According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”
A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.
This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.
The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.
A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.
But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.
The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.
One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.
Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.
The Battle of Ramillies in 1706 was one of the biggest battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, also crucial for the future career of the Duke of Marlborough, and the cause of what is now Belgium switching from Spanish to Austrian rule. 62,000 troops of the Anglo-Austrian alliance inflicted s severe defeat on 60,000 French troops, a quarter of whom were killed. I have seen a claim that it was the largest cavalry battle in history. On a much more intimate level, the doctor treating one of the veteran British soldiers for injuries received at the battle realised that the patient had breasts; this was the famous Christian Davis, aka Mother Ross., who had joined the army disguised as a man many years before.
But in 2016 I was unable to find any memorial of the actual battle in 1706. The memorial at the centre of the village of Ramillies is to a First World War skirmish, not to the much bigger fight of two centuries earlier.
However, dedicated Googling eventually found a small plaque, placed in 2006 beside a shrine to St Donatus way to the north of the battlefield. I have marked it on the below map (taken from Wikipedia, showing the order of battle at the beginning of the fighting) with a blue X. I’ve also marked the Hottomont tumulus, to the southwest, with a blue circle.
So I set off with B to find it today. It’s about 30 minutes’ drive from her home, and she likes car journeys. I was unable to persuade her to smile for the camera when we located it, but she gives a sense of scale.
The plaque, placed by local enthusiasts for the tercentenary of the battle, speaks for itself, though I do find the placement a bit odd; it’s at the junction of two minor, unnamed roads, some way from the most intense point of the fighting.
The chapel is in poor shape. It could date from anywhere between the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the various heritage websites offer no clue. It is referred to in some sources as “la Chapelle des Quatre Tièges”, but I am unable to find a translation for “tiège” – it could perhaps be a dialect form meaning “tree trunk” from “tige”, which means “stem”. Within the chapel, St Donatus looks out cheerfully through a protective grille. (This is probably St Donatus of Münstereifel, who protects you against lightning and was a Roman soldier, hence the tunic.)
I also tried to find the nearby caves of Folx-les-Caves, which I visited in 2005; but they have been closed since 2019.
Yesterday I found myself lunching (for the second time in a few days) at one of my favourite Thai restaurants, La Deuxième Élément in Ixelles, and after lunch I spotted that the Church of St Boniface, which looms over the square, was open. One of the cultural loose ends that I have been thinking about chasing for a while is a report in Dutch Wikipedia that the church contains some of the work of fin-de-siècle artist Jean Mayné, so I seized the chance to go in and have a look.
There are four large paintings on the ends of the transepts in the church, and another in the Lady Chapel, all sadly somewhat dingy and in need of restoration. (Which may be tricky, as they are canvas glued to the wall.) The altarpiece is also flanked by two painted wooden panels which looked like they might be by the same hand.
Frustratingly, the church has a mini-exhibition about the stained glass windows, which have recently been restored, but there was nothing about the paintings or the altarpiece – nor are they mentioned in the bilingual leaflet you can get online, though I found an older pamphlet with more info.
I took photos of them all, hoping that they might turn out to be obscure works by Jean Mayné. But a bit more research this morning revealed that they are actually by a different fin-de-siècle artist, Ernest Wante, who was much more into religious art. Next time you are enjoying La Deuxième Élément’s yummy Keng Kaï Noh Maï (my personal favourite), do take a moment afterwards to pop across the road and look around.
Jesus heals the paralytic (1923). Strictly speaking this should be an indoor scene. Note the chap brandishing his crutches in joy, though the guy in front of him with a walking stick seems less sure.“Suffer little children to come unto me” (1923). Interestingly multi-ethnic crowd. The young woman at the front looks to me like she is wearing a fin-de-siècle dress.The Adoration of the Shepherds (1910). Accompanied by angelic choir, sheep, ox, ass and goat. When I went back for another look I realised that someone has squiggled over the baby with green felt tip pen.Shows how St Boniface tested out a supposed fragment of the True Cross at the abbey of Hooidonk, by seeing if it sank in water. It did, and started shedding drops of blood. Boniface actually recorded this himself. (1909)The angels come to help St Boniface serve Mass. Oddly enough he didn’t leave us personal documentation of this incident.The Wedding at Cana (altarpiece, 1910)Doubting Thomas (altarpiece, 1910)
The stained glass windows looked interesting too, but I was in a bit of a rush to get back to the office and will have to return for another look. And I’m still wondering about the rumoured work of Jean Mayné. Maybe it was just a mistake by whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry.
