The Southern Netherlands had been
part of France from 1794 to 1814. During these twenty years the French
authorities had pursued a policy of cultural imperialism. They had replaced all
the civil servants in Dutch-speaking Flanders, Brabant and Limburg with
Frenchmen. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, most of the French
administrators and civil servants had remained in the Southern Netherlands.
They were followed in 1815 by a second wave of immigrants from France. These
were the most radical political opponents of the Bourbons, who, because of
their political extremism during the previous decades, were persecuted in
France. This group included the so-called ‘regicides,’ the surviving members of
the first French revolutionary ‘parliament,’ the Convention, that in 1793 had
voted in favour of executing King Louis XVI. King
Willem I of the Netherlands (Belgium) granted them asylum. Most of them settled
in Brussels, the nearest big city to Paris.
The most vociferous of
the French immigrants was Prince Maurice de Broglie, the Bishop of Ghent. He
was a French aristocrat, born in Paris in 1766. Broglie had been the almoner of
the French Imperial Court. In 1807, Napoleon appointed him Bishop of Ghent. The
so-called Concordat - the treaty between Napoleon and the Pope - of 15 July
1801 allowed the French Emperor to appoint the bishops in his Empire. As a
result, all the bishops in the Southern Netherlands had become Frenchmen.
At first, the
revolution of 27 July 1830 in Paris did not affect Brussels. King Willem had
been in town until 21 August and everything had remained quiet. There had
been considerable nervousness and commotion, however, amongst the French
immigrants however. Particularly when Wilhelm’s son decided in secret he
wanted to become ‘King of Belgium’ that the ‘Opera Revolution’ as the
Franfurther Newspaper titled it, started to take shape.
On 16 October 1830,
the Prince officially proclaimed Belgium’s independence and put himself at the
head of the new state.King Wilhelm wrote to the
Prince that he was “surprised as afflicted” by his declaration. But it was too
late. (For the above see A. Smits, 1830 Scheuring in
de Nederlanden, 4 volumes,1983-1999.)
A group of 400
Parisian revolutionaries arrived under the command of the French Viscount Pontécoulant, and marched on Ghent and Bruges together with
600 hooligans from France, the Corps de Roubaix, led by a certain Grégoire.
Grégoire’s Corps de
Roubaix preferred to call itself les Têtes de Mort
(the Skulls), but Grégoire considered his corps a civilised
troop compared to the Légion of Pontécoulant which,
he said, consisted of ‘robbers.’ After putting down the revolt in Bruges, the
two ‘armies’ terrorised Menen,
leper (Ypres) and Nieuwpoort. By way of reprisal they plundered the houses of
the Orangists, the people loyal to King Willem. In Lichtervelde, the Catholic parish priest was molested when
he refused to fly the new Belgian flag from his church tower.
The Crown Prince
quickly left Antwerp on 26 October, and went into exile in Britain, having
become the most despised man both in the Nehterlands.
One day later, Dutch troops bombarded Antwerp after revolutionaries had
infiltrated the city. A significant part of the city went up in flames.In Brussels, the Provisional Government of Belgium,
with Gendebien as Minister of justice, started making
preparations for the annexation by France. On 5 October 1830, it was decided
that the whole administration should be run in French. “The efforts of our
government have to°be directed towards the
annihilation of the Flemish language in order to prepare the fusion of Belgium
with our great fatherland France,” Charles Rogier
wrote candidly to the British Foreign Secretary. (Rogier
to Palmerston, in Paul Verhaert, Un Appèl aux Bruxellois: L’Avenir de la.Belgique et le Mouvement Flamand: Le Rôle de Bruxelles, Brussels,
1934. p. 52.)
The judicial courts,
which in 1815 had been ordered by King Willem to use Dutch in the provinces where
the people spoke Dutch, all had to use French again, as in the days of French
occupation. The schools, too, were all forced to become Francophone. Most
schools in Flanders, however, were simply abolished. The number of primary
schools in the South was halved, from 4,000 to 2,000. The army, the backbone of
the new regime, was a Francophone institution as well. Of the 2,700 officers in
the Belgian army in 1831, only 150 had been born in Belgium. Most officers were
of French origin, and many had settled in Belgium only since September 1830. Thé General Staff consisted of 28 generals: 24 Frenchmen
and four Belgians.
