Belgium: A Brief Historical Context

To understand Camille's childhood and youth in Belgium, it is imperative to have an overview of the political, social and cultural milieu of that time and some of the historical processes that shaped them. While Belgium was not considered a major European power, it held an enormous influence in Europe and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carved out of the Netherlands, Belgium emerged as an independent state in 1830 and was a small country of 30,000 square kilometres; its ‘population was divided between often antagonistic French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch speakers of the Flanders region, alongside a small German community’ (Aldrich and Stucki 2022, p. 430). The birth of Belgium as a new nation-state in 1830 reflected the two interrelated trends of the modernisation of state apparatus such as law, institutions and bureaucracy and the quest for ethno-nationalism.

Like the rest of Europe, this trend of modernisation also marked strains between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and growing tensions between autocracy and democratic principles. Coupled with these political churnings, Belgium also witnessed major social and economic changes; capitalist industrial production advanced rapidly, changing the fundamental nature of the agrarian and cottage-industry-based economy. Remarkably, while Belgium stood out as a champion of liberalism and as the world's second industrial nation, the socio-economic disparities were rampant. Karl Marx found refuge in Brussels between 1845 and 1848 and wrote the Communist Manifesto during his stay, calling Belgium an archetype bourgeoisie state. In Das Capital, Marx presented Belgium as the ‘paradise of continental Liberalism’ against ‘the paradise of capitalists’ (Vanthemsche and Peuter 2023, p. 249).

The population of Belgium remained devoutly and almost exclusively Catholic; the region was seen as ‘a bastion of the Counter-Reformation’ (ibid., p. 6). For the first 50 years, the Belgian parliament was dominated by the Catholics, facilitating the expansion of the Catholic Church and its morals over the society. Liberals were another significant political group who sought an end to religious domination in the state and society. The church overcame the opposition of the liberals to regain domination over the education system, holding a monopoly on primary education while controlling secondary and university education.