History of Belgium

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of Belgium begins not with a nation but with an absence of one. For most of its existence, the land we now call Belgium was either folded into empires or splintered into a patchwork of competing principalities. In the Middle Ages, the territory held no fewer than seven distinct feudal states: the Duchy of Brabant, the County of Flanders, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, the County of Namur, the County of Hainaut, the County of Luxembourg, and the Duchy of Lower Lorraine. A kingdom did not emerge until 1831, and even then, it arrived under unusual circumstances. The spark was a performance at an opera house. The unification was negotiated at a conference in London. The first king, Leopold I, was a German prince born in Saxe-Coburg. What kind of country grows from those roots? And how did a land defined for centuries by division become the seat of the European Union itself? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Name and the Land

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  "Belgium" is originally a Latin term coined by Julius Caesar. In his De Bello Gallico, Caesar used it to describe an area now mostly in northern France, where the tribes of the Belgae held military alliance. The Belgae were considered the northern part of Gaul, and Caesar noted that they were separated from the rest by language, law, and custom, and that they claimed Germanic ancestry. Linguists have since proposed evidence that the northern Belgic population may have spoken an Indo-European language distinct from both Celtic and Germanic, a hypothesis tied to the so-called Nordwestblock. The term "Belgium" drifted over the centuries, referring at various times to Roman Belgica Prima, to Upper Lotharingia in the Moselle region, and only slowly to the area that now bears the name. A key turning point came during the Brabant Revolution of 1790, when the name was used specifically to refer to the southern Netherlands. That usage was revived after the better-known revolution of 1830, when modern Belgium broke free of the post-Waterloo United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The County of Flanders, the original foothold of the Burgundian dukes, and the name "Flanders" itself were the first two common names for the Burgundian Netherlands, which was the direct predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, and of Belgium itself.

• 3. Before Written History

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  Neanderthal fossils were discovered at Engis in 1829-30, and some on Belgian territory date back at least 100,000 years. The earliest Neolithic farming technology in northern Europe, known as the LBK culture, reached eastern Belgium at its furthest northwesterly stretch, stopping in the Hesbaye region around 5000 BC. The Belgian branch of the LBK is notable for its use of defensive walls around villages. Farming did not take permanent hold at first. The LBK and Blicquy cultures disappeared, leaving a long gap before the Michelsberg culture emerged and spread. The population of Belgium began a sustained rise only with the late Bronze Age, around 1750 BC. Three related cultures arrived in sequence: first the Urnfield culture, then the Hallstatt culture, and finally the La Tène culture, all three associated with Indo-European languages. By 500 BC, Celtic tribes had settled the region and were trading with the Mediterranean world. From around 150 BC, the first coins came into use. Farming in the sandy north remained precarious; the third and late fourth millennia BC show relatively little evidence of human habitation across all of Flanders, and the megalithic Seine-Oise-Marne culture spread into the Ardennes but did not disperse across all of Belgium. Among the notable surviving archaeological sites is the Neolithic flint mine complex at Spiennes.

• 4. Burgundy and the Rise of Commerce

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  By 1433, most of the Belgian and Luxembourgish territory had come under the control of Burgundy, ruled by Philip the Good. When his granddaughter Mary of Burgundy married Maximilian I, the Low Countries passed into Habsburg hands, and the Holy Roman Empire was eventually unified with Spain under Charles V. During the Burgundy period of the 15th and 16th centuries, the cities of Tournai, Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp took turns as major European centers of commerce, industry, and art. Bruges developed particularly sophisticated financial tools. Its merchants adopted, or borrowed from Italy, bills of exchange and letters of credit, instruments that transformed how trade was conducted across northern Europe. Antwerp welcomed foreign traders, most notably Portuguese pepper and spice merchants. The Flemish Primitives, a group of painters active primarily in the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th centuries, produced work that spread across the continent, alongside the Franco-Flemish composers. Flemish tapestries hung on the walls of castles throughout Europe. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, issued by Charles V, established the Seventeen Provinces as an entity separate from both the Empire and France. On the 25th of October 1555, in Brussels, Charles abdicated Belgica Regia to his son, who in January 1556 became Philip II of Spain. What followed was one of the most violent confrontations in European history.

• 5. The Eighty Years and the Blood Council

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  Philip II sent Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the 3rd Duke of Alba, as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands from 1567 to 1573. Alba established a special court he called the Council of Troubles. Its opponents called it the Council of Blood. Alba himself boasted of burning or executing 18,600 persons in the Netherlands; 8,000 were burned or hanged in a single year. His Flemish victims totalled at least 50,000. The Council condemned thousands without due process and drove nobles into exile while seizing their property. At the Battle of Gembloux on the 31st of January 1578, Spanish forces routed Dutch rebels, killing at least 10,000. Don Juan of Austria died on the 1st of October 1578 and was succeeded by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, who pursued a different strategy. Farnese exploited the divisions between Dutch-speaking Flemish and Walloon-speaking southerners to bring the Walloon provinces back to the Spanish crown. He then drove north, capturing Maastricht in 1579, Tournai in 1581, Oudenaarde in 1582, Dunkirk in 1583, and both Bruges and Ghent in 1584. His siege of Antwerp, which began on the 17th of August 1585, became one of the war's defining engagements. Dutch engineers launched fireships called Hellburners against a bridge of boats blocking the Scheldt. The ships blew up a 200-foot span and killed 800 Spaniards. The siege held regardless, and when Antwerp fell, 60,000 citizens - 60 percent of its pre-siege population - fled north. Farnese's terms were deliberately generous: no massacres, no looting, full amnesty, and a gradual return to the Catholic Church. Catholic refugees regrouping in Cologne and Douai developed a more militant Counter-Reformation identity that would shape the emerging identity of the Belgian south.

