Charleroi

• 1. Introduction

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  Charleroi carries a name that belongs to a five-year-old king. In September 1666, Spanish administrators renamed a small Wallonian hamlet Charle-roi, meaning King Charles, in honour of the child who sat on the throne of Spain. That act of naming captured something essential about the city: it has always been shaped by forces larger than itself, by empires, wars, industries, and the people who came seeking work. Today Charleroi is the largest city in both Hainaut province and the whole of Wallonia, with more than 200,000 residents and a metropolitan area ranking fifth in Belgium. But the questions worth asking are how a hamlet of around 50 people in the Middle Ages became an industrial colossus, why that colossus struggled, and what survives when the furnaces go cold.

• 2. Fortress at the Gap

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  The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees created a dangerous problem for Spain. Territorial losses left a gap between the fortresses of Mons and Namur, and Francisco Castel Rodrigo, then Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, decided to fill it by expropriating land around the hamlet of Charnoy on the Sambre. Construction had barely started when the War of Devolution pulled Spanish troops away in 1667. France stepped in, retained the town under the 1668 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and the military engineer Vauban completed the fortifications. A bridge was built over the Sambre connecting the upper and lower districts, with incentives offered to draw settlers. The French gave up control in 1678, but the city changed hands so many times over the following half-century that its history reads like a ledger of European treaty-making. The Dutch, the Spanish, and the Austrians each held it in turn, and the French Prince of Conti took the city again in 1745 before it passed back to Austria in 1748, beginning what the sources describe as a period of prosperity under Joseph II.

• 3. Coalfields and Conflict

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  Glass, steel, and coal had sprung up in the Charleroi region a century before Joseph II's reign, but the post-1748 stability allowed them to flourish. The area earned a nickname, Pays Noir, or Black Country, that stuck long after the furnaces were extinguished. After the Belgian Revolution of 1830 freed the region from Dutch rule, the Industrial Revolution brought a sharp rise in population as workers arrived from across Europe. That prosperity had a brutal underside. Charleroi became one of the most important centres of labour strikes in Wallonia from the 1850s-1860s onward. In 1886, twelve strikers were killed by the Belgian army in Roux during the Walloon Jacquerie. The repression was severe enough to push miners out of the region entirely: Hainaut miners were recruited by the Dominion Coal Company in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, while others emigrated to Alberta, Canada. The working men of Charleroi continued to play a central role in Belgian general strikes, including the general strike against Leopold III and the 1960-1961 winter general strike.

• 4. War, Magazine, and Merger

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  Heavy fighting during World War I exploited Charleroi's position on the Sambre. Further destruction was narrowly avoided through the Couillet Treaty, which required the city to pay 10 million Belgian Francs along with foodstuffs, vehicles, and armaments to the German forces. Recovery brought an unexpected cultural flourish: in 1938, the publishing company Éditions Dupuis, based in Marcinelle, launched the magazine Spirou, which featured Lucky Luke and the Smurfs among its popular characters. After World War II, heavy industry entered a general decline that deepened through the following decades. The fortified walls, already torn down by 1871, were a distant memory. In 1977, Charleroi merged with surrounding municipalities, which brought its total count of sections to fifteen and confirmed its status as the largest city in Wallonia and the fourth-largest in Belgium.

• 5. Industrial Landscape Reborn

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  The slag heaps that once defined the Pays Noir are now something unexpected: reservoirs of biodiversity. Six slag heaps in the area shelter animal and plant species that depend on this specific type of disturbed ground. At the Viviers site in Gilly, an old mining location, temporary ponds and pioneer grassland attract amphibians including a population of the natterjack toad, and a reed bed is home to the red warbler. The Saint-Charles slag heap in the Bois du Cazier in Marcinelle reaches 241 metres in height. That same Bois du Cazier, a coal mining site dating from the nineteenth century, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012. The city's new logo, designed in early 2015 by the Brussels studio Pam and Jenny, placed a crown of three triangles above the letter C specifically to evoke those slag heaps, yesterday black and today green.

• 6. Transport and the Second Airport

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  Brussels South Charleroi Airport, located in Gosselies 7 km north of the city centre, opened in 1919 as a flight school and later housed a Fairey aircraft factory. Its transformation into a major commercial hub is one of the sharpest economic stories in the region. Passenger numbers grew from 210,000 in 1998 to 8.3 million in 2023, making it the second airport in Belgium for passenger traffic. A new terminal opened in January 2008, and in October 2021 the runway was extended by 650 metres to a total length of 3,200 metres. Low-cost carrier Ryanair is the largest airline serving the airport, alongside Wizz Air and Jetairfly. Charleroi's river network is equally significant: the Port autonome de Charleroi comprises twenty-nine ports distributed along the Sambre and the Brussels-Charleroi canal, with 8 km of embankments and 5 million tonnes of goods transported each year, giving access to the major ports at Dunkirk, Antwerp, and Rotterdam.

• 7. Notable Voices and Visitors

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  Georges Lemaître, born in Charleroi in 1894, became the priest and astronomer who first proposed the theory of an expanding universe. Jeanne Toussaint, born in 1887, became one of the most influential jewellers of the twentieth century. Gaston Salmon, born in 1878, won an Olympic gold medal as an épée fencer. The painter François-Joseph Navez and the Expressionist Pierre Paulus, whose rooster crest became a symbol of Wallonia, both came from this region. Among those who lived in Charleroi without being born there, René Magritte and the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine each spent time in the city. The German artist Gunter Demnig placed nine Stolpersteine in Charleroi to commemorate Jewish residents murdered by the Nazi regime. Napoleon himself stayed in the city for a couple of days in June 1815, just before departing toward the Battle of Waterloo.