rather more threatening and widespread than some historians came to think in retrospect. Hence one dyspeptic English observer remarked that ‘the chemin defer is one of the very few, if indeed it be not the only, advantage derived to Belgium from the events of 1830’. All the rest in his view was disadvantage, not to say disaster.
