BELGIUM

A small, densely populated country in northwestern continental Europe, Belgium exemplified many of the classic trends of nineteenth-century Europe. The second country to industrialize after England, Belgium boasted a strong liberal movement in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1900, it was home to a large socialist party. Belgium was created in 1831 as a neutral country, whose borders were guaranteed by all the great powers. Violation of this neutrality by Imperial Germany in 1914 began World War I and ended nineteenth-century Europe.

Belgium owed its existence as a nation to two accidents of history. The Belgian provinces were the southern region of the Low Countries that the Spanish reconquered in the sixteenth century after the northern, largely Protestant provinces successfully broke away. The provinces in the northern Low Countries became the independent Netherlands ruled by Dutch Protestants. Under the Spanish in the seventeenth century, the southern Low Countries became one of the most Catholic regions of Europe. Under both Spanish rule in the seventeenth century and Austrian rule in the eighteenth century, the southern provinces deepened their strong tradition of local autonomy. After passing under French rule during the Revolution and Napoleonic period, the Belgian provinces were again joined with the Netherlands to the north after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. The goal of the victorious Allies who defeated Napoleon—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—was to create a larger country to the north of France that could more easily check French military expansion. The new "United Kingdom of the Netherlands" lasted only fifteen years. In 1830, the kingdom of Belgium emerged from a revolution against the Dutch in the north. The new state survived, however, only because the great powers agreed to prevent its annexation by France or its reconquest by the recently ousted Dutch.

The southern Netherlands provinces that became the modern nation of Belgium consisted of a group of semiautonomous provinces that had little historic or cultural unity. The northern part was Dutch-speaking. Gradually, this area came to be known as Flanders, even though the medieval county of Flanders only partially overlapped this area. The southern part of the provinces was French-speaking. This area was sometimes referred to as "Walloon" or Wallonia, after the Walloon dialect of French. In the period of Spanish rule until 1715, and continuing under the Austrians from 1715 to 1792, French slowly became the language of education, government, business, and the Catholic Church all over the region, including Dutch-speaking Flanders. The occupation and annexation of the region by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic governments from 1794 to 1815 only accelerated the use of French. By the early nineteenth century, Dutch, or rather local dialects of Dutch sometimes called Flemish, was the everyday language only of farmers, workers, and sections of the middle class in Flanders.

the belgian revolution

The Belgian revolution of 1830 was launched because King William I of the Netherlands disregarded the Belgian provinces' long tradition of local autonomy and Catholic piety. Remarkably for post-1815 Europe, both anticlerical liberals angered by the king's political heavy-handedness and conservative Catholic bishops afraid of Protestantism united against Dutch rule. This "Unionism" of liberals and Catholics kept the infant nation together while the Great Powers debated its fate and the Dutch threatened to invade. The revolution permanently divided Dutch-speaking Flanders in what became Belgium from the Dutch-speaking northern Netherlands. There was only limited affinity for the Netherlands among the Flemish. Textile industrialists in the Flemish city of Ghent, most of whom were more likely to speak French than Dutch, worried that they would lose the Dutch colonial empire as an export market. Workers in cities such as Ghent and Antwerp resented the dominance of French-speaking elites in Brussels that separation from the Netherlands would bring. But these groups of "Orangists" were not united among themselves. (The Dutch royal family came from the House of Orange.) The alliance of the French-speaking south with the largely French-speaking church and upper and middle class in Flanders meant that separation from the Netherlands had wide support.

The new nation might easily have disappeared. The Dutch reinvaded in 1831, but Dutch rule was clearly opposed by the mass of the middle and upper class. Militarily, Belgium was protected from the Dutch only by the intervention of the French army, supported by the British navy. For many observers, the most likely solution for Belgium was union with France. The Great Powers, particularly Britain, Prussia, and Austria, preferred independence for Belgium to strengthening France, and the newly installed French king Louis-Philippe did not push the proposal. Belgium was provided with a king, Leopold I, of Saxe-Coburg, the uncle of Queen Victoria of Britain, who conveniently married the daughter of Louis-Philippe.

