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. He wanted to be able to influence the appointment of bishops. "Night at the opera" 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 rioters swiftly took possession of government buildings. 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