“The first principle
of good administration,” Rogier, the Belgian Minister
of the Interior, said in 1832, “rests on the exclusive use of one language, and
it is obvious that in Belgium this language must be French. To achieve
this result, it is essential that all civil and military posts be entrusted to
Walloons, so that the Flemings, being temporarily deprived of the advantages
deriving from such employment, will be obliged to learn French.” (Quoted in T.
Herman, ed. The Flemish Movement: A Documentary History 1780-1990.
London, 1992. p. 72.)
In October 1830, 200
deputies were elected to the Belgian National Congress. Of a total population
of 3 million, only 46,000 men were entitled to vote. Of these, more than
one-third (16,000) boycotted the elections because they were Orangists loyal to the King. The result was that the
National Congress was elected by only 0.075% of the Belgian population.
Belgium did not adopt the principle “one man one vote” until after WWI, well
behind other European nations.
Paris, however, was
threatened by London that if it annexed the Southern Netherlands there would be
war. The new French king, Louis-Philippe of Orléans, did not want to run
the risk of a war that could lead to the restoration of the Bourbons in Paris.
Prince Talleyrand, the French representative at the Conference of London, which
the European Powers had installed to deal with the problem of the Netherlands,
proposed to divide the Belgian provinces between Prussia and France, while
Antwerp would become a free state under British protection. This was rejected
by Lord Palmerston, the Whig politician who had taken over as British Foreign
Secretary from Lord Aberdeen, a Tory, on 17 November. When the Belgian
revolutionaries realized that annexation by France was out of the question,
they opted for independence and started procedures for the election of a new
Belgian king.
Thus an impoverished
Bavarian in London, Prince Leopold closely followed events in Belgium. By
April 1831, in fact it had become clear to the majority of the Belgian leaders
that their revolution would get nowhere if they constantly offended England.
Those, like Lebeau, who wished to save the
Revolution, knew they would have to mend relations with the British as soon as
possible. On 20 April, a delegation of the Belgian revolutionaries arrived in
London and met Prince Leopold and Stockman Leopold told them that he would not
refuse the Belgian throne if the sovereignty of the new state was guaranteed by
the Great Powers.
In spite of the
protestations of King Willem I, the Powers accepted the creation of a new
kingdom under Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Hence, a totally new state came into existence.
The revolutionaries who had created it had wanted it to be absorbed as quickly
as possible into France. The majority of the people living on its territory had
wanted it to remain part of the Netherlands.
The Dutch King felt
betrayed by perfidious Albion. He refused to give up his rights to Belgium and
kept his garrison at Antwerp, even though the Treaty of London stipulated that
he had to hand the town over to the authorities in Brussels. Willem had not
been part of the Treaty and did not feel bound by it. The people of Antwerp
agreed. In the local elections, held on 29 August 1831, the pro-Belgian
candidate was defeated. “What is to be done with these damned Dutch and
Belgians?” Lord Charles Grey, the British Prime Minister, sighed. “I believe
that the best way would be to draw a cordon round Holland and Belgium, by sea
and land, and leave them to fight it out.” (Quoted in Daniel H. Thomas, The
Guarantee of Belgian Independence and Neutrality in European Diplomacy
1830s-1930s, 1983, p. 31.)
On 5 November 1832, in
a concerted Anglo-French action, the British Navy sealed the Dutch coast and
blocked the Scheldt estuary so that Antwerp could not be reinforced, while a
French army of 65,000 men with 105 canons marched to Antwerp to bomb the Dutch
out of town. On 30 November, the French started shelling the Dutch. At first,
the citizens of Antwerp had fled the city, but later, when they noticed that
the French were only aiming at the soldiers in the Citadel, the bombardment
became an attraction. A platform was installed on the roof of the local
theatre, and for a fee one could climb up and watch the spectacle.