We had three elections back in June, and we have another two next month: on Sunday 13 October we will choose the members of our local council and the council of the province of Flemish Brabant.
As my long time reader knows, I like to put questions to the candidates in each election before the vote comes up, picking an obscure but crucial issue and asking their views. Last time around it proved a very helpful tactic.
This time around it has been less helpful. The storm in a teacup exercising us locally is whether or not a supermarket should be built on the land behind the recycling bins 500m from our house. A couple of NIMBYs have managed to block it so far, to the annoyance of those of us who would prefer not to have to trek a couple of miles up or down the road to the nearest shop.
I wrote to the four groups who were standing in the election as of last weekend, and three of them wrote back to me saying that they were strong supporters of the need for a supermarket, in terms which really left little to choose between them. The fourth, the nationalist NVA, did not reply, but I was not going to vote for them anyway. (The three who replied were a coalition led by the liberal Open VLD party, the Christian Democrats, and the Green party in coalition with the Socialists.)
Since then, a fifth faction has entered the fray, a splinter group from the NVA led by a former mayor. I really can’t bring myself to consider voting for the NVA, a nativist populist party who hate migrants (such as me). They’re not as bad as the extreme Vlaams Belang, who are not standing here, but that’s not saying much. The fact that the former mayor has split from them is the best thing about him.
In the last election, the NVA were the biggest party locally, but three of the other four ganged up against them and out local administration has been led by the CDA (Christian Democrats) in partnership with the Greens and Socialists. (Apparently three of the seven elected NVA councillors have since left the party.)
The numbers on the left in the lower table refer to the order of the parties on the ballot paper.
This time around, a couple of things have changed, partly as a result of new legislation aroudn the local council elections. First of all, the party with the most votes automatically gets the position of mayor. Second, voting is no longer compulsory. Third, the Greens and Socialists are running a joint slate here called “Samen” (“Together”). In the last election, they had 34% of the votes between them and would have won 8 seats as a bloc, due to the way the voting system works. (The Imperiali method, if you’re interested.) As it was, the Socialists lost out on a second seat in 2018 by a mere three votes, and the Greens won five.
For the European and Flemish elections, the combined Green/Socialist vote exceeded that for NVA, and they weren’t that far behind in the election for the Belgian Chamber either.
In a municipal election there’s not all that much to choose between the candidates, and I’m broadly content with the current administration’s performance. My personal priority is to prevent NVA coming top and claiming the position of mayor, and it’s pretty clear that the best way to do that is to vote for the ‘Samen’ joint ticket of the Greens and Socialists. So that’s what I intend to do.
(I’ll actually be away on election day, so will either vote early or by proxy.)
As for the provincial elections, I’ll vote for one of the parties that wants to abolish the provinces; I don’t see the point of having them.
In an insomniac moment recently, I hit upon the memoirs of Herbert Hoover as a potential cure. The second volume of three, which deals with the successful years of his political career, starts with him organising at very short notice a visit to California by King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians. This was in 1919, and the royals had arrived in Washington the very day that President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a cerebral haemorrhage, so all of their official engagements in the capital had been cancelled; and the King and Queen knew Hoover from the war, where he become famous for his role coordinating international aid for Belgium.
Hoover managed to get accommodation for the royals in Santa Barbara, by promising official Belgian awards to everyone who helped. This led to a political problem (pages 8-9):
From the City Hall we went to the Palace Hotel, where we had engaged rooms for the King’s use prior to a public luncheon in his honor… I had no sooner returned to the King’s rooms than the Mayor descended upon me with the Order of the Crown, second class—glittering star, red ribbon, and all—in his hand, and a troubled look. The King had just put it on him. And the very next day, he was coming up for reelection. He felt certain that if he faced over a thousand people and reporters at the luncheon with this display of feudalism on his breast, he would lose thousands of votes. It was an emergency that called for quick action.
I suggested to His Honor that certain European cities had been decorated for valor; Verdun, for example, had received the Croix de Guerre. Why should he not speak at the luncheon, refer to this precedent, and go on to grow eloquent over the great honor conferred on the City of San Francisco? The Mayor thought this a stroke of genius. When he rose to speak, he held up the Order for all to see and in most eloquent terms accepted it on behalf of the city of which he had the honor to be chief magistrate, I sat next to the King, who turned to me and said, sotto voce, in the colloquialism of his youthful period as an American railroad man:
“What in blank is he talking about?”
“Pay no attention to the Mayor,” I replied. “He has his troubles. I’ll explain later on.” Which I did. The King was so interested that he asked me to telegraph him the result of the election. I was happy to inform him next night that the Mayor had been retained in office by an unusually handsome majority.
