Leopold II of Belgium

• 1. Introduction

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  Leopold II of Belgium was the second king of the Belgians, and in 1908 he lost the Congo. The entire archive of the Congo Free State was then burned. Leopold told an aide that, although the colony had been taken from him, "they have no right to know what I did there".

  That colony was not a possession of Belgium. It was his private property. A king of a small European country had become the sole owner of a vast territory in Africa, and he had never once gone there.

  Three questions follow him through this story. How did a constitutional monarch come to own a colony outright? What happened to the people who lived under his rule? And why is Belgium still arguing about his name?

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• 2. A Troubled Household

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  Brussels, on the 9th of April 1835, is where Leopold was born. He was the second child of the reigning King Leopold I and his second wife, Louise, a daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. An older brother, the crown prince Louis Philippe, had died in infancy in 1834, so the new baby was heir to the throne from birth. In 1840 he received the title Duke of Brabant.

  The French Revolution of 1848 forced his grandfather Louis Philippe to flee to the United Kingdom. The old king died in 1850. Leopold's fragile mother was devastated by her father's death, and she died of tuberculosis that same year, when Leopold was 15.

  His sister Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico in 1864. Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, were both his first cousins. So was King Fernando II of Portugal.

  On the 22nd of August 1853, the 18-year-old Leopold married Marie Henriette of Austria in Brussels. She was a cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Lively and energetic, she earned the nickname "The Rose of Brabant" for her beauty. She was also an accomplished artist and musician, and so devoted to horses that she cared for them herself. Some people joked about a "marriage of a stableman and a nun", casting the shy, withdrawn Leopold as the nun.

  The couple had four children, three daughters and a son, also named Leopold. In 1869 the boy died of pneumonia at the age of nine, after falling into a pond. The king was heartbroken. The marriage grew unhappy, and the couple separated after one last attempt at another son, which produced their youngest daughter, Clementine. In 1895 Marie Henriette withdrew to Spa, where she died in 1902.

  Another daughter, Stéphanie, married Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria. In 1889 Rudolf died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at the Mayerling hunting lodge.

  The year 1899 brought Caroline Lacroix into the king's life. He was in his 65th year, and she was a 16-year-old French prostitute. She stayed with him until his death ten years later. He gave her large sums of money, estates, gifts and the noble title Baroness de Vaughan. Ironically, the affair cost him more popularity in Belgium than any of his crimes in the Congo.

  Caroline bore two sons, Lucien, Duke of Tervuren, and Philippe, Count of Ravenstein. The second was born with a deformed hand. A cartoon responded by showing Leopold holding the child, surrounded by Congolese corpses with their hands sliced off. The caption read "Vengeance from on high". Five days before the king died, the couple married in a secret religious ceremony. No civil ceremony followed, so the marriage was invalid under Belgian law. Leopold had left his widow a large fortune in Congo securities, and the Belgian government and his three estranged daughters managed to win back only part of it.

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• 3. The Constitutional King

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  In 1855, on reaching the age of majority, Leopold took his seat in the Belgian Senate. He took a keen interest in trade and national development, and he began urging Belgium to acquire colonies. Between 1854 and 1865 he travelled widely, visiting India, China, Egypt and the Mediterranean coast of Africa. He also served in the army and rose to the rank of lieutenant-general.

  His father died on the 10th of December 1865, and Leopold took the oath of office on the 17th of December, aged 30. In an 1888 letter to his brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, he summed up his aim for the reign: "the country must be strong, prosperous, therefore have colonies of her own, beautiful and calm."

  The Frère-Orban Law of 1879 made schools a political battleground. The Liberals, who governed from 1857 to 1880, created free, secular, compulsory primary schools funded by the state. The same law withdrew all state support from Catholic primary schools. The Catholic Party won a parliamentary majority in 1880 and restored that support four years later.

  In 1885, various socialist and social democratic groups united to form the Labour Party. Rising social unrest and the party's growth forced Belgium to adopt universal male suffrage in 1893. The constitutional revision of that year softened the change with plural voting. It also lowered the eligibility requirements for the Senate and introduced elections by proportional representation, a system Belgium still uses.

  Leopold pushed hard during the 1893 revision for a royal referendum. The king could then have consulted voters directly and used his veto according to the result. Parliament rejected the idea, because it would have let the king override the elected government. Leopold was so disappointed that he considered abdication.

