BELGIUM - Leopold II - King of
Belgium: 17 December 1865 – 17 December 1909 -
Silver 5
Franc Coin 36mm (24.7 grams) Minted 1876
LEOPOLD II ROI DES BELGES - Bare head of Leopold II left, LEOP WEINER underneath.
L'UNION FAIT LA FORCE - Royal court of arms, 5 - F on
either side, all within laurel-wreath, 1876 in exergue.
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Leopold II (French:
Léopold Louis Philippe
Marie Victor,
Dutch: Leopold
Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor) (9 April 1835 –
17 December 1909) was
King of the Belgians. Born in
Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of
Leopold I and
Louise-Marie of Orléans, he succeeded his father to
the throne in 1865 and remained king until his death. He
was the brother of
Empress Carlota of Mexico and first cousin to
Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. He is chiefly
remembered as the founder and sole owner of the
Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by
the King. He used
Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the
Congo, which included the entire area now known as the
Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Leopold ran the Congo brutally, by
proxy through a mercenary force, as his personal
fiefdom. Though he extracted a personal fortune from
the Congo, his regime became one of the most infamous
international scandals of the turn of the 20th century.
The
famous 1904 report by the British Consul
Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of
white officials who had been responsible for
cold-blooded mass killings during a rubber-collecting
expedition in 1903 (including one
Belgian national for causing the shooting of at
least 122
Congolese people).
Biography
Leopold II married
Marie Henriette Anne von Habsburg-Lothringen,
Archduchess of
Austria in
Brussels on 22 August 1853.
Their children were:
-
Louise-Marie Amélie, born in Brussels on 18
February 1858, and died at Wiesbaden on 1 March
1924. She married
Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
-
Léopold Ferdinand Elie Victor Albert Marie,
Count of Hainaut (as eldest son of the
heir apparent), later Duke of Brabant (as heir
apparent), born at
Laeken/Laken
on 12 June 1859, and died at Laken on 22 January
1869, from pneumonia, after falling into a pond.
-
Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte,
born at Laken on 11 May 1864, and died at the
Archabbey of Pannonhalma in
Győr-Moson-Sopron,
Hungary, on 23 August 1945. She married (1)
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and then (2)
Elemér Edmund Graf Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et
Vásáros-Namény (created, in 1917, Prince Lónyay de
Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény).
-
Clémentine, born at Laken on 30 July 1872,
and died at
Nice on 8 March 1955. She married Prince
Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte
(1862–1926), head of the
Bonaparte family.
Leopold and Maria
Hendrikka
Leopold II was also the father of two
illegitimate sons, Lucien Philippe Marie Antoine (9
February 1906–1984) and Philippe Henri Marie François
(16 October 1907 – 21 August 1914). Their mother was
Blanche Zélia Joséphine Delacroix, aka Caroline
Lacroix, a
prostitute with whom the King engaged in a religious
ceremony on 12 December/14 December 1909, with no
validity under Belgian law, at the Pavilion of Palms,
Royal Palace of Laken, in
Brussels, five days before his death. The Priest of
Laeken Cooreman performed the ceremony[1][2]
These sons were adopted in 1910 by Lacroix's second
husband, Antoine Durrieux. Lacroix is said to have been
unofficially created Baroness de Vaughan in
Belgium (a courtesy title), Lucien Duke of Tervuren,
and Philippe Count of Ravenstein.[2]]
He was the 975th
Knight of the
Order of the Golden Fleece in
Austria, the 748th Knight of the
Order of the Garter in 1866 and the 69th and 321st
Grand Cross of the
Order of the Tower and Sword.
On 15 November 1902,
Italian
anarchist
Gennaro Rubino attempted to
assassinate Leopold, who was riding in a royal
cortege from a ceremony in memory of his
recently-deceased wife, Marie Henriette. After Leopold's
carriage passed, Rubino fired three shots at the King;
the shots missed Leopold and Rubino was immediately
arrested.
In Belgian domestic politics, Leopold
emphasized military defense as the basis of neutrality,
but he was unable to obtain a
universal conscription law until on his death bed.
He died in
Laeken on 17 December 1909, and was interred in the
royal vault at the Church of Our Lady, Laeken Cemetery,
Brussels.
He was succeeded as King of the
Belgians by his nephew
Albert, son of his brother Philippe.
Private
colonialism
Leopold fervently believed that
overseas colonies were the key to a country's greatness,
and he worked tirelessly to acquire colonial territory
for Belgium. Neither the
Belgian people nor the
Belgian government were interested, however, and
Leopold eventually began trying to acquire a colony in
his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. The Belgian
government lent him money for this venture.
A statue of Leopold in
Mons, Belgium
After a number of unsuccessful
schemes for colonies in Africa or Asia, in 1876 he
organized a private
holding company disguised as an international
scientific and philanthropic association, which he
called the
International African Society.