I had forgotten this episode when later I was called on to serve as pallbearer at Mr. Rolph’s funeral—he died Governor of California. On his breast was the button of the Belgian Order of the Crown.
We can date this precisely, because official records indicate that the election for mayor of San Francisco was on 2 November 1919 and that James Rolph won it with the biggest majority of his five victories for that position. (His opponent was Handsome Gene Schmitz, who had been previously sacked as mayor and imprisoned for extortion in 1907.)
But I was intrigued by a couple of points here.
Surely Hoover would have spoken French well enough for the King to speak to him discreetly in that language rather then in colloquial English?
And what did Hoover mean by King Albert’s “youthful period as an American railroad man”?
The first question is easy to resolve from the first volume of Hoover’s memoirs. His linguistic gifts were in fact minimal. Although lists of presidential trivia celebrate him as the only Chief Executive who spoke Chinese, he himself is much more modest (p 36):
With a natural gift for languages she [Lou Hoover, his wife] made great progress in the most difficult tongue in the world. I never absorbed more than a hundred words. But all our life afterwards she kept that hundred words in use between us by speaking Chinese to me on sotto voce occasions.
As for French, he notes (p 20) that he studied both French literature (which he passed) and German (which he failed) at Stanford, where he was in the very first class after the university opened in 1891. But I suspect that this French literature course may have been in English. In 1899 in China (p. 36) he notes:
I had armed myself with a supply of cheap paper translations of Balzac, Dumas, Zola, Victor Hugo, Rousseau, and Montaigne, so that I made at least a beginning of an education in French literature. It subsequently traveled the more solid road of Voltaire, Mirabeau, the Encyclopedists, and the other Revolutionaries
There is no suggestion of his reading the books in the original.
Between 1907 and 1912, Herbert and Lou Hoover translated the Latin text De re metallica by Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer) into English. Hoover notes (p. 118) that he mainly worked on the technical terms, while “Mrs. Hoover’s ability to read German and some French helped greatly”, which suggests that he was not comfortable with either language. In 1915 in Paris, after a day of fruitless negotiation with the French government, he notes with relief (p. 169) the intervention of a banker, “an elderly and distinguished looking Frenchman, who spoke perfect English”.
Although most Americans of his class would have been taught some French at school, Hoover lost both his parents before his tenth birthday, was adopted by an uncle in Oregon and then dropped out of high school to work in the family business. And being taught a subject does not mean that you learn it. He must have had at least tourist level French, but it was clearly not a working language for him, any more than Chinese was.
Going back to the question of King Albert’s days “as an American railroad man” (my fingers itch when typing that word, for me of course it’s usually “railway”): this story was told by the King to Hoover at their the first meeting in person (p. 186 of Hoover’s first volume):
When he was heir apparent, after his education at Oxford, the old King Leopold had sent him to get some American experience under the tutelage of James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway in which Leopold had a large interest. The Prince wanted no tourist visit, so he got from Mr. Hill a job as a fireman on the railway. He told me that it was the happiest period of his life. He even made up his mind to abandon his Belgian nationality and become an American. He was sure he would be promoted to be an engine driver in a few years and possibly a railroad president sometime. He thought either of them was a better job than that of being a king. Soon after he began to evidence such yearnings, the Belgian Minister at Washington turned up at Missoula and ordered him, on behalf of the King, to stop dreaming and go straight home. So ended his independence.
Well. The future King’s visit to America in March to June 1898 is very well documented – his diary (in French) has actually been published (with notes in Dutch, sorry). He went all over the country, from coast to coast, dipping into Mexico and Canada (and also visited two brothels in Seattle). James J. Hill and his sons are mentioned several times as offering him hospitality, but there is nothing about working as a fireman, and no mention of Missoula, Montana (the Great Northern Railway’s main junction point in the northwest).
I have not found any reliable record that Albert visited America other than in 1898 and 1919, and his life is pretty well documented. The story he told Hoover is simply inconsistent with his own diary of the trip. I think that he was playing a joke on Hoover in 1915, to exaggerate his affection for America. Obviously he did not say “what the blank…?” at the San Francisco lunch, but something much stronger. However there are plenty of other ways in which he could have picked up the English vernacular, including for instance the brothels in Seattle. So it’s a nice story, recounted by a king to a future president, but I suspect it is fictional.
We took a quick break to Antwerp last weekend, with the aim of looking at several of the museums there, though the Rubenshuis is closed until September. Unfortunately I had a dental emergency after we had visited the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (generally known as KMSKA) and we had to cut our trip short. But what we saw, we liked.
