Leopold II of Belgium

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Leopold II
King of the Belgians
Reign 17 December 1865 – 17 December 1909
(44 years)
Titles Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Born 9 April 1835(1835-04-09)
Birthplace Brussels, Belgium
Died 17 December 1909 (aged 74)
Place of death Laeken/Laken, Belgium
Predecessor Leopold I
Successor Albert I
Consort Marie Henriette of Austria
Caroline Lacroix {morgantic relationship}
Issue Princess Louise-Marie
Prince Léopold
Princess Stephanie
Princess Clementine
Royal House Wettin (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line)
Father Leopold I
Mother Louise-Marie of France

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 the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I, 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.

Outside Belgium, he is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. The state included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The extraction of rubber and ivory in the Congo relied on forced labour and resulted in the massacre and mutilation of millions of Congolese (roughly half the population at the time). He ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom; for him it was a business venture. A friend of Henry Morton Stanley, he used Stanley to help him lay claim to the territory he called Congo. Leopold thought of himself as an astute businessman and he once spent a week in Seville studying Spanish records of their trade with their Latin American colonies.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Caricature of Leopold II in Vanity Fair
Caricature of Leopold II in Vanity Fair
Leopold and Maria Hendrikka
Leopold and Maria Hendrikka

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

Their children were:

Leopold II was also the father of two sons, Lucien Philippe Marie Antoine (9 February 1906–1984) and Philippe Henri Marie François (16 October 1907–21 August 1914), born out of wedlock. Their mother was Blanche Zélia Joséphine Delacroix (12 May 1883 Bucharest – 12 February 1948 Cambo), 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].

The "Belgian King" is reported as being a client of Mary Jeffries's "Rose Cottage" flagellation house and brothel in Hampstead, a suburb of London.[1]

On November 15, 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 on December 17, 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.

[edit] Private colonialism

Further information: Congo Free State

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
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 or DRC again, not to be confused with Republic of the Congo), 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 were particularly bad 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 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."

Estimates of the death toll range from two to fifteen million although most sources indicate it was around ten million.[2] 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.[3]

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led to an international protest movement in the early 1900s. The campaign to report on Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by British diplomat Roger Casement, and former shipping clerk E. D. Morel, became the first mass human rights movement.[4] Supporters included American humorist 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. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.[5] It should be noted that, as Adam Hochschild describes in King Leopold's Ghost, France, Germany and Portugal were quick to adopt the Congolese methods in those parts of their colonies where natural rubber occurred, imposing a similar death toll on the natives.

Leopold II with the coat of arms of the Belgian Congo in Ghent, Belgium
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".[6] 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 foot) statue was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again, without explanation.

[edit] Leopold and the Belgians

Though extremely disliked by his subjects at end of his reign — he was booed during his burial parade — 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 train 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.

There was a "Great Forgetting", as Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold's Ghost, after the King transferred his private colony to Belgium. Hochschild records that, on his visit to the colonial Royal Museum for Central Africa in the 1990s, it did not mention anything at all regarding the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State. It holds a large collection of colonial objects but of the largest injustice in Congo, "there is no sign whatsoever". Another example is to be found on the sea walk of Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, where a monument shows a colonialist supposedly bringing "civilisation" to the black child at his feet, further illustrating this "Great Forgetting".

[edit] Ancestry

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


[edit] See also

Leopold II commemorative coin
Leopold II commemorative coin

[edit] References

  1. ^ In London: The Wicked City, Fergus Linnane (Robson Books 2003) pp. 297–8.
  2. ^ War statistics.
  3. ^ Reflections (PDF).
  4. ^ Africa. News. BBC.
  5. ^ Time.
  6. ^ CUNY.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

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Leopold II of Belgium
Cadet branch of the House of Wettin
Born: 9 April 1835 Died: 17 December 1909
Regnal titles
Preceded by
Leopold I		 King of the Belgians
1865–1909		 Succeeded by
Albert I
Regnal titles
Vacant
Title last held by
Philip II		 Duke of Brabant
1840–1865		 Succeeded by
Prince Léopold, Duke of Brabant
Persondata
NAME Leopold II
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION King of the Belgians
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1835
PLACE OF BIRTH Brussels, Belgium
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 1909
PLACE OF DEATH Laken, Belgium