Maurice Maeterlinck, the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the French-Language in Flanders

In The Age of Empire, Eric Hobsbawm argues that

probably at no time since the seventeenth century did the rest of the world need to take as much cultural notice of the southern Low Countries [Belgium] as in the final decades of the nineteenth century. For that is when Maeterlinck and Verhaeren briefly became major names in European literature (one of them [Maeterlinck] is still familiar as the writer of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande).1

Both Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren were part of the small but socially dominant group of Flemings who spoke and wrote French as opposed to Dutch and Dutch dialects, the language of the overwhelming majority of Flemings. In 1911, the world of letters did indeed take notice of them.

In that year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was only a decade old, yet the receipt of the award was already “becoming a criterion of pre-eminence in the Occidental world,” in the words of the New York Times.2 In that year, Maeterlinck, a playwright and poet who was well-known internationally as a leading figure of the Symbolist movement, won that particular honor. His winning the prize was a source of pride for many people in Belgium. Flemish writers such as Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, while writing in French, traded in on their “exotic,” “Nordic,” and “Germanic” heritage in the French literary field. Literary critics often portrayed these men as bringing a fresh, foreign sensibility to their work that was not present in that of French authors.3 Literary scholar Raphael Ingelbien argues that Maeterlinck’s Nobel Prize

rewarded the efforts of one of those who had tried, since the 1880s, to create a Belgian literature and put it on the world map. To achieve this, Maeterlinck had cultivated his difference from France. Although he wrote in French, he did not regard his work as part of French literature—his exaltation of Germanic art partakes of that strategy. He also took a quasi-Romantic interest in popular culture, i.e. Flemish folk songs and legends.4

At the banquet held in Stockholm to celebrate the award, Charles Wauters, the Belgian Ambassador to Sweden, represented Maeterlinck who was absent on account of illness. In his acceptance speech, Wauters evoked Maeterlinck’s literary talent and the mysteries of the Flemish countryside. He noted that

although Flemish and from Flanders, Maeterlinck wrote French in a most flexible, subtle, and harmonious manner. Still, he is the genius of his race, the incarnation of the Flemish soil… Maeterlinck's success justly adds to the glory of French literature, but also to the glory of his country. The Swedish Academy, in awarding the literary Prize to him, has paid tribute to the French form of a Flemish idea.5

Christophe Verbrugge’s study of Belgian authors and the literary field in the Belle Époque also stresses the importance of Flemish authors who wrote in French in both Belgian and French literary publishing, comparing them to writers from Normandy or Provence who also created regionalist works in standard French.6

In the period before World War I, many in the intellectual elite of Flanders saw the success of writers like Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who conquered the French literary world because of their perceived “difference,” as proof that “being Flemish” did not necessarily require speaking Flemish. The division between “speaking Flemish” and “being Flemish” was a common one in this time period. Responding to an author who was sympathetic to the Flemish Movement, the lawyer Charles Van Beneden claimed to “love [his] Flemish brothers as much as [his] Walloon brothers,” in part because he himself is Flemish. However, like “all those who are not against enlightenment,” he opposed “forget[ting] French in favor of the language spoken by the people” in Flanders, as the Flemish language was “barbarous, atrocious to the ear and to the mouth” and of limited use, like Breton or the various Walloon dialects. French, on the other hand, was “a universal language… the most beautiful of languages.” While the introduction of Flemish in legal proceedings for those who do not speak French was a “charitable concession,” making Flemish equal to, let alone “superior” to, French in the Belgian context was unthinkable.7

Not only could speaking French coexist with a “Flemish” identity, the fact of speaking French while being a Fleming was in fact considered to be a hallmark of Belgian identity, as for example the famous Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne argued from the late 1890s onward. This reflected Pirenne’s “cosmopolitan” outlook, including the idea that what made Belgium unique was in fact its openness to and borrowing from its neighbors, as evinced in part by the adoption of French among the Flemish upper classes since the Middle Ages.8 Pirenne, a Walloon from Verviers in the province of Liège who made his career teaching in French at the University of Ghent, seemed to be an example of the “cosmopolitanism” afforded by the use of the French language.9 He himself was not as antagonistic to the Flemish Movement as many of the other French-speakers in Flanders whom we will look at, though he did take a strong stand against changing the language of instruction at his institution from French to Dutch.10

In 1986, one Flemish newspaper, reflecting on Belgians who had won Nobel Prizes, called Maeterlinck “a typical Belgian of his time: a Fleming who wrote in French.”11 For the nascent Flemish Movement, though, individuals like Maeterlinck were not (or should not have been) typical Flemings: They represented an elite whose control of and influence over Flemish society unjustly excluded the overwhelming majority of Flemings who spoke only “Flemish” (various dialects of Dutch) from fully participating in Flemish society. The Flemish Movement attempted to challenge this hegemony by introducing legislation that would make the use of Dutch mandatory in certain contexts in Flanders. The way in which the French-speakers of Flanders reacted to these early attempts—and, indeed, how the development of an identity as “French-speakers” was in part occasioned by such attempts—forms the focus of this chapter.

“Flemish at Heart?”: The (Non-)Identity of the Francophones of Flanders Before the First World War

Before World War I, the “French-speakers of Flanders” had little concept of themselves as a separate group. Most Flemings who spoke French would have identified either simply as “Belgian,” or as “Flemish,” itself understood solely as a subtype of “Belgian.” They would not have seen themselves as having an identity based primarily on which language they spoke. When these individuals were identified as members of a distinct group, it was more often than not in a disapproving fashion, by members of the Flemish Movement. Flemings who spoke French, either as their first language or as a language of choice, were sometimes called “flamands du cœur [Flemings at heart].” While this was originally a term these individuals would use themselves, demonstrating their continued identification with Flanders, supporters of the Flemish Movement who felt that French-speaking Flemings were “betraying” the Flemish people would come to use it in derisory manner. A more common term of abuse for Flemings who spoke French was “fransquillon” (“little Frenchie,” spelled franskiljon in Dutch). Another term that was more frequently used, especially by the Francophones of Flanders themselves, was “Flemings of French expression [Flamands d’expression française],” a construction which clearly distinguishes between identity (Flemish) and language (French).12

Conversely, French-speaking Flemings, as well as Walloons and Bruxellois, often used the term “flamingant” to describe adherents of the Flemish Movement, or sometimes only the most radical thereof. While this originally only meant “Flemish-speaking” (analogous the usage of bretonnant and gallicant to refer to Breton- and French-speaking inhabitants of Brittany, respectively), flamingant was increasingly perceived as an insult by the end of nineteenth century. Many supporters of “Flemish” causes would instead refer to themselves as “vlaamsgezind [Flemish-minded]” or “vlaamsvoelend [Flemish-feeling].”13

Returning to the example of Maeterlinck, we can see that the French-speaking “Flemings at heart” had multifaceted reactions to the cultural and political Flemish Movement. In 1899, Maeterlinck commended the novelist Cyriel Buysse for “firmly returning to our maternal Flemish;” Maeterlinck claimed that in doing so Buysse had been able to produce literature of the highest quality.14 Shortly thereafter, though, he publicly attacked the political Flemish Movement in the French paper Le Figaro. The Flemish Movement was composed of a “handful of agitators whose obscure birth out in the country [naissance obscure au fond des fermes] and late education had rendered them incapable of learning French.” Their envy had led them to create “a kind of official and artificial jargon, pretentious, baroque, and stillborn, from the various popular patois” which was alien both to real Flemish dialects and to the Dutch of the Netherlands. In their quest they were aided by the Flemish clergy, “the most ignorant of clergies,” who saw the promotion of Flemish to the detriment of French as a manner to “protect” the peasantry from harmful outside influences.15 A week and a half later, Maeterlinck wrote another article in Le Figaro in which he expressed his esteem for writers such as Buysse as well as Stijn Streuvels and Guido Gezelle, who wrote in “true Flemish [flamand véritable],” yet repeated his attacks on the Flemish radicals who wanted to elevate either their “jargon” to the level of a literary language, as well as his conviction that Flemish radicals were allies of the clergy in their mission to keep the peasantry isolated from the civilizing influence of France.16

As one might imagine, many in the Flemish Movement did not respond well to these provocative comments. The Brussels-based “pan-German” monthly review Germania published a poem that upbraided Maeterlinck as a “race traitor [stamverrader].” Beginning with an epigraph from Maeterlinck’s article in Le Figaro, the poem chides Maeterlinck for supposedly turning his back on his people:

Verse

Verse You are a son of Artevelde [a figure from the history of the city of Ghent] You are a Gentenaar Who dares to abuse our Dutch language As if it were but jargon

Verse

Verse Given that you neglect your own race [stam] Forget your mother-tongue Make your books in the enemy’s language Live in a foreign city [Nice]

Verse

Verse Should the Flemish people therefore cast off Their lovely mother-tongue And through cowardice still increase The pride of the Walloon?

17

Germania, admittedly, was a somewhat extreme publication in the Flemish press.18 “Race,” as used in this piece—which we must take with a grain of salt, as “stam” may also be translated as “people” or “tribe”—was not the primary concern of the prewar Flemish Movement, whose criticisms of the place of French in Flanders rested on social and economic arguments, as detailed below. Still, in the eyes of the Flemish Movement it was not self-evident that one could privilege speaking French and still represent a “Flemish” mentality. Drawing on scholarship on national indifference, I would compare the skepticism of the Flemish Movement toward Flemings “choosing” to speak French instead of or in addition to Dutch to the animus of Czech nationalists in the latter years of the Habsburg Empire toward “renegades,” that is, “German-speaking Czechs,” in Bohemia.19

As this suggests, we may tentatively compare the situation of the French-speakers in Flanders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to that of the German-speakers in the Czech lands, especially in cities like Prague and Brno (Brünn). Both groups had long considered themselves to be integral parts of their respective societies, with an identity based on status rather than language. As the historian Gary Cohen writes, “the experience of German-speakers in Prague and other urban minorities in Europe suggests that upper-strata groups generally develop conscious ethnic identities only after being provoked by direct challenges from subordinate groups or adverse changes in political structures.”20 I argue that the same holds true for the Francophones of Flanders: these individuals did not conceive of themselves as belonging to a particular group until the Flemish Movement and its legislative victories questioned their previously self-evident place in Flemish (and Belgian) society. The ways in which this group identity changed over time, and how these changes reflected the Francophones’ attempts to keep a place for French in Flemish public life, form the major subject of this study.

A Nascent Flemish Movement Challenges the Hegemony of French

The growth and success of the Flemish Movement, like all historical developments, should not be seen as predestined nor taken for granted. In the 1880s, Onésime Reclus, the famous French geographer who coined the word “francophone” to encompass a broader French-speaking identity outside of France’s borders, noted that while few Walloons spoke Flemish, many Flemings and German-speaking Belgians knew French. “The coming and going between Flemish-speaking Flanders and [French Flanders, in France] adds each day to the number of French-speaking Nederduitsch [‘low Germans’].” While many Flemings “believed themselves the victors” in a “duel between the two Belgiums,” as “patriots have reawakened the nation… and obtained for their idiom equality [sic] with the speech of Paris… Flemish will no doubt perish.” After all, Reclus reasoned, how could a small language like Flemish compete with a world language like French?21 Reclus certainly would not have predicted the current state of affairs, where Dutch is the unquestioned language of state and culture in Flanders.

The Flemish Movement emerged in the young Belgian state as a cultural movement focused on the promotion of Flemish language and literature. Lode Wils, a prominent historian of the movement, has argued that it was in its origins and in its first manifestations, a Belgian movement. Emphasizing the Flemish language was not necessarily a sign of pro-Dutch sympathies, but rather part of an effort to “make Belgium more Belgian” by concentrating on one of the key factors that differentiated Belgium from France. Indeed, Wils notes, early partisans of the Flemish Movement protested Belgium’s retrocession of land to the Netherlands in the 1839 Treaty of London.22 For many of the early Flemish Movement, it was not even evident that the language the Flemings spoke was “Dutch” (or that Dutch should be the reference language for the different Flemish dialects); it was not until 1864 that a Royal Decree declared that the spelling of “Flemish” in official documents would follow the rules used in the Netherlands for standard Dutch.23

From its beginnings as a cultural and literary movement of writers and intellectuals, the Flemish Movement grew to encompass political demands, calling for the use of “Flemish” in administrative services, judicial proceedings, and education. In this, the Flemish Movement demonstrated the transition from “Phase A” to “Phase B” in Miroslav Hroch’s schema for the development of “national revivals” among smaller ethnolinguistic groups in Europe, whereby such movements have three “phases”: “Phase A (the period of scholarly interest), Phase B (the period of patriotic agitation) and Phase C (the period of a mass national movement).” Hroch claims that the Flemish Movement never quite reached Phase C before 1914, as there was no real call for a separate Flemish “nation.” While this is true, Hroch’s interpretation is rather teleological, seeing the “nation” as the logical endpoint of ethnolinguistic activism.24

At first this was a call for justice for the Flemish masses who did not know French; an attempt to ensure that they could interact with the apparatus of the state despite not knowing the language of the privileged, political class. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Flemish Movement’s demands expanded. We may consider the growth of a Flemish petty bourgeoisie as a driver of this movement, as upwardly mobile individuals who did not know French found their mobility blocked because they lacked access to the prestige language.25

The Flemish Movement now envisioned a Flanders where upwardly mobile individuals could pursue careers in the public and private sector without necessarily having to know French. This reflected a more general “democratization” of Belgium—indeed, of Europe overall. As social movements and calls for universal suffrage challenged the upper classes’ hold on the reins of economic and political power, so did the Flemish Movement call for the “emancipation” of the majority of Flemings who did not know the language of the elites. The expansion of state power in service of its enlarged social duties also increased the amount of contact that the average citizen had with the state, putting further pressure on the state to speak the language of the average citizen—which, in Flanders, was overwhelmingly Flemish. All of these developments presupposed a new educational and legal apparatus to support the creation of “Flemish” public life in Flanders.26

I want to address a misconception about the prewar Flemish Movement. Though some French-speakers—in all areas of Belgium—feared that the Flemish Movement wanted to “eradicate” French from Flanders, this was not true of the overwhelming majority of the prewar Flemish Movement. Many in the movement framed their program as one which allowed for social mobility at all levels of society to be possible in Flemish/Dutch, without necessarily precluding the ability to climb the social ladder in French. Even those who wanted to restrict the use of French as a medium of instruction in Flemish schools still supported the teaching of French as a subject. Alfons Sevens, a Flemish writer (and former schoolteacher) argued that while French should lose its place as language of instruction, it should be the first “foreign” language taught to Flemish schoolchildren. Using a familial metaphor, Sevens claims that much as all households have a mother, so too should all individuals have a mother tongue. Those households which are large and complicated can hire a maid, much as a person might learn new languages if their career required them too. However, it would be a mistake to try to replace the “mother” (Flemish) with the “maid” (French) in both cases.27

The Flemish Movement’s proposed solutions to the “Flemish Question” often called on the state to “restore” the proper relationship between the languages spoken in Belgium. Public education policy, hiring practices for public administration and for judicial bodies, and military regulations, among others, were seen as legitimate objects of legislative action on the part of the Flemish Movement. These proposals for state intervention, however mild, met with resistance from an elite and a political culture that had been steeped in the idea of “liberty” as an organizing principle. We now turn to examine the different ways in which Belgians conceptualized “liberty” in the Belle Époque, how Francophones used “liberty” as an argument against the Flemish Movement’s agenda, and how the Flemish Movement responded to such arguments.