On 23 December, the
garrison surrendered. In 1839, an exhausted Kingdom of the Netherlands,
bankrupted by a Franco-British trade embargo, accepted the independence of
Belgium. Meanwhile, Leopold’s niece Victoria had become Queen of Britain in
1837. King Willem realised, that with the favourite uncle of the British Queen on the throne of his
stolen provinces, his chances of recovering them were over. As late as 1845,
however a German visitor, C. Ludovic, observed:
“The mood among the citizens is everything but Belgian.” (Quoted in J. A.
Goris, Lof van Antwerpen,
Lions Club Antwerpen-Centrum, 1994, p. 124.)
Leopold I wrote to
Queen Victoria: “Belgium is purement et simplement ma creation;” ‘Belgium owes me its sole
existence;’ “The people owe me all they are.” ‘Having great disunity,’ added,
“they are without contradiction the most insufferable creatures that exist.
(Royal Archive Windsor, Leopold I to Queen Victoria, 18 Dec. 1846, 23 July
1847,19 Apr. 1850 and 13 June 1856.)
His son Leopold II’s
main interest in politics, was not domestic affairs but foreign politics, and
Leopold’s aim became to establish his personal colony. In his state, he
wanted to be the supreme authority: no laws would be higher than his
commands. Baron Lambermont, who had been given
a top position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had reliable Belgian
diplomats scour the globe for “a Sarawak.” These diplomats had to be discreet,
because the Belgian government was not allowed to know. Fortunately, the King
could use his prerogatives to ensure that the key diplomatic positions were
assigned to those diplomats whom he considered more loyal to his person than to
the government. They were all rewarded by Leopold in the usual way, with a
hereditary title of Baron:
Beyens in Paris, Solvyns in London, Greindl in Madrid,
Unable to acquire colonies already owned by others,
Leopold decided to go where no one else had been before.
British-American
explorer Henry Morton Stanley On his way home from Africa to London, in January
1878, British-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley arrived at Marseille and
found two emissaries of King Leopold II awaiting him: Baron Jules Greindl and General Henry S. Sanford, a former American
ambassador to Belgium who had become one of Leopold’s business associates.
To finance Stanley’s
expedition, Leopold formed the Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo, a
commercial enterprise with a capital of 1,000,000 francs. The explorer however
was deliberately kept ignorant of the fact that he was working solely for the King.For a detailed study about this particular episode see
the MA thesis of Mark A. Howard Leopold the Second, Belgium, and the Congo,
2004; http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/preview_all/1422509
In fact Leopold became
the ruler of the largest colony in Central-Africa: a state of 1 million
square miles, 76 times larger than Belgium, five times as big as France,
one-third the size of the continental USA, and up to 20 million inhabitants.
And he was literally its proprietor, one of the first decrees of the new state
stipulated that all the land not under cultivation by the natives belonged by
right to the state. The state being Leopold in person, it made him the largest
private landowner in the world; possibly even in modern history.
The King
next cast his eye on the Sudan. After the Mahdist rising in the 1880s the
Anglo-Egyptian troops had evacuated the upper reaches of the Nile. Leopold
decided to take advantage of the vacuum and have the CFS annex the Sudan as a
first step towards driving the British from Egypt altogether. To the Belgian
Prime Minister, Leopold confided that he found nothing more exciting than “the
glory of being a real pharaoh.” (Pierre Daye,Léopold
II. Paris, 1934, p. 413.)
“Egypt,” he told CFS
Governor-General Van Eetvelde, “is my glory: its
occupation has been my objective for years. Rather than renounce I will resort
to violence.” (Robert O. Collins, King Leopold, England and the Upper Nile
1899-1909,Yale University Press, 1968, p. 157.)
