Belgium also witnessed a revolution during the summer of 1830, inspired in part by events in Paris. At the Congress of Vienna, Holland and Belgium had been united under the Dutch king William I and, while several different factors precipitated the uprising, it soon became a struggle for Belgian independence. The immediate trigger for the uprising was a performance of Eugene Scribe and Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici on 25 August, based on the 1647 Neapolitan revolt against Spanish rule.

See Harry Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1830-1880 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 1988), pp. 295-7 and Charles Breunig and Matthew Levinger, The Revolutionary Era, 1789-1840, 3rd edn (New York and London: Norton, 2002), pp. 235-6.