BELIËN, Paul

A Throne in Brussels

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(1830)

Understandably, France did not like the prospect of having the reunited Netherlands as a strong bulwark to the North of its border. As lat as 1829 the French prime minister Jules de Polignac was proposing to redivide the Netherlands. He suggested giving the North to Prussia, the South to France, and the Dutch colonies to Britain. From the beginning, French agents fomented trouble in Willem’s kingdom. To this end they exploited linguistic as ell as religiuous divisions.

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Moreover the revolutionaries did not want Belgium to become independent; they wanted it to be annexed by France.

Paris, however, was threatened by London that if it annexed the Southern Netherlands there would be war (…)

When the Belgian revlutionaries realized that annexation by France was out of the question, they opted for independance and started procedures fort the election of a Belgian king.

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Through its entire history, from the early Middle Ages right up to the Belgian Revolution of 1830, Flanders had been one of the most prosperous regions in the whole of Europe. The industrialisation process that Dutch King Willem had started in Ghent, Antwerp and other Flemish cities, was suddenly brought to a halt in September 1830. In the new state, the government’s attention was focused almost exclusively on Wallonia, the southern Francophone part of the country. From the beginning, the Francophone revolutionary elite, the creators of the new state, made very clear to the King what part of the country he had to cater for. When in 1834 Leopold I decided to build the first Belgian railway line between Brussels and Antwerp, Alexandre Gendebien, one of the fathers of the Belgian Revolution, objected that the railroad had to be constructed between Brussels and his Walloon home province of Hainaut, whose economic interests, he said, were being ‘sacrificed’ to those of ‘Orangist Antwerp.’ In a speech in Parliament on 11 March, Gendebien warned the King. ‘Bear this in mind,’ he said, ‘If you refuse to listen to the language of reason, we shall have you hear the language of violence.’ Leopold realised his mistake. From then on he bore Gendebien’s warning in mind, and so did his successors.

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(1930s)
… (Henri Pirenne ) and other Belgicists were furious: Flanders had been ‘stolen’ from them, they said. The Flamingants were not only traitors, they were thieves as well, robbing Belgium of its soul by denying the Francophones the right to speak French in Flanders (…) They portrayed the Flamingants, who were fighting against he linguistic discrimination of the Flemish people, as intolerant ideologues because they denied others the right to impose French as an official language in Flanders.

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(Coup d’état 1918)

(…) the Loppem four ( Paul-Emile Janson, Eduard Anseele, Prime Minister Cooreman & Albert I) worked out a scheme to remove Parliament and Government for at least one week, leaving the king as the sole legislative and executive power in the country.(…). Women were deliberately excluded from the franchise because the King feared that they would be more inclined to vote conservative, (…) Cooreman presented the resignation of his cabinet, (…). He ( Albert I ) used this opportunity to usurp the powers of both Parliament and Government, disregard the constitution and proclaim the new franchise law devised in Loppem.

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Albert’s unilateral peace negotiations started in September 1915. (…) While the countess of Bardi waited, Albert and ( Emile) Waxweiler worked on a letter tot he Germans. (…) On 24 and 25 november, Törring and Waxweiler secretly met at Zürich in Switzerland. After the first round of talks, Töring went to Berlin for instructions and met Waxweiler again for a second round on 29 November. The Belgian government knew nothing of this, nor did the Allies.

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(1940)

Both Count Lippens and Hendrik De Man were setting up a government, each imagining himself as the future Belgian Quisling. When, on 3 June, Staf De Clercq heard that Lippens, De Man and other politicians, including the anti-Flamingant ex-minister Devèze, had already been received by the King, he wrote Leopold a letter to request an audience as well. The King flatly refused to meet the VNV. This persuaded De Clercq of the need to make his own political overtures to the Germans, lest the Flemings be overlooked in the Nazi-controlled Europe of the future.

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De Man’s downfall presente an opportunity for his rival, Count Maurice Lippens. The latter suggested that the King appoint him Prime Minister and Viscount Davignon as Foreign minister. But the Führer had enough of the political scheming in Laken.

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Staf De Clerq had publicly and formally renounced the decision of his Flemish-Nationalist Party not to collaborate. The VNV had hesitated for full six months about the question of whether or not to side sith the Germans. However, with the Belgicists wooing Hitler and with the British backing a government-in-exile that was overwhelmingly Francophone, De Clercq anounced in a radio speech that henceforward he would consider Germany as Flanders’ally.

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One important reason why the Flemish-Nationalists leadership ultimlately decided to collaborate with the Germans was that they had teamed up with general Eggert Reeder, the second man in the Militärverwaltung. Reeder ran the German administration in Brussels while his boss (Von Falkenhausen) drank champagne at the parties of the Belgian nobility.

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All-in all, 54 per cent of the Jews living in Belgium were murdered, a far lower figure than the 80 per cent that died under the Zivilverwaltung in the Netherlands.

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In 1991, Luc Huyse, a sociologist at Leuven university, described the post-war purge in Belgium as the settlement of the pre-war conflict between two political elites. The purge allowed the old Belgicist elite of the ‘three traditional political clusters’ around the Catholic, Socialist and Liberal parties to eliminate the anti-establishment VNV that in the 1930s had been gaining electoral momentum.

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Meanwhile, Belgium began to run the Katangese state, where Tshombe was surrounded by Belgian advisors. The informal Belgian embassy at Elisabethville was known as Mistebel, the Mission Technique Belge. The head of Mistebel was Count Harold d’Aspremont-Lynden. His assistant was a young scion of an important belgicist family, Viscount Etienne Davignon, the son pf Jacques Davignon, the former Belgian Ambassador to Nazi Germany.

In his speech during the Independence ceremony of the young Congo Republic on 30 June 1960, the King ( Baudouin ) sang the praises of the genius of Leopold II, who had ‘delivered the Congo basin from the odious slave trafficking that decimated the people eighty years ago.’ He stressed the ‘grand work’ of ‘Leopold II who did not come to you as a conquerer but as a civiliser.’ Lumumba felt compelled to give a rebuff. (…) Baudouin listened in anger. He was raging. ‘I am leaving. We return to Brussels at once,’

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When the newlyweds (Baudouin & Fabiola) returned to Laken from their honeymoon on 29 December 1960, they found the palace empty. Lilian, Leopold, and their three children were gone. They had moved to Argenteuil House near Waterloo… and they had taken the furniture and paintings with them

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Asked by the King ( Baudouin ) why the Flemings had protested so little against their humiliations since 1830, ( Lode ) Claes answered ‘Because they are Catholics, Your Majesty. If only 15 per cent of them had been Protestants, then the whole history of Belgium would have been different. Their Catholic meekness plays them false.’

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