  The livret d'ouvrier, an employment record book, was abolished during his reign. Workers won the right to form labour unions. Children under 12 could no longer work in factories, children under 16 could not work at night, and women under 21 could not work underground. Workers also gained compensation for workplace accidents and Sundays off.

  Leopold's reluctance to speak Dutch in public left him less popular than his father with the Flemish Movement. His nephew and heir, Prince Baudouin, became something of a hero to the Flemings. Leopold gave some speeches in Dutch shortly before and after Baudouin's premature death in 1891.

  Fortresses at Liège, Namur and Antwerp were the fruit of Leopold's belief that military defence is the basis of neutrality. During the Franco-Prussian War he kept Belgium neutral in a period of unusual difficulty and danger. He pressed for military service reform but did not obtain it until he was on his deathbed. Until then the army mixed volunteers with a lottery, and men could pay substitutes to serve for them. The new system required one son in every family to serve.

  On the 15th of November 1902, an Italian anarchist named Gennaro Rubino fired three shots at the royal procession. It was leaving a ceremony at the Church of St. Michael and St. Gudula in memory of the late Marie Henriette. The shots missed the king but almost killed his grand marshal, Count Charles John d'Oultremont.

  That evening at the Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, before a performance of Tristan und Isolde, the orchestra played The Brabançonne. The audience sang it loudly and ended with cheers and applause. Heads of state and the pope sent telegrams of congratulation. Leopold himself shrugged it off, telling a senator that if fate wanted him shot, too bad. Rubino was arrested at once, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in prison in 1918.

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• 4. The Builder King

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  Koning-Bouwheer in Dutch and Roi-Bâtisseur in French both mean Builder King, the nickname Leopold earned from a vast programme of public works. The historians Wm. Roger Louis and Adam Hochschild say that Congo profits largely made it possible. Other historians dispute that claim.

  The Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels, with its memorial arcade and complex, was among the projects. So was Duden Park, laid out in 1881. Work on the Basilica of the Sacred Heart began in 1905 and ran until 1969, long after the king's death. The Hippodrome Wellington racetrack dates from 1883. In 1902 came the Royal Galleries and Maria Hendrikapark in Ostend. Tervuren received the Royal Museum for Central Africa and its surrounding park in 1898, and Antwerp's Antwerpen-Centraal railway station was built between 1895 and 1905.

  At the Royal Castle of Laeken, Leopold expanded the grounds and built the Royal Greenhouses. Near the palace he also added the Japanese Tower and the Chinese Pavilion, which now house the Museums of the Far East. In the Ardennes his domains covered about 6700 hectares and included the châteaux of Ardenne, Ciergnon, Fenffe, Villers-sur-Lesse and Ferage. On the French Riviera he built the Villa des Cèdres, with its botanical garden, and the Villa Leopolda.

  In 1900, Leopold created the Royal Trust. He did not want his private collection of estates, lands and heritage buildings scattered among his daughters, each married to a foreign prince. Through the trust he donated most of the properties to the Belgian nation in perpetuity. He arranged for the royal family to keep using them after his death.

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• 5. Buying an Empire

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  Queen Isabella II of Spain was Leopold's first target. In 1866 he instructed the Belgian ambassador in Madrid to raise the idea of ceding the Philippines to Belgium, but the ambassador did nothing. Leopold promptly replaced him with a more sympathetic man.

  Isabella was deposed in 1868, and Leopold pressed the plan again, but he had no funds. He then devised a scheme to make the Philippines an independent state ruled by a Belgian. That failed too, and his ambitions turned to Africa.

  Leopold fervently believed that overseas colonies were the key to a country's greatness. He pictured "our little Belgium" as the capital of a large overseas empire. He saw the empires of the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain in decline and expressed interest in buying their territories. The Belgian government lent him money, and he set out to acquire a colony as a private citizen.

  A holding company created in 1876 wore the disguise of a scientific and philanthropic association. Leopold called it the International African Society, or the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of the Congo. In 1878 the company hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to explore and establish a colony in the Congo region.

  Representatives of 14 European countries and the United States met at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. They recognised Leopold as sovereign of most of the area that he and Stanley had claimed, and they committed the Free State to improving the lives of its people. On the 5th of February 1885, the Congo Free State was established under his personal rule. It was an area 76 times larger than Belgium, and it came with a private army, the Force Publique.

