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 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 however. 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. (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.)