I was fascinated to learn that one of the KMSKA donors was Marie Bonaparte Wyse (1831-1902), born in Waterford to a niece of Napoleon’s and her English soldier lover; a notable hostess of Parisian literary salons, a novelist and journalist whose second husband was prime minister of Italy twice. The KMSKA keeps her bust and a portrait in a room dedicated to its donors; slightly in a corner, I felt, for such a remarkable woman.
The KMSKA has a ground floor of Old Masters and an upper floor of moderns, including James Ensor, and we took a good two and a half hours over it. I took a few photos but where the museum itself has made a better image available online, I’m using that.
Going into the museum you’re pretty much confronted with Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi. There’s a lot of Rubens elsewhere in Antwerp, and indeed there are a lot of Adorations of the Magi by Rubens, but KMSKA lucked out with this one – which is also the subject of a Suske en Wiske comic that I read many years ago.
My eye was also caught by a couple of lesser known pieces among the Old Masters. This is an Annunciation in the style of Rogier van der Weyden, but probably by one of his followers, dating from the 1400s. It’s actually really small, possibly larger on your screen than it is in real life, and I loved the fine detail, including the glimpse of landscape through the window and the vase in the foreground.
The Tower of Babel is a well-known topic, and the more famous versions are by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But his son Jan Brueghel the Elder did one too, somewhat in his father’s shadow; a river flowing past it, and a tunnel leading to it, with human figures running around organising things in the foreground.
Sticking with the family, I also loved Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Census at Bethlehem – this is a copy of his father’s well-known painting, though art historians think he was working from his father’s sketch book rather than from the painting itself./i
Moving forward in time, I was glad to see Theo van Rysselberghe represented; he is one of my favourite fin de siècle Belgian artists. This is a pointillist portrait of 23-year-old Marie Sèthe, a Frenchwoman and student of van Rysselberghe’s who was about to marry Belgian artist Henry van de Velde. French Wikipedia has a really interesting article about her links with William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley, and how she has been erased from art history.
At least Marie Sèthe is generally referred to by her own name in descriptions of this painting. Another of van Rysselberghe’s subjects, also married to one of his fellow artist friends, is simply referred to as “Mme Constantin Meunier”. With some effort, I tracked down her real name which was the rather lovely Léocadie Gorneaux, but she seems to have been even more erased from history than Marie Sèthe. This is from before van Rysselberghe’s pointillist period, but I think it’s a great portrait all the same.
And we have no name at all for Léon Frédéric’s nude model, who is visibly embarrassed that she is going to be preserved in full glory for the centuries; I found this a really striking painting. Its title is “Pudeur” in French, “Schroom” in Dutch, parsed as “Timidity” in the museum’s English translation though I’d have gone for “Modesty”, with overtones of reluctance and hesitation.
There are a couple of more recent artists whose style is less naturalistic and who caught my attention. Here’s James Ensor (KMSKA claims to have more art by him than anywhere else), with a bowl of azaleas:
Marc Chagall has a cat at his window:
And finally for now, Jan Brusselmans loves the colours and geometry and light in the Pajottenland, the area immediately west of Brussels.
Anyway, well worth the journey, even if the journey was curtailed.
Other Antwerp notes: We stayed at the Leonardo Hotel near the station at De Keyserlei 59, in a room at the back looking onto the Queen Astridplein. No air conditioning, and when we opened a window to avoid suffocating, the noise from the square was pretty loud. Would not really recommend, though bed and breakfast were decent enough. Nice Asian food, Malaysian dinner at the Kuala Lumpur, Statiestraat 10, on the first night and Japanese lunch at Umi Sushi, Groenplaats 8, before my dental problems became unignorable.
I would also add that thanks to the Belgian health system, my dental emergency was dealt with briskly and efficiently by the duty dentist in our municipality, who looked about 15 but clearly knows her stuff. She did the job for €102, of which €92.50 has already been refunded through the insurance system.
— C’est enfin toi, Lucien? lui dit une voix rauque dont l’accent lui sembla tout de suite affreux.
“Is that you at last, Lucien?” croaked a hoarse voice that instantly grated on his nerves.
I’m always on the lookout for actual science fiction set in Belgium, and this is a really interesting example, a reaction to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is repeatedly referenced in the text (though I don’t think you’d need to have read it to enjoy this).
Aline is a reserved and somewhat repressed Belgian literature lecturer, and one day waiting for her train home in Paris, the more liberated side of her personality splits off and takes over the body of Lucien, a cute young man who is taking the same train. The (short) book has Aline and Orlanda (as her incarnate other halfnames herself) navigating their identities and relationships through the streets of Brussels.
