Almost simultaneously with the Brussels uprising, large-scale revolts broke out in several cities across the Duchy of Belgium.
This was largely thanks to Charles Rogier, the shrewd and capable former Belgian prime minister, and the French people's appalling conduct.
Charles Rogier was said to have been the most versatile prime minister in Belgian history. He had taken part in the revolution against the Dutch, served as a guerrilla fighter, and organized a regular army.
He had served as prime minister and doubled as minister of the interior, foreign affairs, education, transportation, and public works. He had even overseen the construction of waterworks and railways.
Putting such a polymath to work in an underground resistance movement might have been a waste of his talents, but people like him were exactly what the resistance needed at its head.
Resistance to the French was even fiercer in the countryside. French agricultural taxes were already outrageously high, and with the urban bourgeoisie in power, they naturally weren't going to tax themselves more.
As a result, French agricultural taxes had been raised to an unbelievable level. In Belgium, France's colony on the European continent, they had become downright extractive.
The Belgian countryside's uprisings, however, were far more scattered, and in practice they inflicted very few casualties on the French.
Under the French military's crackdown, the rural insurgents quickly surrendered.
The urban rebels, on the other hand, were much more determined. Most were townspeople and troops from the duchy, and they were far more capable fighters than the peasants.
Even so, the French didn't consider them much of a threat. The French officials had brought only a handful of troops, but those soldiers, together with the collaborators they recruited in Belgium, were enough to stabilize the situation.
The news soon reached Paris. On the matter of