Changing Conceptions of Liberty in Belle Époque Belgium: Work, Church, Language

From the Belgian Revolution of 1830 until World War I, the major cleavage in Belgian politics was between the Catholic Party and the anticlerical Liberals. This extended into civil society as part of the phenomenon of “pillarization” in Belgian society in which Belgians self-sorted into different unions, patronized different businesses, joined different social clubs, and so on according to their ideological affiliation.28 While these factions clashed, often with great rhetorical violence, over the role of the Church in society, both parties inherited a “tradition of intense localism and anti-statism” from the Belgian past. The history of local autonomy and distrust of central authority, often seen as an overbearing outside influence, made themselves felt during the French occupation of 1795–1814 and the “reunion” with the Netherlands in 1814–1830. These values dovetailed nicely with the ideals of free trade and laissez-faire in economic matters to which both Catholics and Liberals subscribed.29 Appeals to “ancient Belgian freedoms” also supported early Belgian patriotism and allowed Belgian politicians to ground the rhetoric of “liberty” in an ideology different from the revolutionary “liberty” of the French tradition.30

These shared beliefs in economic liberty and a relatively weak state faced a great challenge in the three decades before World War I. Belgium had been the first country on the European continent to industrialize and experienced the same labor and social unrest that would affect other parts of the West. In 1886, the same year that the deadly Haymarket incident in Chicago brought labor radicalism to the fore of American politics, massive strikes in the industrial centers of Wallonia were put down with deadly force.31 The previous year had seen the founding of the Belgian Workers’ Party (BWP), heralding the entry of socialism as an electoral force into Belgian politics. These members of the working class and their political organizations called into question the prevailing attitude of “liberty” which permeated much of the Belgian ruling class, both among the doctrinaire Liberals and the conservative Catholic party, regarding the state’s (lack of a) role in relations between employers and the employed.32

In addition to the left-wing activity of the Belgian Workers’ Party, the end of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of “Christian Democracy” in Belgium, especially in Flanders. Drawing from the social doctrines embodied in the 1891 Papal encyclical Rerum Novarum and represented by the Catholic priest Adolf Daens, the Christian Democrats, while opposed to the “Godless” Marxism of the BWP, also contested the primacy of the conservative, Francophone Catholic establishment in Flanders. Indeed, Father Daens made a name for himself by agitating for better working conditions for the textile workers in the Flemish city of Aalst, coming into conflict with Charles Woeste, the francophone Catholic leader who represented the city in Parliament. Daens, like many in the Flemish Movement at the time, linked the problems of the working classes in Flanders to the disadvantages they faced in a society in which access to social and political power was predicated on a knowledge of French.33

Indeed, the social question and the language question were intimately linked in Belgian society. Both phenomena involved relations of power between groups on unequal footing: the rural nobility and urban factory owners vis-à-vis manual laborers in the one case, and speakers of the high-prestige world language French vis-à-vis speakers of the low-status Flemish/Dutch “dialects” in the other. These cleavages often overlapped, the ownership class being French-speaking while the working class was “patoisant.”34 In both the economic and linguistic spheres, the ruling classes often used the discourse of “liberty.” As the worker was free to negotiate the terms of his contract with an employer without the intervention of the state, so too were Belgian citizens free to use the language(s) of their choice, as specified in Article 23 of the Constitution.

The discourse of liberty had also been brought to bear in the intense debates between Liberals and Catholics regarding confessional schooling, reaching a high point in the “school war” of 1879–1884.35 While the Liberals wanted the state to maintain a network of lay schools, the Catholics felt that doing so would unfairly put Catholic schools at a disadvantage. The Catholics argued that it was part of the “freedom of the head of the household” to choose a lay or religious school for his children (at this time period, only the father’s freedom was taken into consideration, as reflected in the original French terminology, “liberté du père de famille”). Soon, the term “freedom of the head of household” was adopted by proponents of French schooling in Flanders, both Liberals and Catholics.36 As a man could choose a lay or religious education for his children, so too should he be able to choose French- or Dutch-language schooling for them, if he judged it to be in their best interest. This transposition of the concept of a father’s right to choose schools for his children from the religious to the linguistic realm did not go uncontested. Flemish parliamentarian Hendrik Borginon claimed that “the head of the household has learned religion, but not pedagogy, he is licensed as a Christian, he does not have a teacher’s diploma.”37

Many in the Flemish Movement thought that the Francophones’ conception of “liberty” in regard to language rang hollow. They cited the French priest Lacordaire: “Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is liberty that oppresses and the law that liberates.”38 This sentiment had concrete consequences for the Flemings’ legislative agenda. As political scientist J. A. Laponce argues in his study on language and territoriality, when two languages coexist in a given space, “the dominant language preaches liberty and equality; the subordinate language talks of borders, security, exclusivity, privileges.”39 The speakers of the dominant language, in other words, see freedom and lack of restraint as not only harmless but actually helpful in securing and even spreading the influence of their tongue. For speakers of the subordinate language, however, only rigidly enforced rules can save their idiom from being overwhelmed by societal pressure to adopt the dominant tongue.

While it is true that the Belgian state was for a long time de facto French-speaking, a state of affairs grounded in large part by appeal to “liberty,” it also did not seek to actively suppress Flemish—again, in large part because of the heritage of “liberty.” Historian Maarten Van Ginderachter describes the Belgian state in the late nineteenth century as “hyperliberal… unitary [yet] noncentralizing.”40 Despite elite organizations’ efforts at nationalizing the public, the state “did not put its full weight behind the nation-building program” as demonstrated by the poor state of the army and schools.41 Indeed, François Perin, a Walloon lawyer and politician, argued that the Belgian revolutionaries of 1830, in choosing not to establish obligatory schooling, had erred. Because schooling would have supposedly “Frenchif[ied] patois-speaking Flemings, like the French Republic had Frenchified Dunkirk [in French Flanders],” the “Belgian gamble” had been “lost.”42 Perin, an ardent Francophile who later advocated for Wallonia to join France, is arguing from a distinctly “French” (as in the French state) ideal of a monolingual, monocultural state. It is questionable whether compulsory schooling could have truly “Frenchified” all of Flanders—it is quite likely that most primary schools in Flanders would still have taught in Dutch. The point remains, though, that Belgium’s commitment to liberty, which allowed for the use of French in Flanders to conform to the wishes of a small but influential population, paradoxically prevented the massive, state-sponsored spread of French among the population at large.

Partly as a result of the strikes of 1886 and the increased labor militancy which followed, the Belgian government agreed to one of the major demands of the workers’ movement, universal suffrage for men aged 25 and older, with a caveat: In order to “temper” the influence of the “masses,” voters with additional qualifications such as owning a large amount of real estate, paying a certain amount of taxes, or holding a diploma from an institute of higher education were allowed up to two additional votes. In both the struggles for universal manhood suffrage and the obstacles set up by its opponents, Belgium was not unique; labor leaders and other sympathetic political figures across Europe worked toward universal (male) voting rights and more conservative interests tried to block such rights outright or water them down by creating a tiered system of suffrage (or representation).

In Belgium, though, the suffrage question had profound consequences for the language question. Before 1893, so-called “official Belgium,” composed only of those whose financial situation made them eligible to be electors, and the even smaller group of those who were eligible to run for office, was almost completely French-speaking, even in Flanders. Those with the means to be part of the electorate would almost certainly have had an education in French. Until the introduction of universal manhood suffrage, then, while those Flemings who qualified to run for office or to vote could argue about the need for Flemish in public life, they would be able to partake in the political life of the country in French with little to no difficulty.

With the advent of universal manhood suffrage, though, even in its watered-down form, candidates for office had to contend with a much larger electorate which, in Flanders, more often than not spoke little to no French. Political parties would now have to offer programs that would interest Flemish electors, and do so in Flemish.43 Several scholars, including Herman Van Goethem, have pinpointed this change as a “critical juncture” in the development of the Flemish Movement and the evolution of Belgian society. Van Goethem argues that the addition of a mass of Flemish voters ultimately meant that the unitary Belgian state that emerged from the Revolution of 1830 would be impossible to maintain.44

On a final note, the classical liberal ideal of a small state informed (or was abused by, depending on one’s point of view) critics of language legislation in another, more roundabout manner. Francophones pilloried language laws for the translation and interpretation costs they would incur. They portrayed the “flamingants” as mere job-hunters, anxious to create “redundant” Flemish-speaking positions in the civil service and to provide employment for armies of translators for Flemish government documents that “no one” would read. The perception of careers in civil service and even of transparency of government as the domain of a privileged elite—one that was Francophone or at least knew French—is apparent in these dismissals of the Flemish Movement’s concerns and accompanies a concern for profligate spending. It should not be a surprise that Francophone organizations like the Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française (on which more below) often used “budgétivore [budget-eater]” as a term of abuse for the “flamingants.”45 What kind of legislation did proponents of French argue would make such a fearful dent in the budget, along with other damaging effects?

Linguistic Legislation Before World War I

It is perhaps unsurprising that laws that required the use, or at least availability, of Dutch in certain aspects of public life in Flanders alongside French spurred on strong reactions among French-speakers in Belgium. Such laws especially raised the ire of Walloon civil servants, many of whom worried that requirements to know Dutch would favor Flemings, as many Flemings spoke Dutch natively but had been educated largely in French; while very few Walloons bothered or saw any interest in learning Dutch. We may compare this to the attempt of the Badeni government in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy to require proficiency in both German and Czech in Bohemia in legislation introduced in 1897—while Czech-speakers with credentials to work in the civil service typically knew German, German-speakers were much less likely to know Czech. As among Walloons in Belgium, many German-speakers throughout the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy considered such laws an attack on their ability to pursue a career in public service.46 The early Walloon Movement, as we shall see below, was largely based on defending the rights of Walloons (who overwhelmingly did not know Dutch) in Flanders. This often overlapped with the interests of “native” French-speakers in Flanders, especially as the latter, many of whom did know local Flemish dialects (if not standard Dutch) nevertheless saw French as an indispensable tool for Belgian national unity.

This solicitousness for the ability to carry out an administrative career across the length and breadth of Belgium solely in French may, of course, represent a case of personal material interests on the part of those who did not wish to put effort into learning Dutch. While not discounting such an explanation, I would also interpret these bureaucrats’ concerns in the light of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of career “pilgrimages” in the Spanish American colonies and the construction of national identity. In brief: Anderson argues that part of the reason why units such as “Mexico” and “Peru,” but not the Spanish American empire as a whole, engendered the loyalty of nationalists in the Age of Revolutions was because creole civil servants’ careers were largely circumscribed by the bounds of colonial divisions. As their careers led them to take posts across different parts of the colony, but not in other colonies, nor in the metropole, they and their fellow bureaucrats whose careers followed similarly shaped trajectories “experience[ed] a consciousness of connectedness,” transforming the limits of the colony into the limits of their national identity.47

Scholars of revolutions in the Americas have been critical of Anderson’s “pilgrimages” model.48 Nevertheless, the metaphor of shared career experiences, and the central importance of civil servants or those who aspire to be civil servants, do make it useful in the Belgian case, especially for the question of French in Flanders. Walloon activists made or hoped to make careers that could include posts in Liège and Mons but also Antwerp and Ghent; they feared losing the opportunity to pursue a career in Flemish cities should knowledge of Dutch become necessary in the northern provinces. In the meantime, “native” French-speakers in Flanders worried that cutting off such an opportunity for Walloons to work in Flanders would hinder Belgian national unity.

Let us now turn more specifically to the development of linguistic legislation in Belgium. After obtaining independence, Belgium did not adopt a de jure official language but essentially all internal bureaucracy and parliamentary debate was conducted in French; laws and decrees of the federal government were issued in French and translated to Dutch if deemed necessary. Article 23 of the Constitution of 1831 stipulates: “The use of the languages spoken in Belgium is optional [facultatif]. This may be regulated only by law and only for acts of public authority and for judicial proceedings.”49 It would not be accurate to say that there was an attempt to “Frenchify” the Flemish population, and in most day-to-day interactions between monolingual Flemings and the organs of government in the nineteenth century, they would likely have encountered someone who knew the local dialect. Still, any serious upward mobility in the private sector, in higher education, or in government service was unimaginable without learning French; a state of affairs that the Flemish Movement argued was unjust, as it seemed to favor Walloons, whose mother tongue was either French or a closely related Romance dialect.