the early belgian state

For its time, the new Belgian state had a progressive constitution. Leopold I, like all subsequent Belgian kings, ruled as a constitutional monarch with very limited powers. Parliament effectively controlled decisions through cabinet governments. Approximately 10 percent of the adult males voted, about the same as in France under the July monarchy and more than was the case in most German states. Freedoms of press, assembly, and religion were guaranteed. The new Unionist regime balanced the interests of liberals with those of practicing Catholics. In vain, the Vatican denounced the constitution for not establishing Catholicism as the state religion. The Belgian bishops decided that, given the predominance of Catholics in the population, they could utilize religious freedom to create a strong position for the church. They chose wisely. The church in Belgium soon controlled much of education and social welfare. Local governments, although not the central government, gave Catholic-controlled institutions subsidies. Under the constitution, any religious organization had a right to financial support from the state. Because the country was 99 percent Catholic, in practice, Catholicism had almost as much support as if it were the state church.

The Unionist compromise broke down in the 1860s and 1870s when the Liberals tried to undo the powerful Catholic hold on education and social welfare. Many Liberals were practicing Catholics, but they opposed the church's privileged position and wanted education, in particular, to be secular and state-controlled. In 1879, Liberals took control of parliament, cut state subsidies to schools controlled by the church, and expanded the secular school system. The Catholics responded by a massive campaign to support church-supported schools and to win the 1884 elections. From 1884 until 1914, the Catholic party controlled all governments.

Catholics and Liberals, both upper-middle-class parties, differed little in supporting economic development and free markets. Already under the French and Dutch, Belgian entrepreneurs, sometime with British capital and technical help, had built the first mechanized cotton, woolen, and linen mills and set up the first coal mining and iron smelting complexes on the Continent. Governments aided this process by removing almost all internal tariff barriers, keeping external tariffs very low, and building the densest railroad network in the world across the small country. On canals, railroads, and harbor traffic, Belgium carried a great deal of the transit trade linking western Germany, northern France, and Switzerland with the rest of the world.

The economy of the newly independent state suffered several severe setbacks in the middle of the nineteenth century, but continued to be more industrialized than most of the rest of Europe. The textile industries had to find new markets in Latin America and Asia after losing the Dutch colonies. Belgian industrialists competed on price, not quality. They relied more on lower paid women and children as workers than did British firms. Belgian workers also worked one or two hours longer than their British counterparts. Flemish rural textile workers and farmers suffered horribly in the potato famine of the 1840s. The Flemish countryside remained a depressed area until the early twentieth century. Thousands of Flemings emigrated to cities such as Brussels or Ghent, to the southern French-speaking areas in Wallonia to work in the coal and metallurgical industries, or to northern France. Belgians were the largest immigrant group in France throughout the nineteenth century. Cities such as Roubaix near Lille in northern France were over 50 percent Belgian for several decades. Very few Belgians emigrated to the New World. The textile industries in Ghent and other Flemish cities always struggled, but managed to compete at the lower end of the market with cheaper, lower quality cloths and by holding down labor costs. In 1870, women made up 36 percent of the workforce in Belgium, 30 percent in Britain. Belgium did better in metallurgy. With little iron ore and with coal deposits that were narrower and less easily worked than those in Britain and Germany, the Walloon industries nonetheless did remarkably well until World War I. As late as 1860, Belgium produced sixty-nine kilograms of pig iron per capita, while France produced only twenty-six and Germany thirteen.

Labor costs could be kept lower both because people were numerous and lacked skills. Although Belgium's population grew only slowly during the nineteenth century, it began the Industrial Revolution with one of the highest population densities in the world. The intensive cultivation of agriculture in Flanders and the widespread network of rural industry supported a large, though frequently impoverished, population. Even in 1913, Belgium, with a population of seven and a half million, had perhaps the highest density in the world at 259 people per square kilometer. Britain, considered very densely populated, had only 238 in 1911. Battles over education kept the school system inadequate. As late as 1914, 10 percent of the population was illiterate, the highest rate in Western Europe north of the Pyrenees.