• 6. Revolution and the First King

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  The Belgian Revolution broke out in August 1830 when a crowd, stirred by a performance of Auber's La Muette de Portici at the Brussels opera house of La Monnaie, poured into the streets singing patriotic songs. Violent street fighting followed. Estimates at the time placed no more than 1,700 revolutionaries in Brussels, facing over 6,000 Dutch troops. Dutch forces penetrated the Schaerbeek Gate but stalled under sniper fire in the Parc de Bruxelles. On the night of the 26th of September, Dutch troops were ordered out of the capital. Eight Dutch warships then bombarded Antwerp. In November 1830, the London Conference ordered an armistice on the 4th of November. A protocol signed on the 20th of January 1831 stated that Belgium would be formed of the regions that had not belonged to the North in 1790. British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston first backed the Prince of Orange, but the Prince proved unacceptable both to William I and to the French. Palmerston's second choice, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg, was accepted by all. On the 21st of July 1831, Leopold was inaugurated as the first King of the Belgians. That date is now a national holiday. The liberal bourgeoisie had officially declared independence on the 4th of October 1830, and a National Congress drafted a constitution giving Belgium a constitutional monarchy. Voting rights, however, were severely restricted to the French-speaking upper class in a country where French was not the majority language. The state of conflict with the Netherlands did not end until the Treaty of London of 1839, by which Belgium lost Eastern Limburg, Zeelandic Flanders, French Flanders, and Eupen, and the five great powers pledged to protect Belgian neutrality. That pledge would become the stated reason Britain entered World War I in 1914.

• 7. Industry and Division

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  Belgium was the second country after Britain in which the industrial revolution took place. John Cockerill, a transplanted Englishman, built factories at Seraing that integrated all stages of production as early as 1825. Coal was the driving force. In 1790, Belgian mines reached a maximum depth of 220 meters. By 1856, the average depth west of Mons was 361 meters, and by 1866 some pits had gone down 700 to 900 meters; one reached 1,065 meters, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at that time. In 1835, Leopold I opened the first railway on continental Europe, running between Brussels and Mechelen. By the 1900s, Belgium was a major exporter of trams and railway materials. One Belgian entrepreneur, Édouard Empain, known as the Tramway King, built public transport systems across the world, including the Paris Métro. In South America alone, Belgian firms owned 3,800 kilometers of track. Alongside industrial growth, labor conflict intensified. The Belgian Workers' Party was founded in 1885 in Brussels and issued the Charter of Quaregnon in 1894, calling for an end to capitalism. Between 1892 and 1961, there were 20 major strikes, including 7 general strikes. The 1893 General Strike helped achieve universal male suffrage, though the government reduced its effect through a system of plural votes based on wealth and education. Women's voting restrictions were only fully lifted in 1948. Meanwhile, language divided the country as sharply as class. After 1830, French became the sole language of government. Flemish was described at the time as "the tongue of a second-class culture." A Flemish cultural movement led by figures like Hendrik Conscience pushed back, and a Walloon Movement emerged, led by Jules Destrée, anchored in loyalty to French. The Flemish goal of linguistic equality was achieved through a series of laws in the 1920s and 1930s.

• 8. Two World Wars and Their Aftermath

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  When World War I began, Germany invaded neutral Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan. The Belgian army, roughly a tenth the size of Germany's, held up the German offensive for nearly a month, helping give the French and British time to prepare the Marne counteroffensive. At the Battle of Liège, the town's fortifications held off the invaders for over a week. King Albert I remained at the Yser as commander while his government withdrew to Le Havre in France. The German army executed between 5,500 and 6,500 French and Belgian civilians between August and November 1914. By 1919-80 percent of Belgium's workforce was unemployed, and only 81 operable locomotives remained out of the 3,470 available in 1914. An international relief effort, unprecedented in world history, was organized by the American engineer Herbert Hoover. His Commission for Relief in Belgium fed the entire nation for the duration of the war. At its peak, the American Relief Administration fed 10.5 million people daily on an $11-million-a-month budget, supplied 78 percent by private donations and government grants. In 1940, the quick surrender by Leopold III to German forces drove a permanent wedge between the king and his people. Leopold's attempt to return after the war triggered a constitutional crisis in 1950 that ended in his abdication in favor of his son Baudouin. The post-war decades brought unprecedented economic growth, and Belgium helped establish the Benelux customs union with its neighbors. That union became a model for the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union. Brussels now serves as the seat of many European Union institutions, a role that reflects both geography and the long lesson Belgium drew from two catastrophic violations of its neutrality.