In 2010, one Flemish journalist attempted to destroy what he saw as the myth of a more tolerant bilingual Belgium of yesteryear, calling the Belgium that emerged from the 1830 Revolution “a French-speaking state with facilities for Flemings.” This is an ironic reference to “municipalities with facilities” in contemporary Belgium: towns in Flanders where inhabitants have the right to request government service in French and towns in Wallonia where inhabitants may do the same for Dutch. The point is clear: in the first decades of Belgium’s history, an overwhelmingly Francophone state apparatus provided service in Dutch on sufferance as an afterthought.50

Some French-speakers had interpreted Article 23 of the Constitution, which stipulated that the use of languages in Belgium was a matter of choice, to mean that state employees could choose which language to use in their dealings with public and with other branches of the administration.51 Proponents of language legislation in favor of Dutch countered that “in a free country, bureaucrats are made for citizens” and not vice versa. It was thus not onerous to require public servants to speak the same language as the majority of the citizens whom they served, and doing so in fact preserved the linguistic liberty of the citizenry.52

Perhaps the most glaring example of linguistic injustice in the early Kingdom of Belgium was the use of French in court cases where one or more parties did not know the language. In 1860, two Flemish workers employed in Wallonia, Jan Coucke and Pieter Goethals, were charged with and found guilty of the robbery and murder of a local woman and executed. The press reported that neither man spoke French well, if at all, while the interpreters provided by the court did not speak Dutch well. In the following year, a suspect in a different crime alleged that (French-speaking) members of his gang, not Coucke and Goethals, had committed the murder, casting doubt on the men’s trial. Research undertaken in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has shown that Coucke and Goethals probably spoke more French than had been widely believed, that one of the interpreters may have been Dutch, and that the testimony that supposedly exculpated the two was riddled with inconsistencies. Still, in the 1800s and well into the 1900s, many Flemish nationalists thought the two suspects had been unfairly tried, or even innocent, and “Coucke and Goethals” became a byword for many Flemings for a Belgian state that disregarded their rights to deal with their government in their own language.53

The case of Coucke and Goethals galvanized Flemish attempts to reform the use of languages in the judiciary. Yet while their trial took place in the Walloon city of Mons, where the predominance of French could be expected, if not excused, there were myriad cases involving lesser infractions, tried in Flanders, where the use of French posed a significant barrier to litigants’ and defendants’ comprehension.54 In response to such infamies, the first piece of linguistic legislation as allowed by the Constitution, the law of 17 August 1873 regarding the use of languages in judicial affairs, mandated that trials in the “Flemish” part of the country were to take place in Flemish unless the accused specifically asked for French.55 Even this relatively common-sense law elicited protest from French-speakers. Jules Bara, a prominent Walloon liberal, argued during the debate on the bill that “we [Walloons] are de facto excluded from all judiciary positions in Flanders.”56 In 1878, another law required public administration in the “Flemish provinces” to use signage in Dutch or in both Dutch and French, and to communicate with the public in Dutch, unless the individual concerned requested French.57

Alexis Schwarzenbach, in his book on the cultural and political aspects of stamps, coins, and banknotes in the multilingual states of Switzerland and Belgium, notes that in the latter country most of these publicly issued “bearers of value” were exclusively French until the last years of the nineteenth century, when coins (1886), banknotes (1888), and stamps (1893) with bilingual inscriptions appeared, thereby changing the linguistic physiognomy of Belgium. Still, Flemish was less prominent than French on most of these objects, and there were numerous complaints about misspelling of Flemish terms. Nevertheless, Schwarzenbach argues that these changes show that near the end of the nineteenth century, “Belgium was no longer considered to be a predominantly French-speaking country with a traditionalist Flemish minority; however, Belgium was not yet perceived to be a bilingual country with two equal national languages.”58 This would soon change, in theory if not in practice.

In 1898, the Belgian Parliament passed the “Law of Equality” which declared that Flemish (Dutch) was an official language of the kingdom on the same standing as French, and which mandated that both the Flemish and French texts of the laws be considered legally binding—until then, only the French text had been official, and the Flemish text had only been considered a translation provided for convenience’s sake. This legislation represented a significant symbolic victory for the Flemish Movement, even if they often found the application of the law to be lacking, but many partisans of French felt it to be an affront. Belgium now presented itself as a country with two languages, not just a French “language” which served as a link between speakers of various “dialects.” Maurice Wilmotte, a Walloon literary historian and friend of French in Flanders, was shocked that the partisans of the Flemish Movement had claimed for “various kinds of gibberish [divers charabias – that is, Flemish dialects] the dignity of a common tongue and the same prerogatives as for French, rich in a literary past and literary present.”59

In regard to education, while every Flemish commune had a Flemish-language primary school; secondary education, both official and private (the latter almost always being Catholic), was in French until the law of 15 June 1883 required that state secondary schools in Flanders teach partly in French and partly in Flemish. The Flemish Movement then pushed to apply the same regulations to private schools, a goal achieved in 1910. While the law of 1883 upset many French-speakers, the campaign to apply its tenets to private education rankled them far more. One Jesuit educator from Flanders, Jules Verest, while agreeing that private schools in Flanders ought to teach Flemish (though not necessarily in Flemish), denied the state the right to mandate private schools to do so. This would be the end of the “liberty of education,” a right which the Belgians had won along with their independence from the Netherlands.60 Verest, as a Catholic clergyman, was deeply opposed to any state intervention in education, likely remembering the “school war” of 1879–1884.61 Maurice Wilmotte fulminated against the Flemish Movement’s supposed intrusion on the prerogatives of private schools: “The flamingant ogre began to demand more and more. Why should private education escape from the obligations of state education?”62

Opponents of extending language regulations to private schools could argue that it was unconstitutional. Article 17, the relevant provision in the 1831 Constitution, only specified that “Education is free; all preventative measures are forbidden… Public instruction given at the expense of the State is… regulated by law,” thereby leaving the right of the state to regulate private teaching in question. The other reason for the Francophones’ specific resistance to regulation of private schooling is that the Francophones of Flanders—again, drawn from the upper ranks of Flemish society—were more likely to have sent their children to private schools anyway. Those who had sent them to public school previously were more than likely able to pay for a private education in French after the law of 1883.

University education in Belgium was completely in French before World War I, with the exceptions of a few classes aimed at lawyers who would practice in Flanders and for teachers for Flemish secondary schools, and some courses in Flemish literature. I will return to the university question in more detail below when I examine the debate over the language(s) of instruction at the University of Ghent.

One last law which would affect the language question was that of 19 May 1914, which made primary schooling compulsory throughout Belgium. The relatively late introduction of mandatory education, in comparison to other Western European states, was another legacy of the power of liberalism among the Belgian political class. As fate would have it, World War I would intervene before the law was put into practice. It is interesting to speculate how the relationship between languages in Flanders (and in Belgium as a whole) would have evolved in a Belgium that escaped the tumult of World War I. Compulsory education promised to spread fluency in standardized “Flemish” (Dutch), bridging the gap between dialects that many proponents of the Flemish Movement bemoaned as an impediment to wider acceptance of Flemish as an administrative language. Might Flanders have moved toward a society in which Flemish/Dutch was the language of administration and business, yet where the French-speaking minority enjoyed wide-ranging rights? The experience of World War I, as we will see in the next two chapters, would infuse the language question with deeply divisive emotional resonance, making such a development unlikely. Returning to the prewar era, we now look at why the French-speakers in Flanders criticized many of the attempts to legislate language use in Flanders.

Explaining the Resistance of the French-Speakers

Francophones’ reticence to use Flemish in public life, and resistance to laws that introduced or expanded the role of Flemish in administration and education, irked the Flemish Movement. Many of the “French-speakers” of Flanders knew some Flemish, though not usually standard Dutch; in some cases these individuals came from patoisant backgrounds and used French mostly in public. French poet Charles Baudelaire, who spent several years in Belgium in the 1860s, wrote in his unpublished Pauvre Belgique (Poor Belgium) somewhat disparagingly about the “Frenchified” upper classes: “People do not know French, no one knows it, but everyone affects not knowing Flemish. It’s in very good taste. The proof that they know it very well, is that they chew out [engueulent] their servants in Flemish.”63 Indeed, they often admitted that they spoke enough of the local patois to communicate with the lower classes, and thus the call for standard Dutch in government offices was superfluous at best, or even the imposition of a “foreign,” academic tongue which was poorly understood by the average person. The Flemish Movement, though, saw the refusal of the Francophones to adjust to the use of standard Dutch as a form of bullheadedness or snobbery. Some Francophones of Flanders, reflecting on their situation, seemed to agree with that assessment.

Suzanne Lilar, born in 1901 to a middle-class family in Ghent, notes in her memoirs that in many bourgeois circles in her hometown, speaking French was not “merely” an act of using a different mother tongue. The upper bourgeoisie “did not content itself with speaking French, it affected to not know Dutch, [a language] of which they only retained a few locutions and commands for the domestics.” Upwardly mobile members of the petty bourgeoisie, meanwhile, “bought for their children the right to distinguish themselves from the people” by sending them to French-speaking private schools, some of which discouraged their students from doing the homework for their Dutch-language courses.64 Journalist Charles d’Ydewalle, a member of a prominent West Flemish aristocratic (and thus Francophone) family, born the same year as Lilar (1901), uses terms even more stark than hers to describe the relationship between Flemish- and French-speakers. “The Flemings,” he wrote, “all patoisants, were a bit of the Third World, with a Frenchified aristocracy.”65

It would be a mistake, however, to see the Francophones’ opposition to legislation in favor of Dutch as “mere” snobbery. They perceived the Flemish Movement as an attack on their favorable economic and social position; it is natural that they would push back against measures which they feared would diminish the relative value of their (and their forebears’) “investment” in the French language. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” helps us understand this apprehension on the part of the Francophones of Flanders.

Bourdieu distinguishes between economic capital, which is a material, “embodied,” and transmissible product of accumulated labor, and “cultural capital,” an immaterial product of the accumulation of education and acculturation. It represents an investment of time by the holder, as “like the acquisition of a muscular physique or a suntan,” the work needed to acquire such capital “cannot be done at second hand.”66 Bourdieu argues that “early domestic education” plays a key role in the accumulation of cultural capital, and in the case of the Francophones of Flanders, speaking French at home allows them a head start in acquiring the particular cultural capital of fluency in the French language.67

Economic capital may suddenly lose its worth, to the chagrin of its holder who had invested time and labor into its creation. For example, a period of inflation could render economic capital in the form of a bank account much less powerful. Cultural capital can also suddenly decline in value. Making the connection to the Francophones of Flanders, a “devaluation” of French as a form of cultural capital—by making French comparatively less vital to the day-to-day operation of Flemish society, as the Flemish Movement desired—would essentially “wipe out” Francophones’ “savings accounts” of accumulated cultural capital in the form of proficiency in French. At the risk of being reductionist, we may see the reaction of the Francophones of Flanders to the Flemish Movement and its projects as a fight to maintain the value of the “investment” in the French language which they and their ancestors had made over the years.

This fear of losing the sunken costs of having learned French went hand in hand with a suspicion that the Flemish Movement, or at least its most extreme members, sought to create a new elite for Flanders. This new elite, the Francophones argued, would maintain its power in part by keeping the common people of Flanders ignorant of French. The flamingants wanted to become bigger fish by creating a smaller pond, a Dutch pool separated from the French ocean. The newsletter of the Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française (AFVLF), a group of Francophones of Flanders drawn from Ghent high society who sought to spread the knowledge of French among their fellow Flemings, mocked what they perceived to be the pretension of the Flemish Movement to erect a new ruling class.68 The AFVLF agreed with the Flemish Movement that Flanders suffered because of the gap between the Francophone ruling class and the Dutch-speaking common people, stated one editorial. The answer to this problem, however, consisted of helping the population to acquire a good understanding of French, thereby giving them access to greater levels of culture and education. Indeed, claimed the AFVLF, “our populations have too much good sense to recognize as masters those who want to keep them in their sole knowledge of the Flemish language.” The motivations of the “little flamingant clan” were “seizing all the [public] positions, all the powers, all the benefits.”69

Some of the Flemish Movement’s proposals did indeed call for the creation of a Dutch-speaking intellectual and business class, though perhaps with less venal motivations than those attributed to them by their French-speaking opponents; indeed, many of these writers would argue that they were inviting the French-speaking Flemings to “return” to their Flemish roots. Julius MacLeod, a botanist at the University of Ghent, called for the university to (gradually) transition to teaching in Dutch to bridge the “gap” between the Flemish population and “its” elite. A proponent of the “university extension” movement, MacLeod argued that university education in Dutch would create an educated class that could spread scientific knowledge to a mass of Flemings who did not have the time or means to learn foreign languages. MacLeod even contended that the emphasis on French was retarding the intellectual development of the “Gallicized Flemings” themselves: they have “become like the French themselves – they now find it very difficult to learn foreign languages; intellectually they are isolated from the rest of the world.”70

Flemish economist Lodewijk De Raet, another proponent of the transformation of the University of Ghent, who in fact rejected MacLeod’s gradualism, bluntly attacked the Flemish elite for their neglect: “If there is any Flemish culture at all to speak of, then it came into being despite the men of government and the ruling classes.” The Flemish lower classes were at an economic and social disadvantage because of the interclass language barrier. De Raet proposed that a Dutch-language University of Ghent “will give the Dutch language the necessary authority to enable it to impose itself on the ruling classes. This will stem the tide of Frenchification, allow us to control our material development and to promote it in the Flemish land.”71

Returning to Francophones’ resistance to language legislation, we may also advance a less instrumentalist view, interpreting the Francophones’ opposition to the Flemish Movement as evidence of concern for the well-being of their fellow Flemings. Groups like the AFVLF maintained that they worked in Flemings’ best interests. Knowledge of French, claimed the AFVLF, was vital to Flemings’ economic and social success, not only in Belgium but also—especially—internationally. The AFVLF instituted French courses for children and adults in Ghent, Antwerp, and other major cities, distributed Flemish-French phrasebooks to Flemish seasonal workers who sojourned in Wallonia and France, and contested legislation that restricted the amount of French in public schools.

