"...notorious episode was the Prince's 30th birthday masquerade on a river barge upon the Seine rented for the occasion, despite the blistering cold of Paris in December. Even by Stephane Clement's standards it was a grotesque orgy of decadence; two Congolese women brought onboard as "entertainment" for the entourage were allegedly murdered and their bodies disposed of in the river, and while this allegation was made posthumously many years later, it serves as just an extreme example of the debauchery associated with the festivities. At the very minimum, Stephane Clement of Belgium's arrival into his fourth decade of life was greeted with copious amounts of alcohol, whores, morphine and bath salts. [1]
December 10th, 1917 came and went whether Stephane Clement remembered it, but life went on, and the New Year did not bring with it much good for the royal family, as issues in the Congo reared their head once again, this time from an intrepid American reporter who was smuggled in despite the best efforts of the Free State's rigid customs officers. The New York Times ran a sprawling expose not long thereafter in early March which detailed in gruesome, lurid details the "killing fields of the Congo," with the reporter John Bertram having been shown mass graves full of children killed for their parents failing to meet their rubber quotas, [2] himself witnessed the bodily mutilation or murder of innocent Congolese by the Force Publique, and the lynchings of African soldiers for insubordination when they refused to carry out various atrocities on behalf of white European officers.
It has often been argued in the press, particularly in France, that the Congo Free State and various French colonies were no more brutal than anywhere else, particularly Germany's savagely brutal plantations in the Kamerun. While that may have been true on the margins, the horrors of the Congo were institutionalized and uniquely barbaric in a way that went beyond mere sensationalism, and Europe had been scandalized by this once before a decade earlier. The revelation by the Bertram articles, which spoke not only to an American public with an appetite recently whetted for moral outrage at atrocities directed towards Black chattel workers but also to a well-meaning European public assured by Belgian authorities that the Congo had been reformed, blew a massive hole in Belgian public relations, which despite the best efforts of men like Stephane Clement to humiliate his father had actually made some strides. Leopold III was nobody's idea of a democrat or a diplomat, but as he neared his sixtieth birthday the former playboy and reactionary had softened a bit, made more friends around Europe in spite of his detested sons, and had especially invested his efforts in repairing relations with London, one of the two key guarantors of Belgian neutrality and, thus, independence as a small power in a sea of sharks. The King's bloody responses to the uprisings of 1890 and 1915 had not been forgotten, but perhaps they had been forgiven. Congo was a step too far, however, and it was finally too much even for the Belgian Parliament, which had swallowed Leopold's promises at face-value in 1908 when last challenged. The King, quite apparently, had either lied about pursuing reforms after public opinion across Belgium and Europe had demanded it, or to be naively charitable he had failed so thoroughly in his genuine attempts to do so that he was too incompetent to trust with pursuing it further, and to put it mildly most parliamentarians were unwilling to grant Leopold that benefit of the doubt.
It speaks to the severity of what would come later that year that the events of March 1918 were simply the "First Congo Crisis." The government of Charles de Broqueville, which was already facing elections in the provinces of Hainaut, Limburg, Liege and East Flanders by early June, saw little choice but to challenge the King directly, and drafted a bill to reform the Congo into a colony of the Kingdom of Belgium. This was in part by design on de Broqueville's part to help Leopold save face, but it was still the most the Catholic Party's leader had ever done to separate himself from the Crown publicly. Had Leopold been his father, who was a canny manipulator of media and public opinion, he may have been able to persuade Parliament to blink, or at least find a way to deescalate. But interacting with the public by way of the press was not Leopold's strong suit, and deescalation when cornered or flustered was not in his nature. The doting grandfather Belgians and Europe had been presented with in the aftermath of the 1915 general strike was gone, and the ruthless tyrant of 1893 was back. Leopold, who had dug the Crown deep into near-ruinous levels of debt to sustain the Free State and become personally almost wholly owned by a cabal of Parisian banks themselves mortgaged to the hilt, had no choice financially but to refuse, but also out of pride. The Congo was his. It was his property, his late father's pride, and he'd be damned if Parliament tried to take it from him.
De Broqueville's Loi Afrique may not even have passed; the ascendant Socialist and Radical deputies had zero intention of participating in imperialist ventures, and many Liberals, particularly Flemings, were skeptical, too. He would never have a chance to pursue this goal - upon his introduction of the law to the Parliament, the government was immediately dismissed by the King, and Leopold III called snap elections in all provinces of Parliament due in mid-April, against the advice of Stephane Clement and both his older and younger brother. The limits of the gamble were glaringly obvious - the King was already unpopular, the Congo scandal had made him more so, and de Broqueville had for once in his life presented himself as something other than a mouthpiece for the Crown, suggesting that whatever government was formed after the elections would be even more hostile to Leopold III than the one that had just been sacked for daring to challenge him.
