The Making of Flemings and Walloons: Belgium: 1830-1914

Abstract

Making of Flemings and Walloons: Belgium: I830-19I4 Are there any Belgians, or merely Flemings and Walloons in a state of conflict? As a leading newspaper put it on Io August 1830, The Belgians have a nationality which one can ignore only by repudiating the extensive evidence of their history and by taking into account none of the numerous characteristics they still display today.' Whatever evidence the past may have afforded, events of subsequent months transformed this statement into a selffulfilling prophecy. Belgium emerged as an independent state which, notwithstanding its linguistic heterogeneity, rapidly acquired the most stable regime in continental Europe. On the eve of World War I, however, the historical evidence could be read very differently. Writing in an atmosphere of increasing contention, one spokesman informed the King: No, Sire, there is no such thing as a Belgian soul. fusion of Flemings and Walloons is not to be desired and, if one were to desire it, one would have to admit that it is not possible.2 What of it, then? two statements need not be mutually exclusive. It is not that there were Belgians in I830 and only Flemings and

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