In 1878, under the auspices of the
holding company, he hired the famous explorer
Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the
Congo region.[3]
Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the
Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which
representatives of fourteen European countries and the
United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of
most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to. On 5
February 1885, the result was the
Congo Free State (later becoming, successively, the
Belgian Congo, the
Republic of the Congo,
Zaire, and now the
Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC — not to be
confused with
Republic of the Congo formerly owned by France), an
area 76 times larger than Belgium, which Leopold was
free to rule as a personal domain through his
private army, the
Force Publique.
Forced labor was extorted from the natives. The
abuses suffered were horrific not only in the
rubber industry, including
enslavement and
mutilation of the native population. Missionary John
Harris of
Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had
come across that he wrote to Leopold's chief agent in
the Congo saying: "I have just returned from a journey
inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject
misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I
was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories
that I took the liberty of promising them that in future
you will only kill them for crimes they commit."
Estimates of the death toll range
from two to fifteen million.[5][6][7]
Determining precisely how many people died is next to
impossible as accurate records were not kept. Louis and
Stengers state that population figures at the start of
Leopold's control are only "wild guesses", while E.D.
Morel's attempt and others at coming to a figure for
population losses were "but figments of the
imagination".[8]
Adam Hochschild devotes a chapter of
his book to the problem of estimating the death toll. He
cites several recent lines of investigation, by
anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, examining local
sources, from police records, religious records, oral
traditions, genealogies, personal diaries, and "many
others", which generally agree with the assessment of
the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the
population perished during the Free State period. Since
the first official census by the Belgian authorities in
1924 put the population at about 10 million, that
implies a rough estimate of 10 million dead.[9]
Smallpox and sleeping sickness decimated the
population.[10]
By 1896 the
sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in
the village of Lukolela on the
Congo River. The mortality figures were gained
through the efforts of Roger Casement, who found only
600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903.[11]
Reports of outrageous exploitation
and widespread
human rights abuses led to international outcry in
the early 1900s. The campaign to examine Leopold's
regime, led by British diplomat
Roger Casement and former shipping clerk
E. D. Morel under the auspices of the Congo Reform
Association, became the first mass
human rights movement.[12]
Supporters included American writer
Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging
political satire entitled
King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which the King
supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the
country outweighs a little starvation. Rubber gatherers
were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of
the century, when the
Western world forced
Brussels to call a halt.[13]
It should be noted that, as Hochschild describes in
King Leopold's Ghost, France, Germany and Portugal
adopted the Congo methods in those parts of their
colonies where natural rubber occurred.
Leopold II with the coat
of arms of the Belgian Congo in
Ghent, Belgium
Finally, in 1908, the
Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the
Congo Free State to Belgium. Emperor
Franz Joseph of
Austria-Hungary once described his fellow ruler as a
"thoroughly bad man."
Leopold II is still a controversial
figure in the
Democratic Republic of Congo; in 2005 his statue was
taken down just hours after it was re-erected in the
capital,
Kinshasa. The Congolese culture minister, Christoph
Muzungu, decided to reinstate the statue, arguing people
should see the positive aspects of the king as well as
the negative. But just hours after the six-metre (20 ft)
statue was erected in the middle of a roundabout near
Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again,
without explanation.
Leopold
and the Belgians
Though extremely disliked by his
subjects at the end of his reign — his funeral cortege
was booed — Leopold II is remembered today by many
Belgians as the "Builder King" (Koning-Bouwer in
Dutch, le Roi-Bâtisseur in
French) because he commissioned a great number of
buildings and urban projects, mainly in
Brussels,
Ostend and
Antwerp.
These buildings include the Royal
Glasshouses in the grounds of the Palace at
Laken, the Japanese Tower, the Chinese Pavilion, the
Musée du Congo (now called the
Royal Museum for Central Africa), and their
surrounding park in
Tervuren, the
Cinquantenaire in Brussels, and the Antwerp
railway station hall. He also built an important
country estate in
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the
French Riviera, including the Villa des Cèdres,
which is now a
botanical garden. These were all built using the
profits from the Congo. In 1900, he created the
Royal Trust, by which means he donated most of his
property to the Belgian nation.
After the King transferred his
private colony to Belgium, there was, as
Adam Hochschild puts it in
King Leopold's Ghost, a "Great Forgetting".
Hochschild records that, on his visit to the colonial
Royal Museum for Central Africa in the 1990s, there was
no mention of the atrocities committed in the Congo Free
State, despite the museum's large collection of colonial
objects. Another example of this "Great Forgetting" may
be found on the boardwalk of
Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, where a
monument shows a colonialist bringing "civilization" to
the black child at his feet. However an activist group
cut off the hands of a statue of Leopold II in Ostend to
protest the Congo atrocities. |