language

The new Belgian nation created in 1831 used French as its national language. Approximately 55 to 60 percent of the population in fact spoke Dutch, or more accurately, versions of Dutch dialects as their first language, and 40 to 45 percent French, or dialects of French. Because Flanders had been cut off for centuries from the Dutch-speaking northern Netherlands, a standardized written and spoken Dutch language had never emerged. The government, law, education, the church, and middle-class business in Flanders used French, even though many French speakers also spoke a Dutch dialect at home or with lower-class people. Until 1898, the official text of laws was always the French version. The dominance of French in public life conferred a great advantage on French-speakers. Workers, farmers, or middle-class people in Flanders often tried to learn French or have their children educated in French as a means of social mobility. As a union newspaper complained, "In front of the bosses, you always have to use French."

Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a strong association of French with progress and wealth and Dutch or Flemish dialects with backwardness and poverty. Flanders was poor and agricultural, except for Ghent and the harbor city of Antwerp. The French-speaking southern provinces of Hainaut and Liége were the industrialized heartland of Belgium. The effects of this can be seen most powerfully in the capital and largest city of the country, Brussels. In the medieval period, Brussels was a Flemish city like Bruges, Ghent, or Antwerp. Like them, it acquired a Francophone upper class by the time of the French Revolution. Unlike them, after 1830, Brussels eventually became a bilingual city. Workers were still usually Dutch speakers, but the middle class and the better paid workers gradually began using French more and more. Immigrants to the city from French-speaking areas rarely learned Dutch. Those from Flanders often learned French. Upper-class people, and increasingly even middle-class individuals, used only French. By the end of the century, Dutch became a language of a small minority, while the bilingual population also shrank and the numbers of French speakers rose.

It was to prevent this fate from befalling the rest of Flanders that there arose a small Flemish-rights movement. These middle-class Flamingants promoted Dutch-language theater and literature, called on the government to allow more use of Dutch in legal proceedings, and protested the exclusive use of French in public life. They made almost no attempt to reach out to workers or the rural poor. The elite-dominated Liberal and Catholic political parties, as Francophone in Flanders as they were in Wallonia and Brussels, largely ignored them. Flamingants, too, split into rival Liberal and Catholic cultural organizations, the Willemfonds and Davidsfonds, respectively. Flamingants did not see the language issue in regional terms. They wanted to have Dutch as an accepted standard language in Flanders. Thus, their biggest opponents were upper-class Flemings who insisted on using French as their normal spoken and written language even though they lived in Flanders. Even local governments followed the lead of the Flemish elite. In 1885, a bilingual official in Brussels reported that it was pointless to use Dutch with local officials in Flanders. When he wrote them letters in Dutch, they responded in French. This was the situation Flamingants wanted changed. They had few issues with French-speaking Walloons, except that the latter were indifferent to the Flemish cause. The Flemish question, in other words, was not one of Belgian identity or unity. It was a battle within Flanders.

labor and political protest

Belgium, Karl Marx once said, was "the paradise of the capitalist, landlord, and the priest." Britain may have invented laissez-faire economics, but Belgium epitomized it. Workers had almost no protections in labor law. Only in 1866 were labor unions legalized, and they still suffered many legal handicaps. Liberals and Catholics, for all the virulence of their battles over education and social welfare, differed little in their support for unfettered free markets. Unlike Liberals in Britain or Radicals in France, the Belgian Liberals did almost nothing to reach out to workers. There was a small wing of so-called progressives within the Liberal party in the 1870s to 1890s, but they lacked any influence on the national party. Catholic charities such as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul organized workers' clubs, distributed welfare, and provided relief. Until the 1890s, "Social Catholics" created "guilds" of workers supposedly modeled on those of the Middle Ages. These were usually run by upper-class individuals and did nothing to help workers to express their grievances. Small unions of skilled artisans in the capital city of Brussels and textile factory workers in Ghent briefly joined the First International of Workingmen's Association between 1866 and 1874. Once the First International fell apart, however, these groups of unions lost any connection between them. The artisanal unions in Brussels, mostly printers, glovers, and bronze workers, were much less radical than the textile workers in Ghent whose leaders began to adopt socialism as a result of ties with Dutch and German workers.