Those who exulted the virtues of French often derided those of Dutch at the same time. While the Flemish patois had a charm that evoked memories of one’s hometown and childhood, they were too primordial to serve all the needs of a modern society and too mutually unintelligible to bind Flemings together. Dutch—besides being the language of the hated King Willem—was also too different from Flemish patois to serve as a common tongue, and besides, even academic Dutch was of little use outside of the Netherlands. The Francophones of Flanders—at least before World War I—thus argued that the Flemings should relegate the Flemish patois to folkloric or sentimental use, and use French for official matters, just as their Walloon compatriots had done with their patois. For example, a petition of the Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française sent to all members of the Belgian legislature in late 1911 or early 1912 in favor of “freedom of language” states that “local dialects, spoken by a certain number of our compatriots (be these dialects Flemish or Walloon) constitute an insufficient instrument” for the promulgation of high science and culture. “The Maeterlincks, the Verhaerens, the Rodenbachs” of Flanders had recognized that reality by writing in French.72 This argument elided the fact that the gap between Walloon dialects and French is much smaller than that between Flemish dialects and French, making it easier for the speakers of the former to learn standard French. They also may have relied on an inflated sense of the dominance of “French” in Wallonia. Aristide Zolberg argues that it “was more politic to emphasize the similarity [between French and Walloon]; hence ‘Walloons’ were French-speakers, if not yet, at least in the making.”73

The opponents of language legislation in Flanders also appealed to patriotic sentiments, claiming that while French tied Flemings closer to their Walloon compatriots, the promotion of Flemish as a prerequisite for public employment in Flanders alienated them. The fact that French was the “native language” of almost half of the Belgian population as well as an international language of great utility undergirded Francophones’ arguments for the maintenance of French-language rights in Flanders. A good knowledge of French, claimed the Francophones, would go a long way toward keeping the unity of the country intact.

I suspect that readers may have expected to see one seemingly simple reason for the Francophones’ resistance to linguistic legislation: namely, that they wanted to protect their rights to use their mother tongue (in this case, French). While, as we will see below, this motivation was not absent from Francophone discourse before World War I, it did not play a prominent role in Francophones’ arguments. There are several reasons for this.

For one thing, the Flemish Movement before 1914 had relatively little interest in banning French from public administration in Flanders. Under most of the proposed language legislation, Francophones in Flanders would still be able to receive public services in French. Requirements to know Dutch would only apply to public employees and not the public in general; this restriction would affect Walloons much more than Francophones of Flanders, who often knew a local dialect.

There is another, perhaps more fundamental reason why the argument of protecting Francophones’ rights to their “mother tongue” only made scattered appearances prior to 1914. Such a line of thought contradicted much of the theoretical underpinning of their opposition to the Flemish Movement. A considerable number of the “Francophones of Flanders” had not learned French at their mothers’ breasts, but were rather native speakers of Flemish who used French regularly, even to the extent of speaking French instead of Flemish at home. Even those raised in French typically descended from ancestors who had made a similar transformation. Organizations like the AFVLF wanted Flemings to continue to have such a choice, using French if they pleased and sending their children to French-language schools if they thought that a more valuable form of education.

Any concern for protecting “native languages” could therefore be seen as backward or archaic. It was in fact the Flemish Movement whom the Francophones often “accused” of being too enamored with the mystique of the “native language,” to the extent that the flamingants fetishized Flemish to the detriment of the much more useful French. (Indeed, opponents of the Flemish Movement mockingly called its proponents “moedertaaliens,” playing on the Dutch word “moedertaal [mother tongue].”) The Brussels economist Maurice Ansiaux, member of the Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française (on which more below), argued in 1912 that “those Flemings who speak French are truly the sons of modern thought, they use the foremost of the rights written into our Constitution, they demonstrate [font acte de] individual liberty. Nothing is more sacred than the right to betray the language or the faith of one’s ancestors!” When speakers of less-common languages learned a world language—even at the expense of their own—they were merely making a choice to join a modernizing world.74

The Specter of Bilingualism

The language legislation passed since 1873 was disquieting to many French-speakers in that it seemed to recognize, and even promote, “bilingualism” on the national level in Belgium, and in Wallonia as well. While “bilingualism” in Flanders was a cherished historical fact and a cornerstone of Belgian unity, “bilingualism” in Wallonia was at best a hassle, at worst an attempt to “denature” the Gallic culture of the Walloons.

For some French-speakers, Flanders was “bilingual” in that French served as the cultivated language, and various Flemish dialects—which they distinguished from standard Dutch as practiced in the Netherlands—the “popular” languages or “patois,” were incapable or at the very least not suited to fill the role of a fully fledged language for administration, education, commerce, and culture. This situation corresponds with what today might be called “diglossia,” that is, the use of different languages in different social situations by the same individual.75 For many French-speakers, the Flemish dialects in Flanders occupied—or ought to occupy—the same role in Flanders as the different Walloon dialects did in Wallonia; they could be the language of hearth and home, a vehicle for folklore, used to add local flavor to literature, but not in any way an official language. Only French could fill that position in Belgian society.

Émile Buisset, a Liberal MP from Charleroi in Wallonia, was a strident proponent of this view. In an article entitled “French: The Official Language of Belgium,” he argued that French, as the language understood by all Walloons and all of the educated class of Flemings, was the only language which could ever aspire to official status. In addition, the 1830 declaration of the Belgian Provisional of Government which made French the official language for all government decrees (with the possibility, though not the requirement, of translations) was not superseded by Article 23 of the Constitution; rather, Article 23, by reserving the ability for the state to regulate language use in matters of public administration, strengthened the intent of the Belgian Provisional Government to make French the sole “official” language for Belgium.76 Buisset’s argument is thus an example of one historian’s claim that for many of the Francophone Belgian elite, “Article 23 had been written mainly as a reaction against [Dutch King] William I’s attempts to require Belgian civil servants to learn Dutch, and was therefore a sort of historic contract to use French.”77

While later in the twentieth century many Belgian Francophones would accuse the Flemish Movement of subscribing to a “blood and soil” nationalism in which the fact of being in Flemish territory necessitated the use of Dutch, before World War I almost the entire Flemish Movement supported bilingualism in Flanders, while many French-speakers, especially in Wallonia, saw Wallonia as a wholly monolingual region. Many of the early proponents of the Walloon Movement explicitly argued that Flanders should indeed be bilingual, or ideally that French, not standard Dutch, should serve as a common bond between speakers of different Flemish (and Walloon) dialects in Belgium. Wallonia had “always” been monolingual, or more exactly, there was no historical Dutch-speaking population in Wallonia which mirrored the Francophones of Flanders. Flemish migrants who came to work in the metal and mineral industry in Walloon cities such as Liège and Charleroi were dismissed as a temporary aberration which could be assimilated. The question of Flemings in Wallonia was also occasionally used to raise the specter of “islands” [ilôts] of Flemings who would be cut off from the local population, or even of Flemish “colonization” of Wallonia.78

Franz Foulon, a liberal personality most often known as a Walloon due to his career in local politics in the Walloon city of Ath, spent the first 25 years of his life in a French-speaking family in Dendermonde in East Flanders.79 Shortly before World War I, he authored a tract on the “Question of Languages in Belgium” stating that the opposition between bilingual Flanders and monolingual Wallonia lay at the heart of the language problem. French had long possessed “citizenship [droit de cité]” in Flanders, and the Flemish who would “ban” it from Flanders were going against centuries of tradition. However, this did not mean that bilingualism should be extended to Wallonia. Indeed, Foulon argued that this latter proposition pleased “Frenchified” Flemings: It would help assure their dominance throughout Belgium, as they would be part of an elite caste which knew both “national” languages, but would offend both Flemish extremists and most Walloons, who were committed to the monolingualism of their respective regions. Foulon argued for French to remain a common language for all of Belgium, repeating the common argument that while it was in Flemings’ own interest to learn French, Walloons drew no advantage from learning Dutch, which itself was different from the various Flemish “dialects.”80

In a deeply suggestive move, the Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française, one of several organizations formed before World War I to protect the French language in Flanders, published a monolingual French train schedule for the Belgian railways as an alternative to the official bilingual edition published by the government. While the Ligue claimed not to begrudge Flemings the use of monolingual Flemish train schedules if they so desired, it also argued that such a Flemish guide would have very few users, and that the publication of a bilingual guide was done under pressure from flamingants to mask the relatively weak readership that solely Flemish documents would attract. While the bilingual train guide was inconvenient for French-speakers, among other reasons because “all the places in the Flemish part of the country are mentioned first in Flemish,” the Ligue’s guide was more compact and less expensive than its bilingual counterpart, and its success would be “the most obvious demonstration of the superficial character of the flamingant movement.”81

Most of the laws which mandated the use of Dutch in certain circumstances had been passed by the homogeneous Catholic governments which had been in power in Belgium since 1884 (and would remain so until the outbreak of the First World War). The Catholic Party’s majority rested in large part on support in Flemish districts. Many Liberals and Socialists from Wallonia and Brussels, frustrated both by their parties’ impotence on the national level and the requirement to know Dutch for certain civil service positions, came to conflate “Flemish” with “Catholic” and spoke of “Flemish domination” of the government. While, on the one hand, this observation was correct—seven of the eight Catholic Heads of Cabinet (Prime Ministers) from 1884 to the beginning of the war were from Flanders—these Flemish politicians were for the most part French-speaking, or at the very least spoke French almost exclusively in the course of their political duties. These “French-speaking Flemings,” however, did not think of themselves as a coherent group in the manner in which we will see during the interwar years. The nascent Walloon Movement would demonstrate concern for the place of “French culture” in Flanders—for the sake of Flemings who were “attached” to French as well as for Walloons to feel “at home” in Flanders—while at the same time attacking (some) French-speaking Flemings as “flamingants” for supporting a Flemish political program, one which was relatively moderate in comparison to that which later Flemish radicals would espouse.

The fears of a Catholic, flamingant domination of Belgium came to a head in the 1912 legislative elections. The Liberals and Socialists had formed an electoral cartel, hoping that by uniting all “anticlerical” voters they could achieve a majority. Instead, the Catholic Party gained several seats, especially in Flanders. In the aftermath of this stunning defeat, the Walloon Socialist MP Jules Destrée published an open “Letter to the King on the Separation of Wallonia and Flanders,” in a liberal-oriented magazine, La Revue de Belgique. Much of the historiography on the language debate in Belgium has exaggerated the importance of this piece, likely because it seems to predict some of the changes in the structure of the Belgian state which would come about throughout the twentieth century, and because it has become a lieu de mémoire for the Walloon Movement. Destrée’s letter should rather be seen as an expression of a historically situated frustration which was shared mostly by other left-leaning, upwardly mobile elites in Wallonia. Still, the “Letter to the King” provides an interesting insight into the concerns which motivated the early Walloon Movement, which in many ways was more concerned with Flanders than with Wallonia per se.

Destrée’s “Letter” is most well-known for his declaration to the king that “there are no Belgians.”82 He sets up a dichotomy between Catholic Flanders and free-thinking Wallonia, which in the unitary Belgian state has led to the domination of the (numerically larger) former over the latter. Thus, the Walloons constitute a people ruled contrary to their interests. Destrée submits a list of things which have been taken from the Walloons by the Flemings. Among these are “our past,” “our artists,” “our public employment,” “our money,” “our security,” and “our language.”83 Destrée’s concern with Wallonia’s “past” reflects disappointment that Flanders and its “cultural hybridity” came to the fore so often as a key determinant of Belgian identity in many Belgian national historical narratives that the cultural contributions of thoroughly Latin Wallonia fell by the wayside.84

However, the first item on the list is not something to be found in Wallonia: “To start with, [the Flemings] have taken Flanders from us. Certainly, it was their possession. But it was also a little bit ours.” Arguing with more than a touch of hyperbole, Destrée laments that Walloons who come to a large Flemish city are treated with increasing hostility and receive fewer and fewer services in French: “We now feel like foreigners in Flanders, at least as much as in the Hague or Amsterdam.” (Destrée, who was adamantly opposed to any language facilities for Flemings in Wallonia, does not mention if Flemings in Charleroi and Liège felt like foreigners as if they were in Paris or Nice.) Destrée also shows some solicitude for the Francophones of Flanders: “The offense, the menace, the intimidation, the constraint are incessant. Flemings who want to keep contact with French civilization are looked down on and ridiculed. The crowning achievement of this enterprise, pursued with tireless tenacity, will be the extinction of the last home of French culture in Flanders, the University of Ghent.”85

The solution Destrée offered for the ills of the Belgian state was “administrative separation:” that is, devolving numerous competencies of the central state to regional apparatuses in Wallonia and Flanders (and in some formulations, Brussels) so that each “region” could regulate its own affairs without undue interference from the other. This was an idea which had found expression from time to time among various Walloon intellectuals and politicians concerned for the “linguistic integrity” (i.e., monolingualism) of Wallonia, as well as the supposed neglect that a Flemish-dominated government demonstrated toward Wallonia.86 Interestingly, a few decades earlier, some moderate German-speakers had previously proposed a separation of Bohemia along linguistic lines in response to the growth of the movement for Czech-language rights; Destrée does not mention this in his letter.87

We should remember that these calls for administrative separation appealed to extremely few Belgians of any linguistic or political stripe before 1914.88 Even those who did make such calls often did so more as a theoretical or rhetorical threat than as a concrete political program. The French-speakers of Flanders were especially unreceptive to the idea of administrative separation. On a philosophical level, many French-speakers in Flanders envisioned themselves as providing a link between Flanders and Wallonia, thereby ensuring Belgian unity—a role that would become much less relevant in a Belgium comprised of two (or three) separate regions. More concretely, some Francophones of Flanders worried that a Flanders with a large amount of legislative leeway would encroach on their rights. A unitary Belgium was necessary to prevent flamingant domination of the Francophones of Flanders. Under administrative separation, argued one opponent, “French [would be] put on the same footing as German or English. French [would be] brutally uprooted, extirpated from Flanders where, nevertheless, long centuries of usage had procured a rightful place for it!” How could Walloons—defenders of French culture—support such a solution? Walloon support for administrative separation would abandon “Flemings whose maternal or everyday language is French” to the tender mercies of the flamingants.89 This last citation reflects a concern for French qua mother tongue of the Francophones of Flanders—a preoccupation that was embryonic during the prewar years, but which became predominant during the interwar years, and again in the 1960s. However, Walloon support for “administrative separation”—what would come to be called “federalism” after World War I, when the Germans and their collaborators gave the former term a negative connotation—did not really gain much traction in Wallonia until at least the 1930s, or even the 1960s.90

There were, of course, many Belgians who saw bilingualism, either of the civil service or of the population more generally, as a viable and indeed patriotic solution to the “language problem” in Belgium. Some of the earliest Walloon political organizations, formed in the first half of the 1890s, investigated different methods of better learning Dutch to maintain Walloon civil servants’ competitiveness on a national level.91 Around 1910, a Ligue pour la vulgarisation de la langue flamande en Wallonie—note the parallel to the name of the AFVLF—came into being. The stated goals of this group were “rapprochement between Walloons and Flemings and good understanding between them… the fraternization of Flemings living in Mons and its environs, [and] respect and promotion of the Flemish language.” The prospectus containing the statutes of this group was prefaced with a famous, even hackneyed quote from the poet Antoine Clesse: “Flemings, Walloons, these are but given names / Belgian is our family name.”92

Within Flanders, too, while many members of the Flemish Movement challenged the predominance and exclusive use of French in various situations in Flanders, very few called for the eradication of French in Flanders, despite some French-speakers' evocation of the danger of “defrancization.” Edward Anseele, Sr., a Flemish socialist who represented the Walloon city of Liège and later the Flemish city of Ghent in Parliament, was a member of the AFVLF, an organization which was often portrayed as the instrument of an “asocial” Francophone bourgeoisie by more radical flamingants. Anseele felt that learning French would help Flemish workers become more cultured and make them more attractive employees. He and some other Flemish socialists noted that in many other countries, the working class and the bourgeoisie spoke the same language, and that this alone did not guarantee a favorable position for the former.93

Organizing the “French-Speakers of Flanders”

As I have stressed throughout this chapter, before the interwar era, those in Flanders who spoke French, either as a mother tongue or as a matter of preference, typically did not see themselves as anything other than (Flemish) Belgians. As such, it would be fruitless to look for any kind of “Francophone-of-Flanders” Movement along the lines of the Flemish and Walloon Movements. There were however organizations whose membership was mostly composed of Francophones of Flanders, and which served as de facto social organizations for the Francophone communities in the northern half of Belgium.

