Jump to content

Leopold II of Belgium

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 89.102.140.194 (talk) at 17:10, 28 August 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Leopold II
King of the Belgians
Reign10 December 1865-17 December, 1909
PredecessorLeopold I
SuccessorAlbert I
IssuePrincess Louise-Marie
Prince Leopold
Princess Stephanie
Princess Clementine
HouseWettin (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line)
FatherLeopold I
MotherLouise-Marie of France

Leopold II (Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor (French) or Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor (Dutch) (April 9 1835 – December 17 1909) was King of the Belgians. Born the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I of Belgium, he succeeded his father to the Belgian throne in 1865 and remained king until his death. He was the brother of Empress Carlota of Mexico and cousin to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Outside Belgium, he is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King to extract rubber and ivory in the Congo region of central Africa, which relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of approximately 3 million Congolese.

The regime of the Congo Free State became one of the more infamous international scandals of the turn of the century. Report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese people).

Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million . According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: indiscriminate "war", starvation, reduction of births and tropical diseases. 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.[1] Of those deaths, 40% are believed to have occurred after 1900.[1]

Biography

Leopold and Maria Hendrikka

Leopold II married on August 22 1853 to Marie Henriette Anne von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduchess of Austria.

Leopold II and Marie Henriette Anne's children were:

  • Léopold Ferdinand Elie Victor Albert Marie, Count of Hainaut (as eldest son of the heir apparent), Duke of Brabant (as heir apparent), born at Laeken/Laken on June 12 1859 and died at Laken on January 22 1869 from pneumonia, after falling into a pond.

Leopold II was also the father of two sons, Lucien Philippe Marie Antoine (1906-1984) and Philippe Henri Marie François (1907-1914), born out of wedlock. Their mother was Blanche Zélia Joséphine Delacroix (1883-1948), aka Caroline Lacroix, a prostitute who married the king on December 12 1909, in a religious ceremony with no validity under Belgian law, at the Pavilion of Palms, Royal Palace of Laken, five days before his death [citation needed]. These sons were adopted in 1910 by Lacroix's second husband, Antoine Durrieux. Though Lacroix is said to have been created Baroness de Vaughan, Lucien the Duke of Tervuren, and Philippe the Count of Ravenstein, no such royal decrees were ever issued [citation needed].

"In London: The Wicked City" by Fergus Linnane (Robson Books 2003) the "Belgian King" is reported as being a client of Mary Jeffries "Rose Cottage" flagellation house and brothel in Hampstead. (Pages 297-298)

On November 15 1902, Italian anarchist Gennaro Rubino unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate King Leopold. Leopold 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. Rubino's shots missed Leopold entirely and Rubino was immediately arrested at the scene.

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 on December 17 1909, and was interred in the Royal vault at the Church of Our Lady, Laeken Cemetery, Brussels, Belgium.

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 loaned 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 1876, under the auspices of the holding company, he hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the Congo region. 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 February 5 1885, the result was the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo again), an area 76 times larger than Belgium, which Leopold was free to rule as a personal domain through his private army, the Force Publique.

Leopold's rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.[2]

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses (including enslavement and mutilation of the native population), especially in the rubber industry, led to an international protest movement in the early 1900s. Forced labor was extorted from the natives. Estimates of the death toll range from 2 to 15 million (for further detail, see Congo Free State ([3])

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. Historians of the period tend to take a very dim view of Leopold, due to the mass killings and human rights abuses that took place in the Congo: one British historian has said that he "was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have been better for the world if he had never been born" [4]. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary once described his fellow ruler as a "thoroughly bad man".

Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo:

"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."

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 foot) statue was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again, without explanation.

The campaign to report on Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by diplomat Roger Casement, and a former shipping clerk E. D. Morel, became the first mass human rights movement ([5]).

Leopold and the Belgians

Though extremely disliked by Belgians at end of his reign - he was booed during his burial parade - Leopold II is perceived 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 in Belgium (mainly in Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp).

These buildings include the Royal Glasshouses at Laken (in the domain of the Royal Palace of Laeken), 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 train station hall. He also built an important country estate in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera in France, 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.

There has been a "Great Forgetting", as Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold's Ghost, after Leopold's Congo was transferred to Belgium. In Hochschild's words:

Remarkably, the colonial Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren Museum) did not mention anything at all regarding the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State. The Tervuren Museum has a large collection of colonial objects but of the largest injustice in Congo, "there is no sign whatsoever" (in Hochschild's words again). Another example is to be found on the sea walk of Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, where a monument shows a colonialist with a black child at his feet (supposedly bringing "civilisation") without any comment, further illustrating this "Great Forgetting".

Ancestry

Leopold's ancestors in three generations
Leopold II of Belgium Father:
Leopold I of Belgium 		Paternal Grandfather:
Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld 		Paternal Great-grandfather:
Ernest Frederick, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
Paternal Great-grandmother:
Sophia Antonia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
Paternal Grandmother:
Augusta Reuss-Ebersdorf 		Paternal Great-grandfather:
Count Heinrich XXIV Reuss of Ebersdorf and Lobenstein
Paternal Great-grandmother:
Karoline Ernestine of Erbach-Schönberg
Mother:
Louise-Marie of France 		Maternal Grandfather:
Louis-Philippe of France 		Maternal Great-grandfather:
Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans
Maternal Great-grandmother:
Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre
Maternal Grandmother:
Maria Amalia of the Two Sicilies 		Maternal Great-grandfather:
Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies
Maternal Great-grandmother:
Marie Caroline of Austria


Footnotes

  1. ^ Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the 20th Century - Congo Free State

Further reading

Miscellaneous

Wikiquote has quotations related to Leopold II of Belgium.

Congo: White king, red rubber, black death (2003) is a documentary by Peter Bate (BBC) on Leopold II and the Congo (see also: BBC page).

Leopold II of Belgium
Cadet branch of the House of Wettin
Born: 9 April 1835 Died: 17 December 1909
Regnal titles
Preceded by King of the Belgians
1865-1909 		Succeeded by
Belgian nobility
Vacant
Title last held by
Philip II 		Duke of Brabant
1840-1865 		Succeeded by

Template:Persondata

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Leopold_II_of_Belgium&oldid=154205518"