Belgium was never meant to be. The region, known as Flanders or the southern United Provinces, had been hotly disputed by France, Holland, Austria, Spain and England over the centuries, but the locals had proven themselves remarkably resilient by remaining autonomous. At the Congress of Vienna Belgium was simply handed over to the northern United Provinces (the leading one being Holland). The problem was that the population of Flanders was not willing to be traded so easily. The francophones along the French border and the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north were all Catholics, and they fiercely opposed the idea of being ruled by Protestants from Amsterdam, especially since they were more numerous, at four million, than the three million people in Holland.
In 1830 the Belgians rebelled and founded their own state. The British, thwarted in their scheme to create a strong buffer nation north of France, reacted somewhat as the French did towards Haiti. They recognized the new state but saddled it with harsh conditions, including a large chunk of the Netherlands’ debt. They also forced Belgium to be neutral so it could fulfil the original objective of the Congress of Vienna—to form a buffer state against the French. The British went as far as refusing to allow a French prince to become King of the Belgians; instead they imposed a German-British prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who would become Leopold I.
The French language fared surprisingly well in newly created Belgium. At the outset French speakers made up about half the population. But thanks to the enduring prestige of the language in Europe, the Flemish nobility, bourgeoisie and prosperous classes all spoke French, tipping the linguistic balance of power. Belgium’s constitution was written in French. The French-speaking Belgians even hoped to turn Belgium into a unilingual French state, but the plan failed. Contrary to the situation in France, where French competed with a dozen regional languages, in Belgium it had to compete with a single language whose speakers formed a united bloc. The Flemish were embarking on a linguistic revival at the time, similar to the Occitan revival that was happening about the same time in France. Oblivious, the francophone elite pushed their linguistic agenda anyway. Their intransigence was the main factor in transforming the Flemish renaissance into a separatist movement that has lasted to this day.
But for the first 120 years of the state of Belgium, French remained politically dominant. In 1832, against the wishes of the British, King Leopold I married a French princess, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the daughter of the King of France. French was so powerful, politically and economically, that the population of the capital city of Brussels slowly adopted it. Brussels was only fifteen percent French in 1830, but it is now thought to be eighty-five percent French, although the statistics are unreliable (since 1947 the Flemish have refused to conduct language surveys, still believing that Brussels is their city, and the lack of reliable data to the contrary keeps their argument alive). To this day, many more Flemish learn French as a second language than French-speaking Belgians learn Flemish. The famous Belgian accent, much derided in France, is often the accent of Flemish Belgians speaking French as a second language rather than that of native francophone Belgians.
Belgium went on to become an impressive industrial powerhouse. Jean Chrétien, the former prime minister of Canada, was fond of reminding everyone of his modest origins in the Quebec town of Shawinigan, located between Montreal and Quebec City. During the first half of the twentieth century the town became famous as a centre for high-tech research in hydroelectric power and paper production. Few people recall that the city’s first paper plant was Belgo-Canadian Pulp and Paper, the creation of a Belgian engineer and industrialist, Ferdinand-Charles de Bruyssels.
It was in Belgium that the Industrial Revolution started on the Continent. Among other things, the Belgians were renowned for building roads and railways, which they needed to move their abundant stocks of coal and steel. When coal production dropped, the Belgians simply enlarged their ports to handle new types of trade. Faced with a tiny domestic market, they decided to export their talent for engineering, and went on to build turnkey projects all over the world, especially railways. Their industrialists invested in raw materials from as far away as the Americas, Asia and Russia. They built trains for France, Austria and Germany, and later for Spain, South America, the British Indies, Russia and China. The Belgian industrial baron Édouard Empain was responsible for digging the first Paris subway line and was the first to build high-risk turnkey steel plants in Russia. In fact, Belgium was the most dynamic industrial power on the Continent throughout the nineteenth century and until 1914.