  The central services of the state sat in Brussels. All officials in the Congo were Belgian, whether in administration, the army or the courts. Belgian army officers played an essential role in governing it. Even the religious missions, especially the Catholic ones, had a distinctly Belgian character.

  In 1894 Leopold signed a treaty with the United Kingdom. He conceded a strip of land on the Free State's eastern border in exchange for a lifetime lease of the Lado Enclave. The lease gave access to the navigable Nile and extended his sphere of influence north into Sudan. Mahdist rebels had overrun the enclave since the Mahdist War broke out in 1881.

  After rubber profits soared in 1895, Leopold ordered an expedition into the enclave. It set out in December 1896 in two columns. Baron Dhanis led about 3,000 men through the jungle toward the rebel base at Rejaf, while Louis-Napoléon Chaltin took the main road with 800. Leopold had hoped to go on to Fashoda and Khartoum. In February 1897 Dhanis's column mutinied, several Belgian officers died, and his entire force was lost.

  Chaltin advanced anyway. On the 17th of February 1897, his outnumbered troops defeated the rebels at the Battle of Rejaf. The victory secured the Lado Enclave as Free State territory until Leopold's death.

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• 6. The Rubber System

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  Ivory was the first source of Leopold's Congo fortune, but it fell short of the revenue he expected. In the 1890s the global demand for rubber exploded. The Free State shifted to the labour-intensive collection of rubber sap, and Leopold used the mercenary Force Publique to run the territory for his personal enrichment.

  A decree issued shortly after the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference of 1889-1890 ordered Africans across a large part of the Free State to sell their harvested ivory and rubber only to the state. It extended an earlier decree declaring that all "unoccupied" land belonged to the state. Anything collected there was therefore state property, which created a de facto monopoly. The state could set prices and control what Congolese people earned. Local elites saw new opportunities, because the Free State and concession companies paid them in guns to tax their subjects in kind.

  By the late 1890s the Free State had abandoned the promises of Berlin. It restricted foreign access and extorted forced labour from local people. Abuses included beatings, widespread killings and frequent mutilation when quotas were missed. Officials took wives and family members hostage to force workers to collect rubber. Failing to meet a rubber quota was punishable by death.

  Hands became evidence. The Force Publique had to produce the hand of anyone they shot, because officers believed the soldiers would otherwise spend costly European-made ammunition on hunting. As a consequence, rubber quotas were partly paid off in chopped-off hands.

  John Harris, a missionary at Baringa, returned from a journey to the village of Insongo Mboyo and wrote to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo. He called the misery and abandon he found "positively indescribable". He added that he had promised the villagers that in future the agent would "only kill them for crimes they commit".

  Historian Jean Stengers argued that Leopold's imperialism was driven by economic advantage rather than political grandeur. Leopold sought to maximise profit through efficient exploitation, including forced labour. Stengers also saw patriotism in it, a wish to ensure the prosperity and embellishment of Belgium.

  Estimates of the Congolese population decline under Leopold range from 1 million to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million. The causes included epidemic disease, a falling birth rate, and violence and famine caused by the regime. Accurate records were never kept. In 1968 the historians Louis and Stengers called the population figures at the start of his control "wild guesses". They dismissed the attempts of E. D. Morel and others to measure the loss as "figments of the imagination".

  Adam Hochschild devotes a chapter of King Leopold's Ghost to the problem. He cites investigations by the anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, who studied police records, religious records, oral traditions, genealogies and diaries. They broadly agree with a 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population was killed or died. The first official census by the Belgian authorities, in 1924, put the population at about 10 million, so Hochschild reads a loss of about 10 million. Several historians argue against that figure. They point to the lack of reliable censuses, the heavy mortality from smallpox and sleeping sickness, and the fact that only 175 administrative agents oversaw rubber exploitation.

  By 1896, African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, had killed up to 5,000 people in the village of Lukolela on the Congo River. The British consul Roger Casement collected mortality statistics. In 1903 he found only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela.

  More than a century later, the economists Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero found lasting damage. Ethnic groups that suffered more intensive rubber exploitation showed significantly lower economic development. The authors traced this to disrupted traditional economies and lost human capital. They also suggested that colonial co-option of local chiefs may have weakened the accountability of later leaders.