Stephane Clement's political instincts were infamously terrible, but for once he had been right. The Catholic Party lost its majority that it had held since 1884 and, notably, was only the largest party by one seat, with 60 to Labor's 59. The Liberals for their part earned 44 seats and the Christian People's Party, a more moderate and Christian Democratic outfit, took the remaining 23. [3] This meant that, hypothetically, a government of all opposition parties could be formed, and that the Liberals and Christian People held the balance of power if they would work together, which seemed increasingly likely since the epochal 1918 "full" election produced another groundswell of new tidings - the triumph of the Flemish Movement, a cultural tradition that had now become political.
The genius of the Flemish Movement was that it cut entirely across politics, particularly seeing strength in the three non-socialist parties. Two-thirds of the Christian People's deputies who entered Parliament in 1918 were Flemish, and twenty-three of the Liberal deputies were as well, many of them associated with a more robust Flemish nationalism; even amongst the Catholic Party, long associated with the Francophone landed aristocracy and elite bourgeoisie in both halves of Belgium, deputies affiliated with August Borms and his more conservative and traditionalist worldview, Flemish interests saw a remarkable boost in their fortunes. Christian democrats like Frans Van Cauwelaart now could enter Parliament and form an alliance with men like the longstanding liberal champion Louis Franck, and both of them were fundamental Flemish advocates to the core, though decidedly moderate in the goals and ambitions for which they agitated. 1918 was thus a severe blunder for the Royal Family, not only on the question of their legitimacy over Congo, but over the legitimacy of the Belgian state as a binational kingdom with ardent, committed, and intellectually compelling Flemish nationalists empowered in a way they had not been since the Belgian Revolution in 1832 saw separation from the Netherlands to begin with.
The King was bailed out of this crisis of his own making only by the inability of this hung Parliament to form a consensus; the Liberals and Christian Democrats agreed to work together, spurred in part by the "Antwerp Alliance" of Van Cauwelaart and Franck, but they then boxed themselves in on trying to form a government with either the Catholics (who did not have a proper leader after Broqueville's sacking) or Socialists (who had a number of competing leaders that various factions would inevitably refuse to back, most notably Jules Destree), laying out a variety of red lines on policy, including refusing to pass the Loi Afrique to make the Congo a colony because of their opposition to colonialism as well as their hard push for more rights for the Dutch language, particularly at university, both endeavors that made their participation in government with either larger bloc of votes a near-impossibility.
This worked to Leopold III's advantage, at least in the short term - the parties could not muster the votes to force him to sell the Congo and absolve Belgium of her sins, nor could they muster the votes to force him to cede the Congo to the possession of the Belgian state, and the Walloon-Fleming wrinkle on language now added additional wrinkles that would extend the impasse. [4] The longer it took for the government to form, the weaker it would eventually be, and so in the meantime, the King endeavored to find an interim Prime Minister who would, conveniently, not be answerable to Parliament. His first choice was Gerard Cooreman, a Francophone native of Ghent, who had been a Catholic Party grandee whom had indeed been offered the job in 1911 before he declined and the task fell to de Broqueville, and had since served as chairman of the central bank. Cooreman was in his late sixties, however, and had refused the burden in times of peace; in a time of crisis, he was even more adamant not to assume the grave responsibility of rescuing Belgium from the brink. The task thus fell instead to Leon Delacroix, the fastidiously Francophile president of the Court of Cassation, Belgium's Supreme Court. Delacroix was politically a moderate - he had advocated as a lawyer an expansion of the franchise to all men - but he was very much a judge rather than a politician, and he was cautious and easily suborned by the Crown. Stephane Clement was impressed - his father had found a remarkably supine choice, and now he just needed to extend the governing crisis as long as possible.
The opportunity to do this fell, almost providentially, in the Black Prince's lap days before the election created the crisis, and it took the impasse for him to realize the boon he had. In Paris, Stephane Clement had been approached by a man named Jean-Marie Piquet, claiming to be a French spy in Luxembourg who had in "his papers" evidence of an extensive conspiracy by the Germans to foment unrest in Belgium through financial and intellectual support of the Flemish nationalist cause - what would in just over a year be formally known as Flamenpolitik and, indeed, be explicit German policy. In the spring of 1918, however, Flamenpolitik was nothing more than the product of idle musings in Berlin or the paranoid extrapolations of Belgian royals; whatever sympathy Germans may have had for "Germanic brothers" in Belgium was little more than just that, sympathy. But Stephane Clement cared little for things such as subtlety or facts, and took what came to be known as the Piquet Note and waved it like a bloody shirt upon his return to Brussels, going so far as to address a crowd holding up the Note and reading its contents. While it did not accuse Borms and Van Cauwelaart of advocating for an independent Flemish crown allied to Germany or the placing of the Kaiserliche Marine in Antwerp, it nonetheless purported financial support of Flemish cultural associations by German patrons, suggested that professors of Dutch in Flanders accepted stipends from the (German-born) king of the Netherlands, Willem V, and after the elections were over, vaguely insinuated that German espionage may have been responsible for the shock overperformance of Flemish nationalist candidates.