Belgian scientists and inventors stood at the forefront of research and participated in the great wave of discoveries in the nineteenth century (more on this in chapter 11). They were particularly active in fields such as mechanics, optometry and engineering, and one inventor of note, Adolphe Sax, patented a new musical instrument—the saxophone.
Belgium owed much of its economic dynamism to its colony in the Congo. In fact, this tiny country probably benefited more from the second wave of colonialism than any other power in Europe, all things considered. Though the methods of Belgian explorers and colonists are alleged to have been among the most brutal, racist and exploitive ever used, there’s no disputing the fact that Belgium was an effective colonial power, much more so than Germany (some of whose African colonies Belgium inherited after the First World War). Ultimately, Belgium contributed greatly to the spread of French in equatorial Africa, particularly around the Congo River basin.
Like the rest of the world, the Belgians became interested in equatorial Africa after hearing stories of the legendary Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who was famous for his exploration of vast swaths of central Africa. When Livingstone disappeared in 1866, an ambitious New York reporter, Henry Morgan Stanley, was sent to find him. He finally discovered him at Lake Tanganyika in 1871. His first question, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” became the most famous line from the whole African colonial era. In a curious twist of history, explorations by the Welsh-American Stanley would help the French language establish a large and permanent presence in equatorial Africa.
After discovering the Congo, Stanley couldn’t find a country willing to finance further explorations, so he accepted offers from the eccentric (and, as it would later turn out, monstrous) King of the Belgians. Leopold II (ruled 1865–1909) never set foot in Africa, but from the beginning of his reign he had been bent on purchasing some exotic foreign territory to create a personal domain and then get rich extracting priceless treasures from it. Thanks to Stanley, he settled on Africa. Deranged as he was, Leopold II knew he needed to establish an appearance of legitimacy in order to explore Africa, so he created the Association internationale africaine (International African Association) and camouflaged it with supposedly humanitarian objectives. In fact, all he wanted to do was strip Africa of all the wealth he could get his hands on.
Stanley worked for Leopold from 1879 to 1884, signing treaties with chiefs on the left bank of the Congo, constructing roads and forts and organizing river navigation. By the turn of the century Europeans had heard about what Leopold and Stanley were really doing: forcing Africans to work in appalling conditions, often under torture, to hunt for ivory and later to harvest rubber. But until the word got out, Leopold II managed to convince Europe’s leaders that he was bringing “civilization” to Africa. And the argument worked; in 1885 they handed over to him part of the territory south of the Congo River, which he cynically named the Congo Free State. Millions of Africans died under the rule of Leopold II. Joseph Conrad based his novel Heart of Darkness (published in 1902) on the Belgian Congo; it tells the story of a search for a deranged company agent whose dealings with the locals have become savagely abusive.
The Belgians reappear in different episodes of the story of French. Whether in Africa or Europe, Belgium was a dynamic centre, quite autonomous from France and the British, and it played an important role in spreading the French language and fostering its international influence. In the twentieth ce
ntury Belgium would become a founding member of the United Nations, and later Brussels would become the capital of a new form of internationalism: the European Union. An early sign of this trend was the creation, in 1913, of the Union of International Associations, still active today.
Belgium has always been part of the original domain of French. The language is as native to Belgium as it is to France. Some parts of Belgium could even make fair claim to being epicentres of the melting-pot process by which Romance dialects evolved into modern French. Belgium was the centre of the kingdom of the Franks before they moved their capital to Paris. The Frankish king Charlemagne, who became Holy Roman Emperor, was born in the Belgian city of Liège in 742. He spoke Frankish, not Romance, but he certainly played a part in the political rise of northern France and, consequently, of the langues d’oïl. Although the oldest original document written in Romance, the poem of St. Eulalie, is stored in an abbey in Valenciennes, on the French side of the Belgian border, it was probably written on the Belgian side, between Liège and Tournai. Two langues d’oïl, Picard and especially Walloon, were firmly established, and they both went into the historical melting pot that created French, although the extent of this contribution is debated among scholars. The great Belgian linguist Jean-Marie Klinkenberg characterizes Belgium as a linguistic suburb of France, a satellite. Indeed, the symbol of Brussels was, and remains, the same as that of the kingdom of France—the fleur-de-lys—even though, historically, Brussels has more often been outside the kingdom than within it.
