By Eric W. Vandenbroeck

Modern Belgian history really began with the Napoleonic wars and the shaky path to unification and separation. Briefly “liberated,” then actually “conquered” by the troops of the French Revolution as a result of the battle of Jemappes on November 6, 1792, it was incorporated into France from 1794 to 1814. It remained a part of France during the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. With the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo, the allied powers, under the Treaty of Vienna, declared that the Netherlands and Belgium would be one state, The United Kingdom of the Netherlands: un état, deux pays, under King William II.

During the time from 1794 to 1814, the French authorities pursued a cultural imperialism policy. 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 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 favor 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.  Particularly when Wilhelm’s son decided in secret he wanted to become “King of Belgium” that the “Opera Revolution” as the Frankfurter 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.1

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 civilized troop compared to the Légion of Pontécoulant which, he said, consisted of ‘robbers.’ After putting down the revolt in Bruges, the two ‘armies’ terrorized 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 in the Netherlands. 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 to prepare the fusion of Belgium with our great fatherland France,” Charles Rogier wrote candidly to the British Foreign Secretary.2

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. The 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, all civil and military posts must be entrusted to Walloons, so that the Flemings, being temporarily deprived of the advantages deriving from such employment, will be obliged to learn French.” 3

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 of “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 around Holland and Belgium, by sea and land, and leave them to fight it out.” 4

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 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 realized, that with the favorite 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.” 5

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.6

 

1. For the above see A. Smits, 1830 Scheuring in de Nederlanden, 4 volumes, 1983-1999.

2. 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.

3. Quoted in T. Herman, ed. The Flemish Movement: A Documentary History 1780-1990. London, 1992. p. 72.

4. Quoted in Daniel H. Thomas, The Guarantee of Belgian Independence and Neutrality in European Diplomacy 1830s-1930s, 1983, p. 31.

5. Quoted in J. A. Goris, Lof van Antwerpen, Lions Club Antwerpen-Centrum, 1994, p. 124.

6. Royal Archive Windsor, Leopold I to Queen Victoria, 18 Dec. 1846, 23 July 1847,19 Apr. 1850 and 13 June 1856.

 

 

For updates click hompage here