ABSTRACT
The generally mistaken impressions of what happened in France were bound to have an impact on adjoining countries. This was particularly true of the strategically senstive Joint Kingdom of the Netherlands, which had been deliberately created by Britain and the other great powers to keep the peace and balance of Europe. In fact some contemporaries blamed the troubles there on French agitators, while there has been a school of thought which sees the events of 1830 as creating a new state which only benefited French-speakers. Any discussion of 1830 in Belgium thus treads on ground which remains politically very sensitive. Yet it has to be said that, just as the July Days can only be understood in local terms, so there were spontaneous local forces behind the troubles in Belgium in 1830. Those forces again included marked social pressures, although questions of religion, language and constitutional rights were even more significant. When conflict over these things exploded in 1830 it produced, first, a revolutionary movement akin to that of 1789 in France and then a new nation. The Belgian experience, therefore, falls halfway between the internal restructuring found in France and the more formal, albeit still limited, war of liberation fought by the Poles.