“Vous êtes Belge?” (“You’re Belgian?”) is a question Jean-Benoît is often asked in France, though more often in the south than in the north. He knows enough not to be flattered. For some reason the French love to laugh at Belgians. Belgian jokes are like Newfie jokes in Canada or Vermont jokes in New England (we can testify that the same cookie-cutter stories circulate freely between languages). But there is at least one legitimate reason why some French confuse Belgians and Quebeckers: Both produce diphthongs (combinations of two vowel sounds) for certain vowels and drag other vowels out in a way that Parisian French no longer does. The pronunciations of Belgians and Quebeckers are actually quite different, but years of language purism have dulled French ears to the nuances that distinguish Belgian and Quebec diphthongs. Typically, Belgians add an I after the sound É so that aller (to go) sounds like alleï. In words like bière (beer) they stretch the E (bee-ehr). Quebeckers typically stretch the E and the diphthong, which results in a pronunciation something like bee-ah-air. Belgians also tend to use the resources of French differently from French people, distinguishing between words that the French pronounce the same way, like brun (brown) and brin (twig) or bout (end) and boue (mud).
Belgians themselves disagree on what exactly constitutes the so-called Belgian accent. The strongest examples come from either native Flemish speakers who use French as a second language, or citizens of Brussels, where the Flemish influence is by far the strongest. Elsewhere, native Belgians speak very normative French under the influence of Picard and Walloon, two dialects spoken on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border and therefore not specifically Belgian. The universally distinct trait of Belgian French is found in its vocabulary, a result of the influences of Flemish, Picard and Walloon. Belgians have different terms for institutions; they do not speak of the maire (mayor) and lycée (college) but of the bourgmestre and athénée. They use terms such as wassingue (floor cloth) and drache (heavy rain). Germanic influence has led Belgians to use terms such as une fois (once), which is a calque, or loan translation, of the Flemish eenmaal.
Belgians also count differently. Whereas the French have come to say soixante-dix (literally “sixty and ten,” for seventy), quatre-vingts (“four twenties,” for eighty) and quatre-vingt-dix (“four twenties and ten,” for ninety), the Belgians kept the more sensible septante, huitante and nonante, which are calqued on the French quarante (forty), cinquante (fifty) and soixante (sixty). For eighty some Belgians say octante, but more prefer, quatre-vingts. Although it sounds more modern to say septante or nonante, the terms actually come from an older system of counting.
Apart from these few exceptions of vocabulary and usage, Belgians, like the French, on the whole embrace a very purist conception of language. The main reason is that their education system was strongly influenced by the French system (more on this in chapter 8). So, unlike Quebeckers, many Belgian writers and intellectuals enter the French cultural sphere quite seamlessly. It was a Belgian schoolteacher and scholar, Maurice Grévisse, who published the definitive grammar of French, Le bon usage, in 1936.
The history of Switzerland is far more complex than that of Belgium. It started as a confederacy of German-speaking cantons in 1291, but France’s influence on Switzerland has always been strong. When François I crushed Swiss ambitions in Italy at the battle of Marignano in 1515, he gave the Swiss trading privileges with France, and France remained their main market until the French Revolution. The western, francophone cantons of Vaud, Valais, Fribourg, Neuchâtel and Geneva were originally outside Switzerland, although they frequently allied with the Swiss to defend themselves against the Duchy of Savoy, France, Italian city states or German principalities. These francophone and semi-francophone cantons progressively joined the confederation until 1815, when the Congress of Vienna formally integrated them into Switzerland. During the same negotiations, Switzerland’s neutrality was recognized, making it a virtual sanctuary of peace in the middle of Europe.