Leopold financed many
Force Publique expeditions to the Nile. The first
one, in 1887-1888, was led by Stanley. Its purpose was to convince a German
doctor-turned-warlord, Eduard Carl Schnitzer, known in the Nile valley as Emin Pasha, to work for Leopold and become his Governor of
the Southern Sudan. Stanley reached the Pasha after a gruelling
march through the Ituri rain forest which took months
and during which most of Stanley’s men died. The Pasha was not interested in
Leopold’s offer. Leopold was not discouraged. When Stanley returned to
Brussels, Leopold proposed to him “the taking of Khartoum.’ (Royal Museun of Central Africa Stanley Papers, Autographical
Journal of Henry Morton Stanley, vol. 3, in F. Hird,
Stanley: The Authorized Life. London, 1935.p. 276.)
The explorer politely
declined and ran for London. Subsequently Leopold sent a Belgian, Captain
Guillaume Van Kerckhoven. He was an aggressive
commander, who rewarded his men per human head they brought him. On his way
from the Congo River to the Sudan, Van Kerckhoven terrorised the natives to such a degree that they all fled,
depopulating the whole area for two years. Then his army plunged itself into
the experience of the Ituri rain forest, where Van Kerckhoven was killed by one of his own soldiers. In 1891,
another Belgian, Lieutenant Charles de la Kethulle,
succeeded in building a number of stations on the upper reaches of the
Nile. During the next years Leopold sent new expeditions deep into the Sudan.
He soon extorted another loan from the Belgian
government.
The King however
simply transferred the money from his Belgian private accounts to his Congo
Treasury; funds he cashed and never repaid to the Belgian State. As usual, he
rewarded those who collaborated in his schemes by receiving them into the
Belgian nobility:
Alexandre Browne de Tiège
became a Baron. Leopold used the money to raise another army, which in
October 1896 left Stanleyville under Baron Dhanis. It
was 3,000 men strong - the largest of all 19th century African expeditions -
and under secret orders to march on Khartoum. Dhanis,
however, got stuck in the tropical inferno of the Ituri.
In February, his auxiliary troops, cannibals from the Southern Congo, mutinied.
They devoured some of their white officers, thereby literally eating into
Leopold’s resources, and fled.
By 1901 British
intelligence reported that Leopold was building the Lado
Enclave, his station on the left bank of the Upper-Nile, into a military
stronghold. In 1902 the Force Publique had 2,400
native troops and 60 European officers based in the tiny enclave. This was the
largest concentration of soldiers anywhere in Africa, apart from South Africa
where the British were fighting the Boers. In 1903, additional arms and
ammunition entered Lado and new contingents of troops
arrived, while an expedition was sent deep into the Sudan. By the turn of the
century, however, the British had grown tired of the King’s attempts to take
the Sudan from them. Queen Victoria had died and London suggested withdrawing
its commitment to uphold Belgium’s independence and neutrality. This greatly
alarmed the Belgian politicians. Even Leopold’s supporter Baron Greindl declared that ‘the King cannot have two policies,
one in Europe as King of the Belgians, the other in Africa as Sovereign of the
Congo; being the friend in Europe of Powers whose enemy he is in Africa.’(Greindl to Lambermont, 28 May
1894, in Jacques Willequet Le Congo belge et la Weltpolitik 1894-1914,Brussels: Presses Universitaires, 1962, p.15.)
Hence Leopold
reluctantly relinquished his Nilotic dreams. Everything he and his father had
obtained - their fortune, the artificial state of Belgium, the vast empire
along the Congo - had been obtained thanks to the British. But London did not
want to grant him the Nile.
On July 20, 2005, 750.000 visitors moved into Brussels to attend its 25
year federalism celebrations:
While the mediahype around Belgians potential break-up took
place, we have taken the above several steps further, with first the most
detailed study yet about how Belgium came about.
Case
Study P. 1: The Creation of Belgium.
Case
Study P. 2: The Start of Belgian Empirialism: When Texas
was to be a Belgian Colony.
History of the former Belgian Congo P.1: Egypt in Central Africa.
The Congo
River is Africa 's most powerful river and the second most voluminous river in
the world. History of Central Africa P.2:
King Leopold's Media.