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• 7. Outrage and Handover

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  In 1890, George Washington Williams described the practices of Leopold's administration as "crimes against humanity". It was one of the first uses of the term.

  Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, dated 1902, first ran as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It drew on Conrad's time as a steamer captain on the Congo 12 years earlier. Works like it helped mobilise international criticism. The British Crown appointed Casement to investigate, and his travels and interviews produced the Casement Report, which detailed the abuses.

  E. D. Morel, a former shipping clerk, founded the Congo Reform Association in Britain with Casement's support. It is described as the first mass human rights movement. The American writer Mark Twain backed it with King Leopold's Soliloquy, a satire in which the king argues that bringing Christianity outweighs a little starvation. The piece uses many of Leopold's own words against him. Arthur Conan Doyle attacked the "rubber regime" in his 1908 book The Crime of the Congo. He contrasted it with British rule in Nigeria, arguing that rulers should care first about the uplift of their subjects.

  As Hochschild describes, many of Leopold's policies, especially colonial monopolies and forced labour, were influenced by Dutch practice in the East Indies. Germany, France and Portugal used similar forced labour to some degree in colonies where natural rubber grew.

  In 1891, Leopold sponsored a very different kind of witness, the writer May French Sheldon. His British consul, Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, arranged her expedition. She travelled on steamboats owned by the state and its company allies, who controlled where she went and what she saw. Back in England, Jones placed her articles in the newspapers. She declared, "I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever seen in the Congo." The king then paid her a monthly salary to lobby members of Parliament.

  Pressure from abroad, together with criticism at home from the Catholic Party, the Progressive Liberals and the Labour Party, pushed the Belgian Parliament to compel the king to give up the Free State in 1908. The deal cost Belgium 215.5 million francs. The money discharged the Free State's debt and paid its bondholders. Another 45.5 million went to Leopold's pet building projects in Belgium, and 50 million went to him personally.

  The Free State became a Belgian colony under parliamentary control, known as the Belgian Congo. Some things improved. The brutal exploitation and arbitrary violence at which some concession companies had excelled were curbed. Article 3 of the Colonial Charter of the 18th of October 1908 declared that "Nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or privates". It was not enforced, and the government kept imposing forced labour by less obvious methods. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960.

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• 8. Legacy and Statues

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  Leopold died at Laeken of an embolism on the 17th of December 1909, exactly 44 years after he took the oath. It remains the longest reign in Belgian history. Crowds booed his funeral cortege. He was interred in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady of Laeken, and the crown passed to Albert I, the son of his brother Philippe, Count of Flanders.

  Attention to the Congo atrocities faded after his death. Vachel Lindsay's poem "The Congo", the poet's best known work, still memorialised them. Most statues of Leopold in Belgium date from the interwar period, according to Professor Idesbald Goddeeris of the University of Leuven. They were erected in the 1930s at the initiative of Albert I. Goddeeris says they were meant to bury the scandal and raise enthusiasm for the colonial enterprise in the Belgian Congo.

  Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost reignited the debate about the king's legacy, and it resurfaced periodically over the following 20 years. In 2010, Louis Michel, a Belgian member of the European Parliament and former foreign minister, called Leopold a "visionary hero". He called the word genocide unacceptable and argued that colonisation had brought civilisation. Senator Pol Van Den Driessche answered that "What happened then was shameful." By 21st-century standards, he said, Leopold would likely be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

  A Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brussels in June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, put Leopold's legacy back in the spotlight. Several of his statues were vandalised, and petitions to remove some or all of them gathered tens of thousands of signatures. Counter-petitions to keep them gathered hundreds. Belgian MPs agreed to set up a parliamentary commission on the colonial past. The Brussels Parliament requested a committee to "decolonise the public sphere". From the 9th of June 2020, authorities began removing statues, starting in Ekeren in Antwerp and at the University of Mons.

  On the 30th of June 2020, the 60th anniversary of Congolese independence, King Philippe expressed his "deepest regret" for the wounds of colonial rule. He did not explicitly mention Leopold's role, and some activists accused him of not making a full apology.

  In Kinshasa, which was called Leopoldville until 1966 in his honour, Leopold's statue was removed after independence. In 2005 the Congolese culture minister Christophe Muzungu decided to reinstate it. He argued that people should recognise some positive aspects of the king alongside the negative. Hours after the six-metre statue went up near Kinshasa's central station, it was officially removed.

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