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.
 

 

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