Most of these organizations tended to have a rather narrow geographical basis, drawn from the elites of a given locality. This was the case of artistic clubs such as the Cercle royal artistique et littéraire in Ghent and Philotaxe in Antwerp, local chambers of commerce, Masonic lodges, and the like.94 Such groups were not expressly limited to “Francophones of Flanders,” but because they drew their membership from local elites, they tended to be Francophone in makeup. As the members of these organizations did not typically see themselves as a distinct group (at least not a group distinguished by language—socioeconomic status was relevant in these cases), the fact that they tended to be very local reflected the fact that their primary identification was based on where they lived, not as part of a “Francophone community” which extended across the whole of Flanders.

There were, though, some developments which can be seen as helping to foster a greater sense of community among the Francophones of Flanders. There had been Francophone newspapers and magazines in Flanders under the Ancien Régime, and especially since the Revolutionary and Napoleonic occupation. The late 1800s witnessed the founding of several important Francophone newspapers in Flanders. Besides the national French-language dailies published in Brussels, there were papers such as Le Bien public of Ghent (founded 1853) and La Métropole (founded 1894) of Antwerp for Catholics and La Flandre libérale of Ghent (founded 1874) and Le Matin of Antwerp (founded 1894) for the Liberals, alongside smaller weekly or monthly publications in French in Flemish cities of varying sizes. In his now-canonical Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson called the reading of the same newspaper, contemporaneously, by private individuals within certain linguistic and geographical bounds, a “mass ceremony” through which they became members of a nation.95 The existence of a press geared toward the French-speakers of Flanders may have reinforced a nascent awareness, not of belonging to an ethnic group per se, but of having a community of interests with other French-speakers across Flanders. In addition, the overwhelming majority of Flemings who could not read French—many of whom could also not read their own mother tongue—would be excluded from this community, by dint of not participating in the “mass ceremony” of reading one of these papers in the morning. This tentative, common experience could then lay the “groundwork” for a full-fledged ethnic identity to develop among the Francophones of Flanders; this (incomplete) development will be discussed in the following chapters.

As a series of laws established a place for Dutch in Flanders—and thus seemed to present a danger to the primacy of French—several issue-specific pressure groups appeared in Flanders. Along with smaller groups like Ligue pour la liberté des langues, the Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française, and the Union pour la défense de la langue française à l'université de Gand, the most important was the Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française (AFVLF).96 The statutes of the AFVLF specified that one needed to “be Flemish or reside in the Flemish part of Belgium” to be named a full member.97 This stipulation reflected the importance of native Flemings in the promotion of French, and was likely an attempt to preemptively deflect criticism from the Flemish Movement that such an organization was a vehicle for Walloons to exercise dominance over Flanders. The members of the AFVLF, sometimes nicknamed “vulgarisateurs,” were often drawn from the classes I have outlined as constituting “French-speakers of Flanders,” aristocratic and bourgeois figures who typically spoke French at home as well as in public. However, the AFVLF actively sought the participation of native Flemish-speakers, like Edward Anseele, mentioned earlier, the presence of whom would highlight the AFVLF’s argument that French was a useful tool for all Flemings.

The AFVLF was intimately connected to other upper class, Francophone organizations in Flanders. The Administrative Committee of the AFVLF was originally housed in the offices of the Cercle royal artistique et littéraire in Ghent before moving to the building of the Cercle commercial et industriel in the same city.98 The AFVLF carried out activities throughout Flanders designed to promote French. Among these were the organization of French courses for both children and adults, the creation and maintenance of French-language lending libraries, (co-)sponsoring speakers and other cultural functions in French, and the creation of a pocket French-Flemish dictionary, which was to be distributed to the many Flemings who worked as seasonal agricultural workers in Northern France.99 As of 31 December 1911, the AFVLF had 1242 members and organized 37 French courses with 1323 students drawn entirely from the working-class population, “all this in the Flemish city of Ghent” (though whether this qualifier applies to the number of members, of students in French classes, or both is unclear).100

The AFVLF did not limit itself to simple educational activities; it also called for the maintenance of French in the Flemish public sphere. The AFVLF cited the 1883 law on public secondary education, which stipulated that such schooling in Flanders needed to take place at least in part in Flemish, as an impetus for the association’s existence, bemoaning what they portrayed as a decline in both the proportion of Flemish students exposed to French as well as the quality of the French spoken by students graduating from public secondary schools in Flanders; the French classes offered by the AFVLF were intended in part to compensate for the poor knowledge of French among the Flemish populace.101 The AFVLF supported revising the law of 1883 in relation to language use in schooling, and was vehemently opposed to the Flemish Movement’s campaign to extend this linguistic requirement to private schools.102

The AFVLF did not sell its monthly newsletter in stores or offer a subscription separate from membership in the association; this policy led some Flemish newspapers to call the newsletter a “secret” publication, a characterization to which the AFVLF took exception.103 The newsletter contained a mix of original content and republications of articles and speeches, provided either for informational purposes or because the editors of the newsletter agreed with their arguments.

As mentioned earlier, the AFVLF couched many of its arguments in favor of French in Flanders in terms of the economic and social utility of French for the Flemish masses. Nonetheless, in the pages of the AFVLF’s newsletter, we see a preliminary, tentative identity forming among the Francophones of Flanders. There are a few precocious expressions of what I will call “minority rhetoric”—which I define as “asserting that one belongs to a group that is a linguistic, ethnic, or national minority, and using that status as a justification for certain political programs and policies”104 While this minority identity did not gain purchase to the extent that it would in the decade and a half following World War I, a handful of pieces in the Bulletin de l’AFVLF argued for the rights of the French language in Flanders for the sake of “those Flemings whose mother tongue is French,” not just on the grounds of the usefulness of French.

This use of “mother tongue” arguments appears in a petition the AFVLF addressed to both houses of the Belgian legislature, urging legislators not to extend the provisions of the 1883 law on language in secondary education to private schools. While the law of 1883 “tended to give satisfaction to students whose mother tongue is Flemish,” the AFVLF reminded the deputies and senators that “in Flanders, there are thousands of children whose mother tongue… is French.” “These students,” the petition continued, “have a right to the protection of the law just as much as those who have been raised in Flemish.” In fact, the obligatory use of Flemish as the language of instruction threatened to make schooling “sterile” for Francophone children. “The flamingants ask to enjoy liberty,” ended the petition, and “we ask that you respect ours as well, and keep us safe from an intolerable tyranny.”105 “We” and “ours” in this case, refer to the French-speakers of Flanders as a group, reflecting an incipient identity among the authors and signatories of the petition. The language of persecution, represented in the preceding quote in the reference to “intolerable tyranny,” also appears in a speech that AFVLF Secretary-General Georges Van Montagu gave at the General Meeting of 15 December 1907, in which he claimed that “the grievances of which the flamingants previously complained have disappeared, and it must not come to be [il ne faut pas] that the oppressed of yesterday become the oppressors of tomorrow.”106

The AFVLF also briefly published a small newspaper in Flemish, at first called De Taalstrijd (The Language Struggle, 1900) and later De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen (The Language Question in Flanders, 1900–1901). These ephemeral publications demonstrate at least a token willingness to engage with the Flemish masses, whose interests the AFVLF claimed to hold dear.107 In their pages, the AFVLF argued that French was an economic and social necessity for Flanders, and that Flemings’ actions in seeking out French-language education disproved the flamingants’ claims that French-language education engendered backwardness among the Flemish masses. The paper advanced the counterclaim that it was the flamingants who wanted to keep the Flemish population “ignorant” of French in order to keep them more closely under their thumb.108 Other articles imputed only slightly less nefarious motives to the flamingants, for example their supposed desire to create “fat and well-paying little jobs” for petty Flemish intellectuals.109 De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen reproduced a speech by the secretary of the AFVLF—part of which, the paper was quick to point out, was given in Flemish, “proof” that the vulgarisateurs were not hostile to that language—in which he compared the flamingants to the Boxers in China: both groups were marked by a “fear of all change and enmity toward everything that is foreign.”110

De Taalkwestie also used another of the commonplaces of the Francophones of Flanders: a comparison between the “sensible” Dutch and the “fanatical” or “French-hating” flamingants. Though Francophones could vituperate against the Dutch as the historical oppressors of the French-speakers when necessary, they could also evoke them as examples of cool-headed reason. While the Dutch loved their mother tongue, they realized that it was “insufficient” for the task of participating in international scholarship and commerce, and prided themselves on knowing French, German, and English.111

The claim that the inhabitants of the Netherlands were more tolerant of French and more realistic in their appreciation of its value than were the flamingants appears repeatedly in the writings of the AFVLF, and elsewhere in those of the defenders of French in general. If the Flemings’ fellow Dutch-speakers could use French with no compunctions, why could not the Flemings themselves? This question presumed that situations in Flanders and in the Netherlands were equivalent. However, as Laponce argues, “a differentiation should be made between the bilingual who lives in a bicultural context and the bilingual who lives in a unilingual context. English-French bilingualism of an engineer in Paris does not have the same social importance as that of his or her equivalent in Montreal.”112 In the former case—of, say, a university professor or customs officer in Amsterdam—speaking French would simply provide another “tool” for doing one’s job, and perhaps access to a greater variety of literature. In the latter case—let us take the example of a lawyer in Antwerp—speaking French would make it likely that this individual would spend significant amounts of time immersed in French-speaking professional and social environments, and could potentially “assimilate” to the French-speaking milieu. To be sure, many partisans of French in Flanders likely wished for such an outcome. In an era when Flemish identity was becoming more and more pronounced, however, the potential of a “second language [to be a] threat to self-identity” (to borrow Laponce’s phrasing) gave the Flemish Movement pause.113

Last but not least, the Liberal Party, especially in municipal politics, was also strongly associated with the Francophones of Flanders. Indeed, given the ideological bases of the arguments in favor of French in Flanders, one of which was freedom from state constraint, it is unsurprising that many Francophones of Flanders would choose to support the Liberal Party. We may also look for a more economically determinist reason for this adherence, as the Francophones of Flanders often came from the business world, or had important business interests, and the Liberal Party’s program was seen as especially “business-friendly.”

We should not, however, exaggerate the connection between the Liberal Party and the Francophones of Flanders, especially in the period before World War I. Many French-speakers of Flanders from the conservative bourgeoisie and aristocracy supported the Catholic Party. In addition, the higher echelons of the Catholic clergy in Belgium, including Flanders, tended to be in favor of the French language. Conversely, there were important supporters of the Flemish Movement among the ranks of the Liberal Party, such as Karel (Charles) Buls, mayor of Brussels (1881–1889), Jan van Rijswijck, mayor of Antwerp (1892–1906), Louis Franck, an MP from Antwerp who was one of the major proponents of a Flemish-language university in Ghent, and Paul Fredericq, a historian at the University of Ghent, among others.

In addition to the aforementioned “autochthonous” Francophone groups, there were also associations in Flemish cities for the benefit of Walloon residents who had relocated to Flanders, typically in the course of their employment. Emblematic of these associations was the Ligue wallonne d’Anvers, commonly known as the Ruche wallonne (Walloon Hive). These groups often published newsletters that featured Walloon dialect songs and poetry, as well as small news items about goings-on in Wallonia.114 These groups of Walloon “expatriates” were not solely folkloric organizations; they also intervened in political debates: in 1884, for example, the Ruche wallonne agitated for a “Walloon” (French-language) section to be created in the city’s public secondary school. Indeed, Lode Wils has gone so far as to say that these associations of Walloons in places such as Ghent and Antwerp were the original motor of the Walloon Movement, which he compares (with some hyperbole) to the German nationalist associations who wanted to “protect” the “rights” of German civil servants in Prussian Poland.115 Camille Huysmans, a socialist (BWP) MP and one of the three “crowing cockerels” of the Flemish Movement in the early 1900s (along with the Catholic Frans Van Cauwelaert and the Liberal Louis Franck) criticized the support of Walloon socialists for a Walloon Movement that prioritized bourgeois fransquillons to the detriment of the Flemish-speaking working class.116

Early in the Walloon Movement’s existence, a Flemish-minded pamphlet argued that “fransquillons” were a kind of “useful idiot,” providing cover for Walloons who wanted to keep French-language jobs in Flanders. The participants of early Walloon Congresses considered the “fransquillons… their ‘Flemish brothers,’ worthy of sharing with them all the functions, all the jobs, all the advantages!” The author called on “fransquillon Flemings” to see that “in the hands of the Walloneux [sic] you are nothing but the vile instruments that they employ to lower your [own] race,” and to “return” to the Flemings and help them “conquer our rights” in order to create a “strong, prosperous, and happy Belgium.”117 One of the methods by which the Flemish Movement hoped to conquer its rights was through the institution of Dutch-language university education in Flanders.

