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The proclamation read from the steps of the Grand-Place. Between the opera and the treaty, this is the paperwork stage of a revolution.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands was 15 years old in 1830 and had been assembled like furniture: the powers at Vienna had bolted the Catholic, half French-speaking south onto the Protestant Dutch north as a buffer against France, and the bolts had never stopped creaking. The south carried more people and less power; Amsterdam held the debt, The Hague the offices, and the king an unshakable conviction that firmness was a policy. Into this, on the night of 25 August 1830, the Brussels opera house programmed Auber's La Muette de Portici, an opera about a Naples fishermen's revolt, scheduled, with perfect institutional blindness, for the king's birthday festivities, four weeks after Paris had chased its own king into exile. At the second-act duet, Sacred love of the fatherland, the audience stood up singing, and by the aria's end the performance had moved into the street. The night's rioting sacked the houses of unpopular ministers; the theater of it mattered as much as the grievances, revolution having become, that summer, the fashionable art form. Through September the quarrel hardened, and when the king sent an army under his son to retake Brussels, the city fought it for four days in the parks and squares, September Days that turned window-breakers into a nation: volunteers walked in from Liège and the Walloon towns, the Dutch withdrew by night, and a provisional government declared Belgium independent on 4 October. By summer the new country had a constitution the liberals of Europe envied and an imported king, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, uncle to a girl who would shortly be Queen Victoria. The powers then guaranteed the new state's neutrality in a treaty signed at London in 1839, filed and forgotten by everyone except the German chancellor who, in August 1914, would famously marvel that Britain went to war over a scrap of paper. The scrap was Belgium's birth certificate; the world war began, in the paperwork sense, at the opera. Wappers painted the founding week in 1835 as the new nation's official memory: the Grand-Place under smoke, the proclamation read from the steps, the tricolor overhead, a family grieving in the right corner because founding myths need a price in the frame. He became the first director of the new state's academy, and his canvas hangs in Brussels as the picture every Belgian schoolchild has stood in front of: the country that began with an aria, painted at aria pitch.