The Belgian Revolution was a conflict which led to the secession of the southern provinces (mainly the former Southern Netherlands) from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and the establishment of an independent Kingdom of Belgium.
The people of the south were mainly Flemings and Walloons. Both peoples were traditionally Catholic as contrasted with Protestant-dominated (Dutch Reformed) people of the north. Many outspoken liberals regarded King William I's rule as despotic. There were high levels of unemployment and industrial unrest among the working classes.
On 25 August 1830, riots erupted in Brussels and shops were looted. Theatregoers who had just watched the nationalistic opera La muette de Portici joined the mob. Uprisings followed elsewhere in the country. Factories were occupied and machinery destroyed. Order was restored briefly after William committed troops to the Southern Provinces but rioting continued and leadership was taken up by radicals, who started talking of secession.
Dutch units saw mass desertion of recruits from the southern provinces and pulled out. On 27 September, a newly formed Provisional Government in Brussels declared independence and called for the election of a National Congress. King William refrained from future military action and appealed to the Great Powers. The resulting 1830 London Conference of major European powers recognised Belgian independence. Following the installation of Leopold I as King of the Belgians in 1831, King William made a belated attempt to reconquer Belgium and restore his position through a military campaign. This Ten Days' Campaign failed because of French military intervention. The Dutch accepted the decision of the London conference and Belgian independence in 1839 by signing the Treaty of London.
United Kingdom of the Netherlands
After the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a kingdom for the House of Orange-Nassau, thus combining the United Provinces of the Netherlands with the former Austrian Netherlands to create a strong buffer state north of France; with the addition of those provinces the Netherlands became a rising power. When the United Kingdom insisted on retaining the former Dutch Ceylon and the Cape Colony, which it had seized while the Netherlands was ruled by Napoleon, the new Kingdom of the Netherlands was compensated with these southern provinces.
The revolution was due to a combination of factors, the main one being the difference of religion (Catholic in today's Belgium, Protestant in today's Netherlands) and the general lack of autonomy given to the south.
The under-representation of today's Belgians in the General Assembly (62% of the population for 50% of the seats)
Most of the institutions were based in the North and public burdens were unevenly distributed. Only one minister out of four was Belgian. There were four times as many Dutch people in the administration as Belgians. There was a general domination of the Dutch over the economic, political, and social institutions of the Kingdom;
The public debt of the north (higher than that of the south) had to be supported by the south as well. The original debts were initially of 1.25 billion guilders for the United Provinces and only 100 million for the South.
The action of William I in the field of education (construction of schools, control of the competence of teachers and the creation of new establishments, creation of three State universities) placed it under the total control of the State, which displeased Catholic opinion.
The contingent imposed on Belgium by the recruitment of militiamen was proportionally high, while the proportion of Belgians among the officers was low, the high staff being mainly composed of former officers of the French army or of the British army. Only one officer out of six would be from the South. Most Belgian soldiers were therefore commanded by officers who were not originally from the Southern Netherlands. Moreover, the Dutch language had become the sole language of the army of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1823/24, which was an additional grievance on the part of the francophone elites and the Walloon people who spoke Romance dialects and languages.
The unsatisfactory application of freedom of the press and freedom of assembly were considered by Belgian intellectuals as a means of control of the South by the North.
Belgian merchants and industrialists complained about the free trade policy pursued from 1827 onwards. The separation of France had caused the industry of the South to lose a large part of its turnover. On the other hand, the colony of the East Indies was experiencing a long period of revolt and British products were competing with Belgian production. With the end of the continental blockade, the continent was invaded by cheap British products, appreciated by the North, still mainly agricultural, but which excluded the productions of the South.
A linguistic reform in 1823 was intended to make Dutch the official language in the Flemish provinces. This reform was met with strong opposition from the upper classes who at the time were mostly French-speaking, whether they came from Flanders or Wallonia, but also from the Flemish speakers themselves, who at the time did not speak standard Dutch but their own dialects. On 4 June 1830, this reform was abolished.
The conservatives in the northern Netherlands were pushing for only followers of the former (Protestant) State Church to be appointed to the government, while the Belgian conservatives wanted to re-establish Catholicism as the state religion in Belgium. The coexistence of two state religions throughout the kingdom was unacceptable to both sides. Until 1821 the government used the opposition of the Catholics to the Basic Law to maintain the Protestant character of the state apparatus through the appointment of civil servants. William I himself was a supporter of the German Lutheran tradition, according to which the sovereign is the head of the church. He wanted to counter the Pope's authority over the Catholic Church by being able to influence the appointment of bishops.
Catholic partisans watched with excitement the unfolding of the July Revolution in France, details of which were swiftly reported in the newspapers. On 25 August 1830, at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, an uprising followed a special performance, in honor of William I's birthday, of Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici), a sentimental and patriotic opera set against Masaniello's uprising against the Spanish masters of Naples in the 17th century. After the duet, "Amour sacré de la patrie" (Sacred love of Fatherland), with Adolphe Nourrit in the tenor role, many audience members left the theater and joined the riots which had already begun. The crowd poured into the streets shouting patriotic slogans. The brawls and violence continued for several days, with protesters capturing key points in the city including the Parc de Bruxelles and the Palais de Bruxelles. The Belgian rebels began to organize and fortify their positions in preparation for further confrontations with Dutch forces. The following days saw an explosion of the desperate and exasperated proletariat of Brussels, who rallied around the newly created flag of the Brussels independence movement which was fastened to a standard with shoelaces during a street fight and used to lead a counter-charge against the forces of Prince William.
William I sent his two sons, Crown-Prince William and Prince Frederik to quell the riots. William was asked by the Burghers of Brussels to come to the town alone, with no troops, for a meeting; this he did, despite the risks. The affable and moderate Crown Prince William, who represented the monarchy in Brussels, was convinced by the Estates-General on 1 September that the administrative separation of north and south was the only viable solution to the crisis. His father rejected the terms of accommodation that Prince William proposed. King William I attempted to restore the established order by force, but the 8,000 Dutch troops under Prince Frederik were unable to retake Brussels in bloody street fighting (23–26 September). The army was withdrawn to the fortresses of Maastricht, Venlo, and Antwerp, and when the Northern commander of Antwerp bombarded the town, claiming a breach of a ceasefire, the whole of the Southern provinces was incensed. Any opportunity to quell the breach was lost on 26 September when a National Congress was summoned to draw up a Constitution and the Provisional Government was established under Charles Latour Rogier. The Provisional Government then issued a Declaration of Independence on 4 October 1830.