“A Crime Against Civilization”: The Debate Around the University of Ghent

In his history of the University of Strasbourg as a site of nationalist contention under both German and French administration, John A. Craig argues that “the modern European university” owes much of its existence to “the pervasive influence of nationalism and its associate, the nation state,” as universities were expected “to strengthen the nation state.”118 While this was self-evident in major flagship universities, such a nationalist mission was often strongest in institutions “in the provinces of uncertain allegiance”—using more recently scholarly terminology, one might call these areas suspected of “national indifference” (see Chapter 1)—these universities were “bastions or advance guards of the national culture.” Among these, he lists “the French-language university in Ghent.”119 The Flemish Movement’s push to transform the University of Ghent into a Dutch-language institution, and French-language counter-movements against such a measure, created a major polemic that played a large part in the “language question” in Belgium over the following decades. Not only was the University of Ghent the alma mater for many in the French-speaking class of Flanders—and in part responsible for reproducing such a class—it was seen as a site of national unity, as students from both Wallonia and Flanders studied together in French, as well as an attraction for foreign students, who would be far less likely to attend a Dutch-medium than a French-medium institution.

One of the most important demands of the Flemish Movement, which went unfulfilled until after World War I, was the creation of a Flemish—(Dutch-)language university. Flemish leaders such as the economist Lodewijk de Raet portrayed the lack of university education in the Flemings’ native language as one reason for Flanders’s relative backwardness compared to Wallonia.120 Because Flemish students who wished to attend university in Belgium had to do so in French, they often had to “catch up” to students who had taken some or all of their pre-university schooling in French. Then, at the end of their university training, they were prepared for a career in a liberal profession, but—in the eyes of de Raet and other proponents of Flemish university education—they were bereft of a proper Dutch vocabulary on, say, legal or medical matters. As such, they were less able to communicate in a professional capacity with the average, monolingual Flemings who ought to form the majority of their clientele.

Proponents of a Flemish university set their sights on transforming the University of Ghent—which, while located in Flanders, taught in French—into a Dutch-language university. For Flemish leaders, Ghent was a logical choice because it already had the existing infrastructure to support a full range of university activities, and being a state university, its operation was subject to the Belgian legislature. Thus, concerted political action could conceivably change the language of instruction at Ghent, which would be much less likely at the private Catholic University in Leuven. Historian Harry Van Velthoven has argued that “the Dutchification of the University of Ghent meant the beginning of the end for fransquillonisme in Flanders… and that was well-understood in those [‘fransquillon’] circles.”121

The campaign for a Dutch-language university in Ghent mirrored the movement of the Czechs for a Czech-language university in Prague, which succeeded in splitting the Charles University into German- and Czech-speaking sections in 1882.122 Many proponents of transformation of the University of Ghent pointed to the example of Prague and of other universities which taught in “smaller” European languages. One common, though dubious, argument claimed that the Flemish were one of only three peoples in Europe who did not have a university in their own language, alongside the Romanians in Hungary and Poles in Russia.123

Defenders of the French-language institution in Ghent also drew parallels to the Czech case, typically arguing that if a Flemish-language university were to be created in Belgium, the French-language university of Ghent should not be transformed or even paired with its Flemish equivalent in the same city. Had not Prague experienced waves of violence between the students attending the German and Czech universities?124 J. Lhoneux, a Walloon teaching at a Ghent secondary school, denied the parallels between the cases of Ghent and Prague:

One objects in vain [by referring to] Bohemia and Croatia. There, it is an entire people that wants to be taught in its own language, and that is its right. Here, an enlightened, numerous, and capable bourgeoisie raises its children in French. It has changed its language [over the course of centuries], under the influence of forces which are numerous and probably irresistible.125

Why should Ghent tempt fate by setting up the conditions for “national” quarrels between linguistic groups as happened in Prague? It would be better for the University of Ghent to remain wholly francophone, thereby avoiding an introduction of ethnic conflict into the city as well as supposedly safeguarding the economic livelihood of those who depended on the student population, which French-speakers predicted would decrease dramatically if the university were to be made “Flemish.” After all, were not a large proportion of the students in Ghent Walloons or international students, who would not be as interested in, or even capable of, studying in Flemish instead of in an international medium of scholarship such as French?

The French-speakers of Flanders vigorously opposed any transformation of the University of Ghent. They took heart in the instructions of Cardinal Mercier, the Catholic primate of Belgium, to the Belgian bishops of 1906. Mercier chastised those who sought to change the Catholic University of Leuven into a partly or fully Dutch-language institution, claiming that they “had not reflected enough on the role of a university,” especially as regards its international calling and its need for an international language of instruction. The Francophones of Flanders made these words their own, applying them to the University of Ghent.126 The role of French as an international language formed an integral part of the Francophones’ defense of the status quo at the University of Ghent, and indeed, in the role of French in Flanders as a whole.

French in Flanders as an International Affair

In an oft-cited phrase from an essay of 1900, the Flemish writer and critic August Vermeylen argued that “to be something, we must be Flemings. — We want to be Flemings in order to become Europeans.”127 Vermeylen, a socialist with internationalist leanings, saw the flamandisation of Flanders—without, however, excluding French from every educated Fleming’s upbringing—as necessary for Flemings’ intellectual development and ability to participate in a wider, European culture. As such, he was an ardent proponent of the transformation of the University of Ghent into a fully Flemish institution; when this finally came to pass in 1930, he became its first rector.128

Much of the French-speaking class in Flanders, and in Belgium as whole, did not share Vermeylen’s ideal. For them, the Flemings’ best chance to “become Europeans” was to increase the role of French in Flanders. In this optic, French was the international language of culture and diplomacy, and to a lesser extent world trade, and Flemings had a precious opportunity to learn French like a second native language, situated as they were in the “historically bilingual” Flanders. The confluence of the French language’s dominance in Flanders and its role as a world language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allows us to place the story of French in Flanders into the global history of the French language.

Many studies of “Francophonie” and French linguistic identity outside of France concentrate on the period after World War II, and focus on (former) French colonies.129 However, before World War I, France deliberately projected its power abroad through the promotion of French culture and language.130 Other peoples used French as an international language in an attempt to avoid using another international language, such some Czechs did to avoid using German, the elite language of the Habsburg lands.131

Though not to the extent that we will see after World War II, some French commentators feared a decline of the relative share of French-speakers internationally in the face of both national vernaculars and English; this concern motivated their advocacy for French abroad.132 One such author, linking the “decline” of French in Belgium and around the world, claimed in 1907 that “if, during the majority of the nineteenth century, the French language gained ground outside of France, in recent years it is in decline [régression] in most of the countries where it is spoken.”133

The Belgian Fernand-A. Van Aalst rejected theories of the decline of French worldwide and at the same time defended Belgium as an essentially “French” country. Belgium was “intellectually and morally” closer to France than even French Canada or Alsace-Lorraine. Belgians enjoyed the same literature and theater as the French, and even Maurice Maeterlinck was unknown to the Belgian “masses” as he was too Germanic. In the Flemish strongholds of Antwerp and Ghent, “the entire official world… practices French, Dutch does not predominate anywhere.” Van Aalst goes through a brief tour of the world and claims that there are people who can speak or who want to speak French across the entire globe. And to do so, they come in great numbers “to Paris, to Lyon, to Brussels, to Ghent (to the French University of Ghent).”134 In evoking the “French University of Ghent”—emphasis on “French”—as an institution which attracts students from China, Turkey, and Persia, Van Aalst ties together the question of the University, a matter of domestic politics, with the relative power of French civilization on the international stage.

The Walloon literary historian Maurice Wilmotte took a leading role in the movement to connect the domestic and international aspects of the language question, as president of the Association internationale pour la culture et l’extension de la langue française. Before World War I, this Association held three conferences in Belgium; the first stemmed from its founding at the Universal Exposition in Liège (in Wallonia) in 1905. The two following Congresses were held in locations chosen precisely because they represented zones where French was perceived to be in conflict with another language. In 1908, the Congress of the Association was held in Arlon, the capital of the Belgian province of Luxembourg, where parts of the local population spoke dialects of German. In 1913, the Congress was held in Ghent, an even more symbolic choice: as seen earlier, for the past several years the state-run university in the city had been the object of calls to be transformed into a Flemish-medium institution. As one study of the association claimed, the Association and its congresses had the goal of “guaranteeing to the French language a status that [would] permit it to persist or develop in the face of competing international languages (German, English, artificial languages) but also, more particularly in multilingual states, like Belgium, in the face of a local dialect [parler], like Flemish.”135

Likewise, Anne Rasmussen has argued that such conferences represented an attempt to tie the language question in multilingual societies where French was one language among several, such as Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, to the question of an international scholarly language, which should, obviously, be French, not German or English.136 Many Belgian nationalists, among whom were naturally the Francophones of Flanders, evoked the very internationalism of Belgium as a “meeting place” of cultures as support for the unique vocation of the Belgian nation.137 The proponents of French in Flanders did not let the popularity of Belgium (and Switzerland) as sites for international conferences of all kinds go unnoticed. The monthly newsletter of the AFVLF reproduced a speech of Hermann De Baets, a prominent Ghent attorney, on the importance of French culture to the Flemish. Belgium, De Baets pointed out, was at the “crossroads of intellectual circulation, [the circulation of] ideas.” One of the reasons why Belgium was popular for academic and diplomatic meetings was that “by tacit accord of scholars, as well as by the traditions of diplomacy, the reports and discussions in these meetings take place in French.” How then, De Baets asked, could Flemings deprive themselves of the immense benefits of knowing French, especially when they had the sheer luck to live in a country blessed to host so many intellectual luminaries?138

The interest of French intellectuals and politicians and of other French-speakers in the status of French in Flanders stemmed not only from a general concern for the spread of French influence and civilization, but also reflected Belgium’s position as a land that was both geographically and culturally located between France and her rival, Germany.139 In this optic, the “defeats” of French vis-à-vis Flemish were perceived as victories of a conquering pan-Germanism which was using—or according to some Francophones, had created—the Flemish Movement as a counterweight to the influence of France in Belgium. However, it is interesting to note that among the substantial German immigrant population in the port city of Antwerp, one of the hotbeds of the Flemish Movement, class considerations usually prevailed over ideas of ethnic brotherhood. The Germans in Antwerp formed a commercial elite, and for the most part learned French to fit in to high society, perhaps learning Dutch as an afterthought.140

Ghent hosted a World’s Fair in 1913, providing another opportunity for both proponents and opponents of French in Flanders to popularize their messages. The Vlaamsche Hoogeschool Commissie (Flemish University Commission), a pressure group which supported the transformation of the University of Ghent into a fully Dutch-language school, organized a demonstration for 10 August 1913. A pamphlet for the demonstration argued that the “franskiljons” were conspiring with French diplomatic staff in an “anti-national” manner, painting the question of the University of Ghent as a matter of international, especially French, concern. The pamphlet went on to speculate that if these machinations continued, “we will eventually be considered a sphere of French influence, just like Morocco.”141

We should be careful not to overestimate the influence of France among the French-speakers of Flanders, however. The AFVLF repeatedly stressed that it had turned down offers of financial support from the Alliance Française, despite approving of the latter organization’s goals, in order to keep the AFVLF a “Flemish” organization and not a proxy of the French government.142

In the period before World War I, Belgium acceded to the circle of colonial powers at first indirectly, as the major European powers recognized the Congo as King Leopold II’s personal possession in the 1880s, and later directly, with the Belgian state’s annexation of the Congo in 1908. Belgium’s acquisition of its own “civilizing mission” added an imperial element to the discourse about the use of French in Flanders. Partisans of French in Flanders used colonial symbolism as part of their rhetorical repertoire. A joke which appeared in a 1914 issue of Pourquoi Pas? (an irreverent Brussels weekly sympathetic to the Francophones of Flanders), imagined a scenario in which a Walloon and a Fleming were both sent to the Congo. Neither spoke the other’s language, and so they conversed in a local tongue. When a native Congolese asked the Walloon why he and the Fleming spoke “negro [nègre]” to one another, none of the Walloon’s answers seemed to satisfy him. Finally, the Congolese replied to the Walloon: “You’re not telling the truth. You speak negro with him because he’s the savage of Europe!”143 The implication about the Flemish language is obvious.

Adherents of the Flemish Movement could also muster colonial comparisons in service of their arguments. Alfons Sevens mocked the claim that the Flemish Movement’s legislative goals were extreme by pointing out that before 1890, judges in Flanders were not legally required to know Dutch. Sevens noted a Belgian magistrate who went to work as a judge in Egypt took three years beforehand to learn Arabic, and claimed that judges serving in the Congo needed to know the “language of the negroes.”144 A Francophone of Flanders who was sympathetic to the Flemish Movement wrote in 1913 that

It is not just free peoples who have the right to be judged and administered in their mother tongue, but also the people of the colonies themselves, and it would be something else [il ferait beau de] to tell the oldest and best colonizers of the world, the English and the Dutch, that it is unjust that the knowledge of Hindi, Sinhala, or of Javanese be imposed on those who want to embrace a judicial or administrative career in India, Ceylon, or Java!145

French in Flanders at the End of the “Long Nineteenth Century:” Challenged but Still Dominant

In the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, the French language in Flanders, while having lost its monopoly on public life, still played an important role in business, culture, administration, and education. French was still overwhelmingly the language of higher education, except for a few scattered courses in Dutch at Ghent, Leuven, and Brussels meant to acquaint those in the liberal professions with the necessary terminology to deal with the overwhelmingly Dutch-speaking public. It was still possible for French-speakers in the large cities of Flanders, as well as foreign visitors, to consider Flemish a “patois” or a regional language along the lines of Breton and Occitan in France or Welsh in the United Kingdom. Indeed, many French-speakers thought of the various laws in favor of language rights for Flemish-speakers in Belgium as “concessions” to a backward population which needed to be “raised up” to the level where it could use French, the “real” language of the country. Many flamingants, needless to say, did not agree with this interpretation, instead seeing the language laws as defenses of the inherent rights of Flemings which had been wrested from an unwilling Francophone political class.