Unlike Belgium, which influenced French because of its economic and cultural dynamism, Switzerland’s impact on French came about through the peculiar fate of one city—Geneva. In the history and geography of Switzerland, Geneva sticks out like an appendix, sharing about 118 kilometres of its border with France but only seven with Switzerland. During the Protestant Reformation, the exiled French theologian Jean Calvin established the political and religious doctrine that transformed Geneva into an autonomous city state. Calvin preached an ascetic form of Protestantism that became very influential in England and America among the Puritans (who called him John Calvin). During the wars of religion in the sixteenth century, Geneva became a refuge for the French Huguenots. The first wave of eight thousand doubled the population of the city between 1549 and 1587, followed by a second wave after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—after which Geneva became the centre of French Protestantism. The Geneva Huguenots became important in the textile industry, and as goldsmiths and watchmakers.
Over the centuries, business got so good that Swiss banks in Geneva (as well as in Zurich and Basel) accumulated huge reserves of capital. In the eighteenth century Geneva developed a reputation as a banking centre. Swiss bankers demonstrated an uncanny talent for investing abroad. One of them—Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s last finance minister—was the father of Madame de Staël, and she held a famous salon on the shores of Lake Geneva (in French, Lac Léman), which was already a refuge for the rich and famous. This had a spillover effect all the way to Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud, which was also on the shores of Lake Geneva—an area still known as the Swiss Riviera. The accumulation of wealth transformed Geneva into an important intellectual centre. As a printing centre, Geneva was not as important as Holland, but it did remain French, whereas the Huguenots in Holland assimilated in the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, and returned there in 1754 after he became famous in Paris. Voltaire was frequently seen in Geneva as well; he went there seeking refuge from the French authorities, who often threatened to jail him for his irreverence.
Although there have always been far fewer francophones in Switzerland than in Belgium—today about 1.4 million, compared to 4.4 million in Belgium—Switzerland’s francophones, especially Genevans, have played a remarkable role in the development of internationalism. Geneva’s prestige in watch-making and industry was eroding by the mid-nineteenth century, so the city reinvented itself by creating a completely new form of international activity—humanitarian aid. Geneva had long been a
popular travel destination for the French and English elite. Its neutrality also made it an ideal location for representatives of countries such as France, Germany and England—always rivals—to meet to consider their common interests. Starting in 1853, the International Sanitary Convention (which later became the World Health Organization) and the World Meteorological Organization were established in Geneva to find ways to control epidemics and coordinate efforts on weather forecasts.
Henri Dunant (1828–1910), the founder of the International Red Cross, was an important player in developing Geneva’s new international vocation. His story is a film waiting to be produced. Although a Genevan, he left Switzerland in the 1850s to run a colony of Swiss citizens living in Algeria. In order to get the proper papers to open a grain mill in the colony, he tracked down Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon’s nephew, who was briefly president and then France’s second emperor from 1852 to 1870), following him all the way back to Italy, where he was fighting the Austrians. In 1859 Dunant arrived in the wake of the battle of Solferino, where forty thousand men died, mostly because of lack of medical care. In 1862 he published Un Souvenir de Solferino (Memories of Solferino), which recounted the horrors he had witnessed. In this book Dunant called for an international body for the care of the wounded.
The idea snowballed, and by 1863 the International Committee of the Red Cross had been created, thanks to the support of four influential Geneva francophones, including General Dufour and Gustave Moynie, who would run the organization for its first forty years. The next year, sixteen countries signed the first Geneva Convention. This accord obliged signatories to take care of the wounded and to protect medical personnel, regardless of their nationality, during conflicts. It was the first move to civilize modern warfare and has remained the basis of humanitarian law ever since. Dunant went bankrupt the same year and lived in obscurity until a journalist rediscovered him in a poor-house in the late 1890s. He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
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