It was a provocative accusation, both inside and outside of Belgium. Flemish voters were scandalized, particularly that it was the loathed Stephane Clement essentially branding them as fifth columnists and traitors to their own country on behalf of Germany, a place few if any Flemings cared much for or thought of as any kind of friend, and protests erupted in Antwerp throughout April and May, especially as the efforts to form a government continued to prove impossible. But the Piquet Note also proved a major diplomatic issue otherwise - the Delacroix government, once seated, seemed to accept it as a fait accompli, making little effort to discern the credibility of Monsieur Piquet (and who exactly he was, or had ascertained this information), and badly eroding Belgian relations with Germany ahead of an even more severe crisis mere weeks away. In Paris, meanwhile, while Stephane Clement had eaten through much of his credibility, the Poincare government was naturally inclined to believe the most lurid things proposed about Germany, and the idea of Germany meddling in her neighbors' internal affairs seemed not entirely unlikely, especially as her efforts to intervene in Austria-Hungary that same year became more apparent. To the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Office, it did not so much matter if the specifics of what Piquet alleged were entirely accurate (or even partially true) - it mattered instead that it suggested and revealed a pattern, a pattern of German belligerency hidden behind kind words and cautious diplomatic maneuvering, a pattern that showed Germany to be untrustworthy and aggressive all at the same time, a pattern that spoke towards the desirability of a war against Germany while France still had the ability to win such a conflict..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
[1] I promised Steffie content and by god, you shall have it!
[2] This was often why people had their hands chopped off in the Congo
[3] Leopold III's... shall we say, illiberal instincts means that the emergence of the Christene Volkspartij in the late 1890s does not inspire a moderation and democratization of the Catholic Party, which retains its more ultramontanist and clericalist elements. As a result, CVP retains itself even after the death of Adolf Daens, and by now is basically the main outlet for moderate Flemish nationalism.
[4] Not to bring in present day politics, but this is essentially how Belgium works today.
December 10th, 1917 came and went whether Stephane Clement remembered it, but life went on, and the New Year did not bring with it much good for the royal family, as issues in the Congo reared their head once again, this time from an intrepid American reporter who was smuggled in despite the best efforts of the Free State's rigid customs officers. The New York Times ran a sprawling expose not long thereafter in early March which detailed in gruesome, lurid details the "killing fields of the Congo," with the reporter John Bertram having been shown mass graves full of children killed for their parents failing to meet their rubber quotas, [2] himself witnessed the bodily mutilation or murder of innocent Congolese by the Force Publique, and the lynchings of African soldiers for insubordination when they refused to carry out various atrocities on behalf of white European officers.
It has often been argued in the press, particularly in France, that the Congo Free State and various French colonies were no more brutal than anywhere else, particularly Germany's savagely brutal plantations in the Kamerun. While that may have been true on the margins, the horrors of the Congo were institutionalized and uniquely barbaric in a way that went beyond mere sensationalism, and Europe had been scandalized by this once before a decade earlier. The revelation by the Bertram articles, which spoke not only to an American public with an appetite recently whetted for moral outrage at atrocities directed towards Black chattel workers but also to a well-meaning European public assured by Belgian authorities that the Congo had been reformed, blew a massive hole in Belgian public relations, which despite the best efforts of men like Stephane Clement to humiliate his father had actually made some strides. Leopold III was nobody's idea of a democrat or a diplomat, but as he neared his sixtieth birthday the former playboy and reactionary had softened a bit, made more friends around Europe in spite of his detested sons, and had especially invested his efforts in repairing relations with London, one of the two key guarantors of Belgian neutrality and, thus, independence as a small power in a sea of sharks. The King's bloody responses to the uprisings of 1890 and 1915 had not been forgotten, but perhaps they had been forgiven. Congo was a step too far, however, and it was finally too much even for the Belgian Parliament, which had swallowed Leopold's promises at face-value in 1908 when last challenged. The King, quite apparently, had either lied about pursuing reforms after public opinion across Belgium and Europe had demanded it, or to be naively charitable he had failed so thoroughly in his genuine attempts to do so that he was too incompetent to trust with pursuing it further, and to put it mildly most parliamentarians were unwilling to grant Leopold that benefit of the doubt.
