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- On 3 July 2013, King Albert II announced his abdication. On the National Day, which follows a few weeks later, Prince Philippe took the oath and became the seventh King of the Belgians. His daughter Elisabeth, who turned 22 on 25 October 2023, is now first in line to the throne.
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Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, since 1826 also called Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was designated as King of the Belgians by the National Congress and swore allegiance to the Belgian constitution in front of Saint James's Church at Coudenberg Palace in Brussels on 21 July.
On 3 July 2013, King Albert II announced his abdication. On the National Day, which follows a few weeks later, Prince Philippe took the oath and became the seventh King of the Belgians. His daughter Elisabeth, who turned 22 on 25 October 2023, is now first in line to the throne.
Jun 12, 2020 · But in the chaos of the early 20th Century when World War One threatened to destroy Belgium, Leopold II's nephew King Albert I erected statues to remember the successes of years gone by.
Leopold I, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831 to become the first King of the Belgians. Under the hereditary constitutional Monarchy system, the role and operation of Belgium's institutions, including the Monarchy, are governed by the Constitution.
- Overview
- Domestic policies
- Leopold II and the Congo Free State
- Legacy
Although Leopold II established Belgium as a colonial power in Africa, he is best known for the widespread atrocities that were carried out under his rule, as a result of which as many as 10 million people died in the Congo Free State.
What was Leopold II’s family like?
Leopold II was the second son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Orléans. The couple's first son, Louis Philippe, died in infancy prior to Leopold II's birth.
How did Leopold II change the world?
Leopold II implemented a forced-labour system in the Congo that was quickly copied by other European colonial powers. This brutal practice was a catastrophe for the population of the Congo, and Leopold was eventually forced to give up his hold on the colony.
What was Leopold II’s legacy?
The country of Belgium itself was only about five years old at the birth of Leopold II, who became the eldest surviving son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Louise-Marie of Orléans. Then, as they would be into the 21st century, most of the royal families of Europe were related. For instance, Leopold II was a first cousin of Queen Victoria of Britain. He became duke of Brabant in 1846 and served in the Belgian army. In 1853 he married Marie-Henriette, daughter of the Austrian archduke Joseph, palatine of Hungary, and became king of the Belgians on his father’s death in December 1865.
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Most of the monarchs in western Europe had been forced to largely yield political power to the electorate by the late 19th century, so Belgium’s parliament and cabinet were the real locus of power, but Leopold used the prestige of the monarchy to lobby for pet projects. Although the domestic affairs of his reign were dominated by a growing conflict between the Liberal and Catholic parties over suffrage and education issues, Leopold concentrated on developing the country’s defenses. Aware that Belgian neutrality, maintained during the Franco-German War (1870–71), was imperilled by the increasing strength of France and Germany, he persuaded parliament in 1887 to finance the fortification of Liège and Namur.
Presenting himself as a philanthropist eager to bring the benefits of Christianity, Western civilization, and commerce to African natives—a guise that he perpetuated for many years—Leopold hosted an international conference of explorers and geographers at the royal palace in Brussels in 1876. Several years later he hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to be his man in Africa. For five years Stanley traveled up and down the immense waterways of the Congo River basin, setting up trading posts, building roads, and persuading local chiefs—almost all of them illiterate—to sign treaties with Leopold. The treaties, some of which appear to have been subsequently doctored to Leopold’s liking, were then put to use by the Belgian monarch.
Although Belgium’s government felt that colonies would be an extravagance for a small country with no navy or merchant marine, that situation suited Leopold perfectly. He persuaded first the United States and then all the major nations of western Europe to recognize a huge swath of Central Africa—roughly the same territory as the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo—as his personal property. He called it État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State. It was the world’s only private colony, and Leopold referred to himself as its “proprietor.”
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The king then embarked on an ultimately successful effort to make a vast fortune from his new possession. Initially he was most interested in ivory, a material that was greatly valued in the days before plastics because it could be carved into a great variety of shapes—statuettes, jewelry, piano keys, false teeth, and more. For some years ivory was a principal source of the great wealth that Leopold and his associates drew from the new colony. In his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890 as a steamboat officer, gives a searing picture of the brutal and voracious European quest for Congo ivory.
By the early 1890s a new source of riches had appeared. A worldwide rubber boom was under way, kicked off by the invention of the inflatable bicycle tire and spurred on by the rise of the automobile and the use of rubber in industrial belts and gaskets, as well as in coating for telephone and telegraph wires. Throughout the tropics, people rushed to sow rubber trees, but those plants could take many years to reach maturity, and in the meantime there was money to be made wherever rubber grew wild. One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. Detachments of his 19,000-man private army, the Force Publique, would march into a village and hold the women hostage, forcing the men to scatter into the rainforest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap.
By the end of his life, Leopold was unpopular with his people, but, ironically, that had much less to do with his actions in Africa than with his conduct of his personal life. He spoke contemptuously of Belgium’s small size, could not speak proper Dutch, the native language of more than half of its citizens, spent long winters in luxurious quarters on the French Riviera, and was estranged from two of his three daughters. Moreover, he had a well-known penchant for teenaged girls, and, when he was age 65, he began a liaison with a teenaged former prostitute who bore him two additional children.
He is remembered in Belgium for some of what he built with his Congo wealth, such as the monumental Arcade du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, and for his advocacy of strong fortifications in the eastern part of the country, which slowed the advance of German troops in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. His most important legacy, however, remains the human catastrophe that the rubber forced-labour system brought to the Congo—a heritage that continued to echo in that region more than a century after Leopold’s death.
Leopold III was the king of the Belgians, whose actions as commander in chief of the Belgian army during the German conquest of Belgium (1940) in World War II aroused opposition to his rule, eventually leading to his abdication in 1951.
Jun 30, 2020 · Sixty years after Congo gained its independence, the Belgian king has expressed his "deepest regrets" for the suffering his nation caused as a colonial power. It is the first time that a Belgian monarch has offered any form of apology for the brutality, death and plunder that the nation oversaw after colonising Congo in the 19th century.
