Wallonia

• 1. Introduction

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  Wallonia covers 55 percent of Belgium's territory, yet holds only 31 percent of its population. That imbalance sits at the heart of one of Europe's most quietly contentious political arrangements. Here is a region that, for the better part of a century, was the economic engine of an entire continent, and which now grapples with unemployment rates that in some areas reach 30 percent. How did a place once ranked second only to the United Kingdom in industrial output fall so far behind its northern neighbour? And what does it mean for a region to rebuild its identity around something other than the coal and iron that defined it for generations? To answer those questions, we have to go back much further than the Industrial Revolution, to a valley carved by two rivers, to a rooster chosen as a symbol of defiance, and to a language border that began solidifying somewhere between the year 700 and the year 1000.

• 2. Rivers, Borders, and Deep Time

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  Julius Caesar conquered Gaul in 57 BC, and the territory that would become Wallonia fell within a vast Roman province called Gallia Belgica, which stretched from southwestern Germany to Normandy. The people living in the south of that province were Celtic, with a Germanic influence that grew stronger as you moved north. Over time, those southern inhabitants abandoned their Celtic dialects and adopted Vulgar Latin, becoming what their Germanic neighbours called the Walha, or strangers.

  The Merovingian Franks moved in during the 5th century under Clovis, and the Latin spoken in the south began drifting away from the Germanic languages spreading through the north. The oldest surviving text written in a langue d'oil, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, shows characteristics of Picard, Walloon, and Lorrain, and was likely composed around 880 AD in or very near what is now Wallonia. That single document is a kind of linguistic fingerprint, fixing the moment when these dialects had already taken on their distinct regional character.

  The language border that now cuts Belgium roughly in half began crystallizing between 700 under the Merovingians and Carolingians and around 1000 after the Ottonian Renaissance. French-speaking cities rose along the Meuse, while formerly Gallo-Roman cities such as Tongeren, Maastricht, and Aachen became Germanized. By the 9th century, the Treaty of Verdun in 843 had assigned the territory of present-day Wallonia to Middle Francia. The region then passed through Lotharingia and, on Lotharingia's breakup in 959, became part of Lower Lotharingia before fragmenting into rival principalities and duchies by 1190. The name Wallonia itself is a cognate of Wales, Cornwall, and Wallachia, all descended from the same Germanic root word meaning, roughly, the people who are not us.

• 3. The Industrial Backbone

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  The Sambre and Meuse valley runs east to west across Wallonia at an elevation that drops from 120 metres near Charleroi to 70 metres at Liège. That fault line, separating Middle Belgium from High Belgium, became the spine of something without precedent in continental Europe. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the iron masters of Liège had already developed a method for refining iron ore using a blast furnace, a technique that came to be called the Walloon Method. Coal mines were operating around Charleroi and the Borinage during the same period, and a glassmaking industry had taken hold in the Charleroi basin by the 14th century.

  By the 19th century, that long tradition of metalworking and extraction had given Wallonia something remarkable: it became the first fully industrialized area on the continent, and ranked as the second industrial power in the world in proportion to its population and territory, trailing only the United Kingdom. The words for coal itself, houille and houilleur, and for the dangerous gas found in mines, grisou, were coined in Wallonia. The valley acquired specific names for each of its industrial zones: Borinage around Mons, le Centre around La Louvière, Pays noir around Charleroi, and Basse-Sambre near Namur.

  The wealth that poured out of this valley made Wallonia the more prosperous half of Belgium from the beginning of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th. Flanders, by contrast, centred on agriculture, was poorer, and large numbers of Flemish workers migrated south. That flow of people, and the economic power imbalance it reflected, would leave a lasting mark on Belgian politics. Major strikes punctuated the industrial era repeatedly: the Walloon jacquerie of 1886, general strikes in 1893, 1902, and 1913 for universal suffrage, and further strikes in 1932 and 1936. The 1932 strike was later depicted in the documentary Misère au Borinage.

• 4. Science from the Valley

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  Engineer Zenobe Gramme invented the Gramme dynamo, which was the first generator to produce electrical power on a commercial scale for industry. That single invention came out of a region already accustomed to solving the deep technical problems of extraction: the coal seams of Wallonia had required specialized training for mining engineers long before the Industrial Revolution, and engineer Rennequin Sualem was already working in that tradition before it.

  Chemist Ernest Solvay gave his name to the Solvay process for producing soda ash, an industrial chemical with wide applications, and went on to become a major philanthropist. His legacy includes the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, all now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, Solvay started a series of conferences on physics and chemistry that had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics.

  Georges Lemaître of the Université catholique de Louvain proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927. Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine went to Walloons: Jules Bordet of the Université libre de Bruxelles received his in 1919, and Albert Claude and Christian De Duve shared the award in 1974. Bureau Greisch, a contemporary Walloon firm, has built an international reputation as a consulting engineer and architect, with its work including the Millau Viaduct in France.