However, there were signs that the Flemish Movement was making progress in critical areas. The communal councils of hundreds of Flemish towns, as well as the provincial councils of Antwerp, Limburg, and West Flanders, had all passed motions calling for the flamandisation of the University of Ghent. In March 1914, the Chamber of Representatives passed a preliminary version of the bill on the flamandisation of the university; the government gave hints that it would push for a fully bilingual institution, and not the replacement of French by Dutch.146 On 19 May of that same year, Belgium became one of the last states in Western Europe to make some level of schooling mandatory for all children. This would have the effect of spreading the knowledge of standard Dutch among the Flemish population. The question of French-speaking primary and secondary schools in Flanders remained open and would indeed continue to be a source of friction in Belgian politics in the decades to come.

However, there was little time to see how these developments would affect the linguistic situation in Flanders. Before the bill on the flamandisation of the University of Ghent could be taken up in the Senate, and before the beginning of the new academic year in Fall 1914, fate would brutally intervene. Belgium, so often defined itself by its position between France and Germany, would suffer for this very “in-betweenness.” In August 1914, on its way to attack France, Germany invaded Belgium, inaugurating four years of war and occupation that would irrevocably change the nature of the language debate.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 225.

  2. 2.

    “Awarded to Maeterlinck: This Year’s Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Belgian Author,” New York Times, 10 November 1911, 7. See also Josepha Laroche, “Le Nobel comme enjeu symbolique dans les relations internationales,” Revue française de science politique 44, no. 4 (1994): 599–628.

  3. 3.

    Paul Gorceix, “L’image de la germanité chez un belge, flamand de langue française: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949),” Revue de littérature comparée no. 299 (2003): 397–409.

  4. 4.

    Raphael Ingelbien, “Symbolism at the Periphery: Yeats, Maeterlinck, and Cultural Nationalism,” Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 3 (2005): 189.

  5. 5.

    Speech of Charles C. M. A. Wauters, 10 December 1911, translated and reproduced in Lynn R. Wilkinson and Leon Sachs, “Maurice Maeterlinck,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit et al.: Thomson-Gale, 2007), 331: 107–8.

  6. 6.

    Christophe Verbruggen, Schrijverschap in de Belgische Belle Époque: Een Sociaal-Culturele Geschiedenis (Ghent: Academia Press, 2009), 226–27.

  7. 7.

    Ch[arles] van Beneden, “Réponse à M. Frans Deckers,” La Jeune Wallonie 5, no. 5 (December 1910): 36–37.

  8. 8.

    See the discussion of Pirenne in Chapters 1, 3, and 4, as well as Jo Tollebeek, “At the Crossroads of Nationalism: Huizinga, Pirenne and the Low Countries in Europe,” European Review of History 17, no. 2 (2010): 187–215; Jo Tollebeek, “The Hyphen of National Culture: The Paradox of National Distinctiveness in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1860–1918,” European Review 18, no. 2 (2010): 207–25.

  9. 9.

    Sarah Keymeulen, “Introduction: Pirenne, Belgium and the First World War,” in Belgium and the First World War, by Henri Pirenne (Wesley Chapel, FL: The Brabant Press, 2014), xv–xvi.

  10. 10.

    Walter Prevenier, “‘Ceci n’est Pas un historien’: Construction and Deconstruction of Henri Pirenne,” Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine 41, nos. 3–4 (2011): 555.

  11. 11.

    “Negen Belgen kregen al Nobelprijs,” De Standaard, 16 October 1986. Clipped in Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse cultuurleven, Antwerp (hereafter AMVC), Nobelprijs collection.

  12. 12.

    This term was also used by outsiders to describe the French-speaking population of Flanders. See Henri Charriaut, La Belgique moderne, une terre d’expériences (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1910), 35.

  13. 13.

    W[illem] De Vreese, “De woorden ‘flamingant’ en ‘franskiljon’,” Tijdschrift voor nederlandsche taal- en letterkunde 51 (1932): 65–90.

  14. 14.

    Maeterlinck to Buysse, 28 November 1899, reproduced in A. Van Elslander, Maurice Maeterlinck et la littérature flamande (Ghent: Seminarie voor Nederlandse Literatuurstudie, 1963), 40–41.

  15. 15.

    Maurice Maeterlinck, “Commémoration inutile,” Le Figaro, 5 July 1902, reproduced in Van Elslander, 23.

  16. 16.

    Maurice Maeterlinck, “Un anniversaire inutile,” Le Figaro, 14 July 1902, reproduced in Van Elslander, 31.

  17. 17.

    Leonard Buyst, “Aan een stamverrader: Maurice Maeterlinck,” Germania, July 1902, 636.

  18. 18.

    Bruno De Corte, “Het tijdschrift Germania (1898–1905) in het kader van de Vlaams-Duitse betrekkingen” (Licentiate thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1982); Bruno Yammine, “De ‘Flamenpolitik’, breuk of continuïteit in de Duitse politiek? Nieuw licht op het tijdschrift ‘Germania’,” Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen 68, no. 3 (2009): 214–63.

  19. 19.

    Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 83–84.

  20. 20.

    Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, 2nd ed. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 205.

  21. 21.

    Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886), 416–17.

  22. 22.

    Lode Wils, Histoire des nations belges: Belgique, Wallonie, Flandre: Quinze siècles de passé commun, trans. Chantal Kesteloot, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 2005), 176–80. See also Éliane Gubin, Bruxelles au XIXe siècle: Berceau d’un flamingantisme démocratique, 1840–1873 (Brussels: Crédit communal de Belgique, 1979).

  23. 23.

    Lode Wils, Waarom Vlaanderen Nederlands spreekt (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2001).

  24. 24.

    Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23, 107–16. For a further application of Hroch to the Flemish Movement, see Bruno De Wever, Frans-Jos Verdoodt, and Antoon Vrints, Flemish Patriots and the Construction of the Nation: How the Flemish Nation Ceased to Be “Small” (Antwerp: Peristyle, 2019).

  25. 25.

    The classic study of the connection between economic development and the creation of “national” identities is Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

  26. 26.

    Luc Boeva, “Pour les flamands la même chose”: Hoe de taalgrens ook een sociale grens was (Ghent: Provinciebestuur Oost-Vlaanderen, 1994).

  27. 27.

    Alfons Sevens, Fransch, de voertaal? NEEN! Fransch, een vreemde taal? de eerste vreemde taal? JA! (Ostend: Dhont, [n.d.]), 11–13. Held in Centre for Historical Documentation and Research on War and Contemporary Society, Brussels (hereafter CEGESOMA).

  28. 28.

    Harry Post, Pillarization: An Analysis of Dutch and Belgian Society (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989).

  29. 29.

    Carl Strikwerda, A House Divided: Catholics, Socialists, and Flemish Nationalists in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (Lanham, MD et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 27–33.

  30. 30.

    Lode Wils, “Het beroep op ‘de oude Belgische vrijheden’ in het midden van de 19de eeuw,” Standen en Landen 32 (1964): 115–22. See also Janet Polasky, “Liberal Nationalism and Modern Regional Identity: Revolutionary Belgium, 1786–1830,” in Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires, ed. Iván Zoltán Dénes (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 75–88.

  31. 31.

    Marinette Bruwier et al., eds., 1886: La Wallonie née de la grève? (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1990).

  32. 32.

    Jo Deferme, Uit de ketens van de vrijheid: Het debat over de sociale politiek in België, 1886–1914 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2007).

  33. 33.

    Frans-Jos Verdoodt, “Daensistische beweging,” in Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging, CD-ROM (Tielt: Lannoo, 1998) (hereafter NEVB).

  34. 34.

    In Wallonia, there were a substantial number of Flemish migrants who came to work in the coal and steel industry and who also formed a linguistically distinct subclass. As we shall see, fear of this minority “implanting” itself in Wallonia came to convince some Walloons to abandon the fight for the French linguistic minority in Flanders to seek reciprocity from the Flemish Movement.

  35. 35.

    Vernon Mallinson, Power and Politics in Belgian Education, 1815 to 1961 (London: Heinemann, 1963), 85–98; Els Witte, Jan Craeybeckx, and Alain Meynen, Political History of Belgium: From 1830 Onwards, 3rd ed. (Brussels: Academic & Scientific Publishers, 2009), 89–92.

  36. 36.

    Interview with Lode Wils, Leuven, 27 June 2011.

  37. 37.

    Borginon in the Chamber of Representatives, 21 January 1914, cited in Harry Van Velthoven, De Vlaamse kwestie 1830–1914: Macht en onmacht van de vlaamsgezindheden (Kortrijk-Heule: UGA, 1982), 329.

  38. 38.

    Maurits de Vroede, The Flemish Movement in Belgium, trans. W. Sanders (Antwerp: Kultuurraad voor Vlaanderen, 1975), 32.

  39. 39.

    J. A. Laponce, Languages and Their Territories, trans. Anthony Martin-Sperry (Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 41.

  40. 40.

    Maarten Van Ginderachter, The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 10.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 26–30, quote at 27.

  42. 42.

    François Perin, La Belgique au défi: Flamands et Wallons à la recherche d’un état (Huy: Presses de l’Imprimerie coopérative, 1963), 89.

  43. 43.

    Els Witte and Harry Van Velthoven, Languages in Contact and in Conflict: The Belgian Case (Kapellen: Uitgeverij Pelckmans, 2011), 73–78.

  44. 44.

    Herman Van Goethem, Belgium and the Monarchy: From National Independence to National Disintegration, trans. Ian Connerty (Brussels: Academic and Scientific Publishers for University Press Antwerp, 2010), 15–16.

  45. 45.

    “Appétits flamingants,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 28 (March 1903): 52; “S. N.,” “À propos des nouvelles exigences du flamingantisme,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 37 (February 1904): 33; Maurice de Smet de Naeyer, speech at General Assembly of AFVLF of 11 December 1904, reproduced in Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 45 (December 1904): 240. See also “Régime flamand,” L’Antiflamingant: Organe de la Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française, 15 April 1911, 7; Curtio (pseud.), “Le Flamingant,” L’Antiflamingant, 15 April 1911, 8–9.

  46. 46.

    Adéla Hall, Deutsch und Tschechisch im sprachenpolitischen Konflikt: Eine vergleichende diskursanalytische Untersuchung zu den Spachenverordnungen Badenis von 1897 (Frankfurt-am-Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Tim Mathias Schmidt, “Sprachnationale Konflikte, Staatsreformdiskurs und Sozialdemokratie: Ein Vergleich zwischen den böhmischen Ländern und Belgien 1894–1938” (PhD dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2014), 143–46.

  47. 47.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 56.

  48. 48.

    John Breuilly, “Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: A Symposium,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 4 (2016): 644, 647.

  49. 49.

    Translation from John Martin Vincent and Ada S. Vincent, “Constitution of the Kingdom of Belgium,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 7, supplement no. 11 (1896): 19. In 1994, a revision of the Constitution changed the numbering of this article from 23 to 30; it is still in force today.

  50. 50.

    Dirk Vander Peypen, “Een Franstalige staat met faciliteiten voor Vlamingen,” Apache, 10 November 2010, https://www.apache.be/2010/11/10/een-franstalige-staat-met-faciliteiten-voor-vlamingen.

  51. 51.

    See for example Nicolas Bonbled and Sophie Weerts, “La liberté linguistique,” in Les droits constitutionnels en Belgique: Les enseignements jurisprudentiels de la Cour constitutionnelle, du Conseil d’État et de la Cour de cassation (Brussels: Bruylant, 2011), 1097–147.

  52. 52.

    Jan Clement, Taalvrijheid, bestuurstaal en minderheidsrechten: Het Belgisch model: Een constitutionele zoektocht naar de oorsprong van het territorialiteitsbeginsel en de minderheidsrechten in de bestuurstaalwetgeving (Antwerp et al.: Intersentia, 2003), 171–72.

  53. 53.

    Gaston Durnez, “Coucke, Jan en Goethals, Pieter,” NEVB; Lieselot Van Herreweghe, “Coucke en Goethals: Ware martelaars van de Vlaamse zaak?” (Master’s thesis, Universiteit Gent, 2010).

  54. 54.

    Rik Van Cauwelaert, “Ils nous ont pris la Flandre”: Waals socialisme en Belgische illusies. Van Jules Destrée tot Elio Di Rupo. (Kapellen: Uitgeverij Pelckmans, 2012), 39–40.

  55. 55.

    Pierre Maroy, “L’évolution de la législation linguistique belge,” Revue de droit public et de la science politique en France et à l’étranger 82, no. 3 (1966): 457.

  56. 56.

    Bara in the Chamber of Representatives, 12 July 1873, cited in Clement, Taalvrijheid, bestuurstaal en minderheidsrechten, 167–68.

  57. 57.

    Maroy, “L’évolution de la législation linguistique belge,” 457–58.

  58. 58.

    Alexis Schwarzenbach, Portraits of the Nation: Stamps, Coins and Banknotes in Belgium and Switzerland 1880–1945 (Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 1999), 73–74. Emphasis added.

  59. 59.

    Maurice Wilmotte, La culture française en Belgique (Paris: H. Champion, 1912), 105.

  60. 60.

    J[ules] Verest, Vers la suppression de la liberté d’enseignement (Brussels: Albert Dewit, 1907).

  61. 61.

    Jozef Jageneau and Marie Gevers, “Verest, Jules,” NEVB.

  62. 62.

    Wilmotte, La culture française en Belgique, 105.

  63. 63.

    Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres posthumes, 4th ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908), 271. Emphases in original.

  64. 64.

    Suzanne Lilar, Une enfance gantoise (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1998 [1976]), 39, 41, 44.

  65. 65.

    Charles d’Ydewalle, Confession d’un Flamand (Brussels: Pierre de Méyère, 1967), 39.

  66. 66.

    Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 244.

  67. 67.

    Ibid.

  68. 68.