It speaks to the severity of what would come later that year that the events of March 1918 were simply the "First Congo Crisis." The government of Charles de Broqueville, which was already facing elections in the provinces of Hainaut, Limburg, Liege and East Flanders by early June, saw little choice but to challenge the King directly, and drafted a bill to reform the Congo into a colony of the Kingdom of Belgium. This was in part by design on de Broqueville's part to help Leopold save face, but it was still the most the Catholic Party's leader had ever done to separate himself from the Crown publicly. Had Leopold been his father, who was a canny manipulator of media and public opinion, he may have been able to persuade Parliament to blink, or at least find a way to deescalate. But interacting with the public by way of the press was not Leopold's strong suit, and deescalation when cornered or flustered was not in his nature. The doting grandfather Belgians and Europe had been presented with in the aftermath of the 1915 general strike was gone, and the ruthless tyrant of 1893 was back. Leopold, who had dug the Crown deep into near-ruinous levels of debt to sustain the Free State and become personally almost wholly owned by a cabal of Parisian banks themselves mortgaged to the hilt, had no choice financially but to refuse, but also out of pride. The Congo was his. It was his property, his late father's pride, and he'd be damned if Parliament tried to take it from him.
De Broqueville's Loi Afrique may not even have passed; the ascendant Socialist and Radical deputies had zero intention of participating in imperialist ventures, and many Liberals, particularly Flemings, were skeptical, too. He would never have a chance to pursue this goal - upon his introduction of the law to the Parliament, the government was immediately dismissed by the King, and Leopold III called snap elections in all provinces of Parliament due in mid-April, against the advice of Stephane Clement and both his older and younger brother. The limits of the gamble were glaringly obvious - the King was already unpopular, the Congo scandal had made him more so, and de Broqueville had for once in his life presented himself as something other than a mouthpiece for the Crown, suggesting that whatever government was formed after the elections would be even more hostile to Leopold III than the one that had just been sacked for daring to challenge him.
Stephane Clement's political instincts were infamously terrible, but for once he had been right. The Catholic Party lost its majority that it had held since 1884 and, notably, was only the largest party by one seat, with 60 to Labor's 59. The Liberals for their part earned 44 seats and the Christian People's Party, a more moderate and Christian Democratic outfit, took the remaining 23. [3] This meant that, hypothetically, a government of all opposition parties could be formed, and that the Liberals and Christian People held the balance of power if they would work together, which seemed increasingly likely since the epochal 1918 "full" election produced another groundswell of new tidings - the triumph of the Flemish Movement, a cultural tradition that had now become political.
The genius of the Flemish Movement was that it cut entirely across politics, particularly seeing strength in the three non-socialist parties. Two-thirds of the Christian People's deputies who entered Parliament in 1918 were Flemish, and twenty-three of the Liberal deputies were as well, many of them associated with a more robust Flemish nationalism; even amongst the Catholic Party, long associated with the Francophone landed aristocracy and elite bourgeoisie in both halves of Belgium, deputies affiliated with August Borms and his more conservative and traditionalist worldview, Flemish interests saw a remarkable boost in their fortunes. Christian democrats like Frans Van Cauwelaart now could enter Parliament and form an alliance with men like the longstanding liberal champion Louis Franck, and both of them were fundamental Flemish advocates to the core, though decidedly moderate in the goals and ambitions for which they agitated. 1918 was thus a severe blunder for the Royal Family, not only on the question of their legitimacy over Congo, but over the legitimacy of the Belgian state as a binational kingdom with ardent, committed, and intellectually compelling Flemish nationalists empowered in a way they had not been since the Belgian Revolution in 1832 saw separation from the Netherlands to begin with.
The King was bailed out of this crisis of his own making only by the inability of this hung Parliament to form a consensus; the Liberals and Christian Democrats agreed to work together, spurred in part by the "Antwerp Alliance" of Van Cauwelaart and Franck, but they then boxed themselves in on trying to form a government with either the Catholics (who did not have a proper leader after Broqueville's sacking) or Socialists (who had a number of competing leaders that various factions would inevitably refuse to back, most notably Jules Destree), laying out a variety of red lines on policy, including refusing to pass the Loi Afrique to make the Congo a colony because of their opposition to colonialism as well as their hard push for more rights for the Dutch language, particularly at university, both endeavors that made their participation in government with either larger bloc of votes a near-impossibility.