• 5. Decline and the Politics of Autonomy

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  Towards the end of the 1950s, the factories of Wallonia were antiquated and coal was running out. The cost of extraction kept rising. Industrial activity had already begun shifting north to Flanders in the first half of the 20th century, and the prosperity gap between the two regions began reversing. Wallonia now has a GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power of 25,700 euros, which equals 85 percent of the EU27 average, while the total regional GDP was 105.7 billion euros in 2018.

  The political consequence came fast. The 1960-1961 Winter General Strike, which took place more in Wallonia than in Flanders, was not primarily about language but about regional autonomy and economic recovery. That strike set in motion a formal process of state reform. The linguistic laws of 1962 and 1963 defined four language areas within the constitution. Then in 1968, French-speaking people in Flanders, associated broadly with Wallonia in the eyes of Flemish nationalists, were driven out of the Catholic University of Leuven, with crowds shouting Walen buiten, meaning Walloons out. The university formally split, and a new campus was built in Wallonia.

  The series of state reforms that followed ultimately produced the federal Belgium of today. Following especially the 1993 reform, Belgium became a federal state made up of three communities and three regions. The directly elected Walloon Parliament was created in June 1995, replacing the Regional Council that had first sat on the 15th of October 1980. The Walloon Region now has a unicameral parliament of 75 members elected for five-year terms, and an executive called the Government of Wallonia with nine members. The region's autonomy extends to foreign policy, including treaty-making, and in many domains the federal government cannot sign an international treaty without the agreement of the Parliament of Wallonia.

• 6. Culture, Identity, and Symbols

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  The rooster now on the Flag of Wallonia was chosen as an emblem by the Walloon Assembly on the 20th of April 1913 and designed by Pierre Paulus on the 3rd of July 1913. It appears on a yellow background and is called the coq hardi, or bold rooster. The anthem, Le Chant des Wallons, was written by Theophile Bovy in 1900 and composed by Louis Hillier in 1901. On the 21st of September 1913, the first Walloon feast day was held in Verviers, marking the participation of Walloons in the Belgian Revolution of 1830. It is now held annually on the third Sunday of September.

  Walloon literature in the regional language has been printed since the 16th century. Its golden age came during the peak of Flemish immigration to Wallonia in the 19th century, when plays and poems multiplied and new theaters and periodicals were founded. Yves Quairiaux counted 4,800 plays for the period 1860 to 1914. The New York Public Library holds what may be the largest collection of Walloon-language literary works outside Belgium; of nearly a thousand items, only twenty-six were published before 1880, the numbers then rising to a peak of sixty-nine in 1903 before falling again.

  Georges Simenon, described by the Tribune de Genève as likely the most widely read French-speaking writer in the world, was Walloon. More than 500 million of his books have been sold, translated into 55 languages. Charles Plisnier, born in Mons in 1896, won the Prix Goncourt in 1936 for his novel Mariages and for Faux Passeports; he was the first foreigner to receive that honour. Adolphe Sax, born in Dinant, invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Between 1370 and 1468, a school of music flourished in Liège, producing composers including Johannes Ciconia, named the third Master of Ars Nova. The Ducasse de Mons, the Gilles of Binche, and the giants' procession in Ath have all been recognized as UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

• 7. A Region Remaking Itself

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  Charleroi, with 204,146 residents the largest city in Wallonia, sits at the heart of an area still feeling the aftershocks of the steel industry crisis, where unemployment in some zones reaches 30 percent. Liège, the second city at 195,790 residents, is home to the autonomous port of Liège, the third largest inland port in Europe, handling over 20 million tonnes of traffic across 26 kilometres of quays and managing 31 ports along the Meuse and the Albert Canal. It connects Wallonia, which has no coastline, to the major ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Dunkirk.

  The Brussels South Charleroi Airport handled 7,303,720 passengers in 2016 and operates as a low-cost alternative to Brussels Airport. The Strépy-Thieu boat lift in Hainaut Province, completed in 2002 at an estimated cost of 160 million euros, increased river traffic from 256 kilotonnes in 2001 to 2,295 kilotonnes in 2006. These are not glamorous numbers, but they trace the outline of an economy trying to reconnect ancient waterway infrastructure to modern logistics.

  The south of Wallonia, bordering Luxembourg, benefits from cross-border employment, with many residents working on the other side of the frontier. The Ardennes, reaching its highest point at the Signal de Botrange at 694 metres, draws tourists for outdoor sports and cultural heritage, with destinations including Bastogne, Dinant, Durbuy, and the hot springs of Spa. Wallonia joined the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie in 1980, situating itself within a global network of French-speaking communities that stretches far beyond the language border that first formed in the middle of the first millennium. The Walloon Parliament in 1998 made official the rooster, the anthem, and the feast day, but chose not to codify the motto Walon todi, meaning Walloon Forever, leaving that particular declaration unresolved.