Opposition to the restricted electoral system eventually mobilized workers. The suffrage or right to vote that was progressive for its time in the 1830s was still unchanged in the 1880s. Whereas only 10 percent of males could vote in elections in Belgium, France and Germany had both adopted universal male suffrage in 1871, and Britain, by the Second Reform Bill of 1867, had granted approximately two-thirds of males the right to vote. Conservative Catholics opposed a wider suffrage because of their fears of more democratic rule. Liberals feared that a wider suffrage would enfranchise the Catholic countryside. In 1884, Edmond Van Beveren and Edward Anseele, the leaders of the Ghent Socialists, persuaded a number of Brussels artisanal unions to collaborate in forming the Belgian Labor Party, Belgische Werkliedenpartij/Parti Ouvrier Belge. The platform of the tiny party called for universal suffrage, that is, in practice, universal male suffrage. The party had only a few knots of supporters in the coalfields and ironworks in Wallonia, in southern Belgium, where most workers lived, but its pamphlets calling for universal suffrage were distributed widely.

The watershed event in Belgium's history in the nineteenth century occurred in March 1886. In the midst of the worst economic depression since the 1840s, coal miners and metallurgists in southern Belgium organized demonstrations, went on strike, and engaged in acts of violence in reaction to the government's use of police and the army. Small groups of anarchists helped spark the demonstrations, but the strikes were a genuine economic protest in which anarchists often had no role. At least thirty-two people died, all, it appears, killed by the police or army. At its peak, the wave of protests may have brought almost 200,000 workers out on strike, out of a total industrial workforce of perhaps 800,000. It was arguably the first general strike in the world.

suffrage and political change

The Socialists in the new Labor Party had not organized the strike wave, nor were they able to control it. In its wake, however, they fanned out across the industrial regions trying to organize consumer cooperatives, mutual insurance societies, labor unions, and political clubs. Many of these eventually faded away. Enough survived to be a network supporting the Labor Party as a fledgling national movement. It was still largely led by artisans and middle-class intellectuals—journalists, teachers, and lawyers—in Brussels and labor union leaders in Ghent. For the first time, however, it had intermittent support from the mass of miners and metallurgists in the industrial provinces of Hainaut and Liége in southern Belgium. The party's newspapers and propagandists preached a simple message: universal suffrage. In principle, the party had a socialist platform in calling for the nationalization of private property, but the party's leaders never displayed a commitment to Marxism. Universal suffrage would, they believe, allow workers to vote the Labor Party into power in parliament, where it would be able to bring about reforms. The party's leaders were all close to the Liberals in their anticlericalism. They called for complete separation of church and state by ending subsidies to church-related institutions.

The ripple effects of 1886 overturned the elite-dominated political and social system. The Catholic government introduced a few cautious reforms. Labor inspection laws, laws against garnishing wages, and elected consultative councils for workers and employers all were introduced. More importantly, 1886 forced both Liberals and Catholics at last to consider extending the suffrage. Few supported universal male suffrage. Liberals wanted to enfranchise the middle class that they hoped would vote for them. Catholics feared that workers would vote Liberal or Socialist. Like Disraeli and Bismarck, they also calculated that farmers and the lower middle class might vote more conservatively than the middle class or workers. The stalemate strengthened the attractiveness of the simple Socialist call for universal suffrage. In 1893, the Socialists organized a massive general strike of some 250,000 workers. The government responded with repression and confusion, and finally agreed to consider reform. Universal male suffrage was introduced the next year, although wealthier or more educated voters had up to two additional votes. The number of voters went from 136,000 to 1,370,000. The Catholics' calculations proved correct. They won 103 seats, the Socialists 28, Liberals only 20. The Liberals actually outpolled the Socialists, but were thinly spread across the country. Under the winner-take-all system, the Socialists' concentration in industrial areas in Wallonia was a major advantage.