This worked to Leopold III's advantage, at least in the short term - the parties could not muster the votes to force him to sell the Congo and absolve Belgium of her sins, nor could they muster the votes to force him to cede the Congo to the possession of the Belgian state, and the Walloon-Fleming wrinkle on language now added additional wrinkles that would extend the impasse. [4] The longer it took for the government to form, the weaker it would eventually be, and so in the meantime, the King endeavored to find an interim Prime Minister who would, conveniently, not be answerable to Parliament. His first choice was Gerard Cooreman, a Francophone native of Ghent, who had been a Catholic Party grandee whom had indeed been offered the job in 1911 before he declined and the task fell to de Broqueville, and had since served as chairman of the central bank. Cooreman was in his late sixties, however, and had refused the burden in times of peace; in a time of crisis, he was even more adamant not to assume the grave responsibility of rescuing Belgium from the brink. The task thus fell instead to Leon Delacroix, the fastidiously Francophile president of the Court of Cassation, Belgium's Supreme Court. Delacroix was politically a moderate - he had advocated as a lawyer an expansion of the franchise to all men - but he was very much a judge rather than a politician, and he was cautious and easily suborned by the Crown. Stephane Clement was impressed - his father had found a remarkably supine choice, and now he just needed to extend the governing crisis as long as possible.
The opportunity to do this fell, almost providentially, in the Black Prince's lap days before the election created the crisis, and it took the impasse for him to realize the boon he had. In Paris, Stephane Clement had been approached by a man named Jean-Marie Piquet, claiming to be a French spy in Luxembourg who had in "his papers" evidence of an extensive conspiracy by the Germans to foment unrest in Belgium through financial and intellectual support of the Flemish nationalist cause - what would in just over a year be formally known as Flamenpolitik and, indeed, be explicit German policy. In the spring of 1918, however, Flamenpolitik was nothing more than the product of idle musings in Berlin or the paranoid extrapolations of Belgian royals; whatever sympathy Germans may have had for "Germanic brothers" in Belgium was little more than just that, sympathy. But Stephane Clement cared little for things such as subtlety or facts, and took what came to be known as the Piquet Note and waved it like a bloody shirt upon his return to Brussels, going so far as to address a crowd holding up the Note and reading its contents. While it did not accuse Borms and Van Cauwelaart of advocating for an independent Flemish crown allied to Germany or the placing of the Kaiserliche Marine in Antwerp, it nonetheless purported financial support of Flemish cultural associations by German patrons, suggested that professors of Dutch in Flanders accepted stipends from the (German-born) king of the Netherlands, Willem V, and after the elections were over, vaguely insinuated that German espionage may have been responsible for the shock overperformance of Flemish nationalist candidates.
It was a provocative accusation, both inside and outside of Belgium. Flemish voters were scandalized, particularly that it was the loathed Stephane Clement essentially branding them as fifth columnists and traitors to their own country on behalf of Germany, a place few if any Flemings cared much for or thought of as any kind of friend, and protests erupted in Antwerp throughout April and May, especially as the efforts to form a government continued to prove impossible. But the Piquet Note also proved a major diplomatic issue otherwise - the Delacroix government, once seated, seemed to accept it as a fait accompli, making little effort to discern the credibility of Monsieur Piquet (and who exactly he was, or had ascertained this information), and badly eroding Belgian relations with Germany ahead of an even more severe crisis mere weeks away. In Paris, meanwhile, while Stephane Clement had eaten through much of his credibility, the Poincare government was naturally inclined to believe the most lurid things proposed about Germany, and the idea of Germany meddling in her neighbors' internal affairs seemed not entirely unlikely, especially as her efforts to intervene in Austria-Hungary that same year became more apparent. To the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Office, it did not so much matter if the specifics of what Piquet alleged were entirely accurate (or even partially true) - it mattered instead that it suggested and revealed a pattern, a pattern of German belligerency hidden behind kind words and cautious diplomatic maneuvering, a pattern that showed Germany to be untrustworthy and aggressive all at the same time, a pattern that spoke towards the desirability of a war against Germany while France still had the ability to win such a conflict..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
[1] I promised Steffie content and by god, you shall have it!
[2] This was often why people had their hands chopped off in the Congo
[3] Leopold III's... shall we say, illiberal instincts means that the emergence of the Christene Volkspartij in the late 1890s does not inspire a moderation and democratization of the Catholic Party, which retains its more ultramontanist and clericalist elements. As a result, CVP retains itself even after the death of Adolf Daens, and by now is basically the main outlet for moderate Flemish nationalism.
[4] Not to bring in present day politics, but this is essentially how Belgium works today.