ABSTRACT
To some extent, the events of July and August 1830 in France owe their position in the historiography of the subject more to the role of the country in which they took place than to their nature. As Riballier has observed, ‘The revolution of 1830, in contra-distinction to that of 1848, was not a European or general movement. It was a local French affair, best studied in a French context.’ That context had two particularly striking features. The first was the emergence of a dynamic political opposition well before the actual crisis, while the second was the considerable depth of social awareness and protest. As a result, miscalculations leading to the surprising military humiliation of Charles X’s government in Paris led to immediate political experiment and to an explosion of social dissent. The two were much more closely connected than in many other countries at the time.