The political system might have continued to change, except that the Catholics, Liberals, and Socialists all made strategic choices that put a new stalemate into place. Under the winner-take-all system in which only one party captured all the seats in a district, the Liberals and Socialists were shut out unless they allied against the Catholics. Meanwhile, within the Catholic party, democratic elements among workers, farmers, and the lower middle class for the first time could pressure the old elite. When Socialists, Liberals, and democratic Catholics in 1899 all called for proportional representation, the conservative Catholic government gave in. The number of seats held by the Catholics, Liberals, and Socialists went from 112, 12, and 28, respectively, to 86, 33, and 32. The Catholics' majority was reduced, but they succeeded in keeping their opponents from uniting. Replacing the Socialists as the major opposition party, the Liberals never definitely committed to an alliance to turn the Catholics out of power or get rid of plural votes. The Socialists, meanwhile, never firmly allied with democratic Catholics on economic issues, but clung to anticlericalism. As Emile Vandervelde, the Socialist leader put it in a May Day speech, "Christian holidays are those of a world that is dying." Only gradually, Socialists, the increasingly larger democratic Catholic camp, and a few progressives among the Liberals combined to put through social reforms in parliament on a piecemeal basis. In elections until World War I, Socialists and Liberals campaigned against the Catholics on separate anticlerical platforms and lost.

The Socialists were the primary beneficiaries of universal male suffrage, but in the long run the sea change of 1886 to 1894 had as great an effect on the Catholics and Flemish activists. In anticipation of the struggle under universal suffrage, in 1891, democratic Catholic leaders created the Belgian Democratic League (Belgische Volksbond/Ligue Democratique Belge), an association of middle-class, farmer, and workers groups to broaden the Catholic party. They also created the Boerenbond (Farmers' League) to help Flemish small farmers switch from unprofitable grain production to dairying and truck farming. A large Catholic labor union movement also arose. After 1894, the Catholic elite could only win elections by taking account of these groups' grievances and letting more of their leaders into decision-making. In Flanders, both Christian Democrats, as these groups came to be known, and Socialists had to use Dutch to reach lower-class voters. This, in turn, transformed Flemish activism. By 1900, there was a group of Catholic, Socialist, and Liberal deputies in parliament successfully demanding that Dutch be more widely used in schools, courts, and the military. This paved the way for a transformation whereby the Francophone elite in Flanders was forced to change and the region became a genuinely Dutch-speaking area.

Despite Belgium's small size and neutral status, the country played a role in world affairs. The second Belgian king, Leopold II, who ruled from 1865 to 1909, chafed at the limits imposed on his power by the constitution. He skillfully convinced the European Great Powers to turn over most of the huge Congo River basin in central Africa to him as the Congo Free State, which he personally ruled. The king's subcontractors exacted huge profits for him from sales of ivory, rubber, and other products supplied by the Congolese at a horrible cost in human life. Finally, as a result of perhaps the first international human rights campaign, led by British journalists and activists Roger Casement and E. D. Morel, the Belgian government was shamed into taking over the rule of the Congo as a Belgian colony in 1908. More wisely, Leopold II had advocated stronger defenses for Belgium against German attack and an increased army. Antimilitarism ran deep among both Catholics and Socialists, however. Combined with tight-fisted economic policies, this meant that only in the years right before 1914 did Belgium begin to build up its forts. As a neutral country where commerce among Britain, France, and Germany flowed freely, Belgium was a strong supporter of international organizations. La vie internationale, the journal that documented the explosion of international organizations in the pre-1914 era, was published in Brussels. Belgium produced several Nobel Peace Prize winners before 1914, among them Charles Beernaert, Catholic prime minister and international negotiator. The Socialist Second International (1889–1914), the federation of Socialist parties worldwide, was headquartered in Brussels, and its secretary was the Flemish Socialist Camille Huysmans. In the last days of July 1914, the Belgian Socialists gathered French and German Socialists together for a meeting to help head off an impending war. No resolution came from the meeting. Within a few days, German troops poured over the lightly defended Belgian border. The end of Belgian neutrality marked the end, too, of nineteenth-century Europe.

See alsoLeopold I; Leopold II; Netherlands.

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Carl J. Strikwerda