    I discuss the AFVLF in greater detail below. See also Elizabeth Durnez, “L’Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française: Een verzetsbeweging tegen de vernederlandsing van de Rijksuniversiteit te Gent” (Licentiate thesis, Universiteit Gent, 1974).

  69. 69.

    “Une nouvelle classe dirigeante,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 57 (February 1906): 41–42.

  70. 70.

    Julius MacLeod, “Language and Knowledge” (1895), translated by Tanis Guest in Hermans, Vos, and Wils, eds., The Flemish Movement, 172–77.

  71. 71.

    Lodewijk De Raet, “The Flemish University and Flemish Life” (1907), translated by Jane Fenoulhet in Hermans, Vos, and Wils, eds., The Flemish Movement, 193–201. Emphases added.

  72. 72.

    Petition of the Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française signed by Fernand Pavard and Simon Sasseratt [sic, Sasserath], reproduced as “Un Manifeste,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 117 (February 1912): 42. Emphasis added.

  73. 73.

    Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Making of Flemings and Walloons: Belgium, 1830–1914,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 2 (1974): 192–93.

  74. 74.

    Maurice Ansiaux, La suprématie de la langue française en Belgique (Brussels: Librairie française et internationale, 1912), 9–11.

  75. 75.

    Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959): 325–40.

  76. 76.

    Émile Buisset, “Le français, langue officielle de la Belgique,” Revue de Belgique 45 (1913): 939–54.

  77. 77.

    Arthur Edward Curtis, “New Perspectives on the History of the Language Problem in Belgium” (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 1971), 243–44.

  78. 78.

    Maarten Van Ginderachter, Le chant du coq: Nation et nationalisme en Wallonie depuis 1880 (Ghent: Academia Press, 2005), 44–51.

  79. 79.

    Jean-Pierre Delhaye and Paul Delforge, Franz Foulon: La tentation inopportune ([Charleroi]: Institut Jules Destrée, 2008), 7.

  80. 80.

    Franz Foulon, La Question des langues en Belgique (Brussels: Imprimerie Victor Feron, 1914), 5–16.

  81. 81.

    Mass-mailing of Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française, “Guide horaire des chemins de fer belges (Édition française),” [1910]. Documentation collection “Ligue nationale pour la défense de la langue française,” AMVC.

  82. 82.

    Jules Destrée, “Lettre au Roi sur la séparation de la Wallonie et de la Flandre,” Revue de Belgique, August 1912, 740.

  83. 83.

    Destrée, “Lettre au Roi sur la séparation de la Wallonie et de la Flandre,” 746–55.

  84. 84.

    Philippe Destatte, “La Lettre au Roi de Jules Destrée: Pourquoi et comment?” in Jules Destrée, La Lettre au roi, et au-delà 1912–2012: Actes du colloque des 24 et 25 avril 2012, ed. Philippe Destatte, Catherine Lanneau, and Fabrice Meurant-Pailhe (Liège and Namur: Musée de la vie wallonne and Institut Destrée, 2013), 68.

  85. 85.

    Destrée, “Lettre au Roi sur la séparation de la Wallonie et de la Flandre,” 746–47.

  86. 86.

    Paul Delforge, Un siècle de projets fédéralistes Pour La Wallonie: 1905–2005 (Charleroi: Institut Jules Destrée, 2005).

  87. 87.

    Nicholas Aldorde, “German-Czech Conflict in Cisleithania: The Question of the Ethnographic Partition of Bohemia, 1848–1919” (MA thesis, Portland State University, 1987); Schmidt, “Sprachnationale Konflikte, Staatsreformdiskurs und Sozialdemokratie,” 7.

  88. 88.

    Alexander B. Murphy, The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium: A Study in Cultural-Political Geography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 101; J. Vandeplas, “De Vlaamse pers (1912–1914) en het federalisme,” Wetenschappelijke tijdingen 25, no. 5 (1966): 329–44.

  89. 89.

    F. Pavard, “La Séparation administrative et la défense de la langue française,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 111 (June 1911): 153–56. This piece was originally published in the subtly titled periodical L’Anti-flamingant.

  90. 90.

    Paul Delforge, “Fédéralisme et Mouvement Wallon,” in Encyclopédie du Mouvement Wallon, CD-ROM (Charleroi: Institut Jules Destrée, 2003).

  91. 91.

    Corinne Godefroid, “Un premier ‘exécutif’ du Mouvement wallon: Le Comité permanent des Congrès wallons (1890–1893),” in Studium et museum: Mélanges Édouard Remouchamps (Liège: Éditions du Musée de la Vie Wallonne, 1996), 2: 696, 699, 706.

  92. 92.

    Pamphlet, “Statuts de la Ligue pour la vulgarisation de la langue flamande en Wallonie” [postmarked 20–21 November 1910], Documentation collection “Bond tot Verspreiding van de Vlaamsche Tael [sic] in Waalsch België,” AMVC. I have not been able to find any other mention of this organization, which was likely connected to Flemish migrant groups in Mons.

  93. 93.

    Boeva, “Pour les Flamands la même chose,” 94–95.

  94. 94.

    For more on Masonic lodges and their participation in linguistic politics, see Anaïs Maes, Flamands? Wallons? Belges et Francs-Maçons! La franc-maçonnerie et la construction d’identités nationales au long XIXe siècle (Brussels: Academic & Scientific Publishers, 2015); Jeffrey Tyssens and René Vermeir, Sous le signe du progrès: La loge maçonnique gantoise La Liberté (1866–1966) (Brussels: Academic & Scientific Publishers, 2016), especially Chapter 7.

  95. 95.

    Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–46, “mass ceremony” at 35.

  96. 96.

    Durnez, “L’Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française.”

  97. 97.

    Brochure [1899?], 2. Documentation collection “Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française,” AMVC.

  98. 98.

    “Assemblée générale extraordinaire du 14 Mai 1899,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 2 (June 1899): [2].

  99. 99.

    L’Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française (Ghent: Van Doosselaere, 1913), 26.

  100. 100.

    P. Vermeersch, “L’Amendement Delbeke,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 137 (February 1914): 20.

  101. 101.

    L’Association flamande pour la vulgarisation de la langue française, passim.

  102. 102.

    Ibid.

  103. 103.

    “Bétisier flamingant,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 69 (April 1907): 123–24.

  104. 104.

    David J. Hensley, “An Unlikely Minority? The Development and Use of ‘Minority Rhetoric’ Among the Francophones of Flanders, 1918–1932,” Journal of Belgian History 43, no. 4 (2013): 81. My understanding of the use of the term “minority” as a political maneuver is informed by Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  105. 105.

    Reproduced in Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 75 (30 December 1907): 325–30. Emphasis in original.

  106. 106.

    “La Réunion générale du 15 décembre 1907,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 75 (30 December 1907): 313.

  107. 107.

    Producing Dutch-language material in defense of French may seem paradoxical, but it echoes the experience of many linguistically mixed areas. In the run-up to the plebiscite to determine the fate of Upper Silesia after World War I, for example, there was an explosion of German-language propaganda arguing for the region to join Poland, and Polish-language propaganda in favor of voting for Germany. See James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), Chapter 5.

  108. 108.

    “Het werkvolk en de flaminganten in den provincieraad,” De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen, 13 November 1900, 2.

  109. 109.

    “De Vlaamsche Akademie,” De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen, 13 November 1990, 2.

  110. 110.

    “Bij de vulgarisateurs,” De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen, January–February 1901, 2–3.

  111. 111.

    “Vlamingen en Hollanders tegenover de vreemde talen,” De Taalkwestie in Vlaanderen¸13 November 1900, 2.

  112. 112.

    Laponce, Languages and Their Territories, 44.

  113. 113.

    Ibid., 49–52.

  114. 114.

    Steve Heylen and Bart D’Hondt, “Emile Meunier (1866-),” ODIS—Online Database of Intermediary Structures, http://www.odis.be/lnk/PS_452.

  115. 115.

    Wils, Histoire des nations belges, 206–7.

  116. 116.

    Vincent Scheltiens, Met dank aan de overkant: Een politieke geschiedenis van België (Kalmthout: Uitgeverij Polis, 2017), 88.

  117. 117.

    D. Crauwers, Le Mouvement Wallon en Belgique: Simples annotations sur le «Compte-rendu analytique des débats des Congrès Wallons: 2e Session: Namur, 25–26 Décembre 1891, 3e session: Liège, 20 Novembre 1892, 4e session: Mons, 1 Novembre 1893» (Leuven: Typ. Alphone Meulemans-De Preter, 1895), 4, 24. Documentation collection “Waalse Beweging,” AMVC.

  118. 118.

    John E. Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1.

  119. 119.

    Ibid., 1–2.

  120. 120.

    Lodewijk de Raet, De Vervlaamsching der Hoogeschool van Gent (Brussels: De Vlaamsche Boekhandel, 1906).

  121. 121.

    Van Velthoven, De Vlaamse kwestie 1830–1914, 241–42.

  122. 122.

    For example, Georges Margot, Le flamand à l’université: Étude sociale sur le Mouvement flamand (Leuven: Peeters, 1910), 50–58; La question de l’Université flamande à l’Association Catholique de Bruxelles (Brussels: F. Van Gompel, 1911), 7–8. Brochures “Gand français,” FHMW.

  123. 123.

    Verslag van de Commissie verlast met het onderzoeken van de wenschelijkheid van het inrichten eener Nederlandsche Hoogeschool in Vlaamsch-België (XXIIIe Nederlandsch Taal- en Letterkundig Congres) (Ghent: I. Vanderpoorten, [1896]), 4.

  124. 124.

    For example Ansiaux, La suprématie de la langue française en Belgique, 17.

  125. 125.

    “Enquête de ‘Wallonia’ sur la néerlandisation de l’Université de Gand et sur le mouvement flamingant,” response of J. Lhoneux, Wallonia 19, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1911): 94–96.

  126. 126.

    Robrecht Boudens, Kardinaal Mercier en de Vlaamse beweging (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1975), 50ff.

  127. 127.

    August Vermeylen, “Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging (1900),” in Eerste bundel van Aug. Vermeylen’s verzamelde opstellen (Bussum: C. A. J. van Dishoeck, 1904), 213.

  128. 128.

    Raymond Vervliet, “Vermeylen, August,” NEVB.

  129. 129.

    David C. Gordon, The French Language and National Identity (1930–1975) (The Hague: Mouton, 1978).

  130. 130.

    Mathew Burrows, “‘Mission civilisatrice’: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860–1914,” Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986): 109–35; J. P. Daughton, “When Argentina Was ‘French’: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 831–64.

  131. 131.

    Stéphane Reznikow, Francophilie et identité tchèque, 1848–1914 (Paris: Champion, 2002).

  132. 132.

    Jean-Claude Lescure, “L’universalisme de la langue française en Europe à la fin du XIXe siècle,” in Gallomanie et gallophobie: Le mythe français en Europe au XIXe siècle, ed. Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro and Tanja-Isabel Habicht (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 271–88.

  133. 133.

    J. Dewachter, “Recul du français en Belgique à notre époque,” in Société Dunkerquoise pour l’encouragement des sciences, des lettres et des arts, Congrès des sciences historiques en juillet 1907 (Région du Nord et Belgique) à Dunkerque (Dunkirk: Typographie-Lithographie Minet-Tresca, 1907), II: 127.

  134. 134.

    Fernand-A. Van Aalst, “Le français hors de France,” La Belgique artistique & littéraire 22 (1911): 169–75. Emphasis in original.

  135. 135.

    Dan Savatovsky and Muriel Jorge, “Une archive pour l’histoire du français langue seconde: le Congrès pour l’extension et la culture de la langue française (1905–1913),” Langue française 208, no. 4 (2020): 80.

  136. 136.

    Anne Rasmussen, “L’internationalisme belge au miroir de la France (1890–1914),” in France-Belgique (1848–1914): Affinités-Ambiguïtés, ed. Marc Quaghebeur and Nicole Savy (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1997), 112–14; Anne Rasmussen, “L’internationale scientifique, 1890–1914” (Doctoral dissertation, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1995), 507–10.

  137. 137.

    Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 1.

  138. 138.

    Hermann De Baets, “Les Flamands et la culture française,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 134 (October 1913): 142–43.

  139. 139.

    See Marie-Thérèse Bitsch, La Belgique entre la France et l’Allemagne, 1905–1914 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994).

  140. 140.

    Geert Pelckmans, “De Duitse kolonie te Antwerpen en haar invloed op de Antwerpse samenleving (19e eeuw – 1914)” (Licentiate thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1993–1994), 82.

  141. 141.

    Pamphlet of Vlaamsche Hoogeschool Commissie addressed “Aan de Vlaamsche Maatschappijen en de Vlaamschgezinden van geheel het Land [To the Flemish Societies and Flemish-Minded throughout the Country],” [1913]. Documentation collection “Vlaamse Hogeschoolcommissies,” AMVC.

  142. 142.

    “Opinions d’un pangermaniste,” Bulletin de l’AFVLF no. 39 (April 1904): 120.

  143. 143.

    “Négro-Belge,” Pourquoi Pas?, 2 April 1914, 1650. Emphasis in original. The dialogue of the Congolese was given in “petit nègre,” a simplified form of French used in the colonies. I have decided to translate it to standard English. The same joke was recounted in a Walloon political periodical: “Li sauvage d’Europe,” Défense wallonne: Bulletin mensuel de l’Assemblé wallonne, 1914, 206.

  144. 144.

    Alfons Sevens, La question flamande exposée aux Wallons (Ostend: Dhont & Co., 1909), 11. Held at CEGESOMA.

  145. 145.

    Paul Lippens, Voix d’outre-tombe. La Question flamande (Brussels: F. Vanbuggenhoudt, [1929?]), 23. Emphasis added.

  146. 146.

    Karel de Clerck, ed., Kroniek van de strijd voor de vernederlandsing van de Gentse universiteit (Beveren: Orion, 1980), 103; Marie Bourke, “The Flemish University Question and the Development of a Modern Dutch-Language Culture in Belgium 1890–1914” (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1989), 30–31; Sophie De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale, trans. Claudine Spitaels and Marnix Vincent (Brussels et al.: Peter Lang, 2004), 33.