I really enjoyed this. Harpman writes herself into the book as a minor character, a science fiction-loving friend of Aline’s. The story ends a bit abruptly, but it’s tidy enough given the situation. You can get it here.
I wondered about the extent to which the duality of Aline/Orlanda, and the duality of Aline’s apartment which has two street addresses, intentionally reflects the cultural and linguistic dualities of Brussels and Belgium, but perhaps that is reaching a bit far and we only need to look at the fact that Harpman was a psychiatrist who brought her professional work to her fiction, and it’s rather obviously a story about integrating your personality.
Bechdel pass; Aline reminisces about teenage conversations with her mother in the first chapter. (And does Orlanda count as male or female for Bechdel purposes?)
The book won the 1996 Prix Médicis, awarded to an author who “n’a pas encore une notoriété correspondant à son talent”. Harpman’s first novel was published in 1958, but she took a twenty-year break from writing between 1966 and 1987 (she was born in 1929 and died in 2012). Her best known book is not actually Orlanda but a dystopian science fiction novel, I Who Have Never Known Men / Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, which I think I must now look out for, though most of her work seems to be non-genre. (I see also an alternative history, La Dormition des amants, which has been translated into German but not English.)
After the disappointment of Moroda, this was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna.
This post has been updated to include responses from Vooruit, Open VLD and PvdA.
You may remember that last week I asked ten Belgian political parties about their views on the excessively high import charges on small items shipped to Belgium from the UK with the Belgian state-owned postal company bpost, with a view to informing my vote in the coming elections.
As it happens I had another case today, of a friend who sent me some freebie academic books whose value is sadly more than the €45 threshold for a gift. A kind thought, but screwed by Belgian regulations; I will get the parcel returned to the sender, pick up the books via a UK contact, and Bpost will do all the work of handling the parcel and get nothing in return because of their greed.
Well, I have heard back from nine of those parties, three small and six larger. I’m sorry to report that six out of nine replies were pretty unsatisfactory. For your reference and amusement, this is what I got:
From the BLANCO Party, whose sole policy is that spoilt ballots and non-voters should be represented by an unoccupied seat in the new parliament:
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Hartelijk dank voor je interesse in Partij BLANCO.
Thank you very much for your interest in the BLANCO Party
Zoals je op onze website PartijBLANCO.be kan nalezen is het een essentieel en enige onderdeel van ons programma om geen enkel standpunt in te nemen betreffende andere thema’s dan hetgeen waar we als partij voor staan.
As you can read on our website PartijBLANCO.be, it is an essential and only [?] element of our programme not to take any position on any issues other than the one that we as a party stand for.
Wij met Partij BLANCO willen een keuze en zichtbare vertegenwoordiging geven aan de kiezers die vinden dat geen enkele partij hun stem nog verdient, Dat betekent dat ipv blanco of niet te stemmen, wat uiteindelijk toch maar meer steun en zetels geeft aan de verkozen partijen, er beter gestemd wordt op Partij BLANCO omdat die stem dan door ons geneutraliseerd wordt en geen enkele van de gevestigde, ook niet de extreme partijen, ten goede komt.
We in the BLANCO Party want to give a choice and visible representation to voters who feel that no party deserves their vote anymore. That means that instead of voting blank or not voting, which in the end only gives more support and seats to the elected parties anyway, it is better to vote for the BLANCO Party because that vote is then neutralised by us and does not benefit any of the established parties, including the extreme parties.
Een verkozene van Partij BLANCO zal zich bij elke stemming in het parlement onthouden behalve voor het wetsvoorstel dat we zelf ingediend zullen hebben om in de toekomst te kunnen stemmen voor een niet toegewezen zetel. Wanneer dit gerealiseerd is zal de Partij BLANCO ophouden met te bestaan.
An elected member of the BLANCO Party will abstain in any vote in parliament except for the legislative proposal that we ourselves will have tabled to vote for an unallocated seat in the future. When this is realised, the BLANCO Party will cease to exist.
Dus ok [sic] deze reden kan en zal de Partij BLANCO geen mening geven over wat je hier aanbrengt.
So for this reason, the BLANCO Party cannot and will not give an opinion on what you bring up here.
Ik wens je alvast wel veel succes om dit aan te kaarten bij andere instanties of partijen.
I do wish you every success in raising this with other bodies or parties.
Met vriendelijke groeten en dank je voor je begrip.
Kind regards and thank you for your understanding.
Full marks for courtesy and clarity; they do not care about my issue, and they have no interest at all in helping me with it. Definitely not getting my vote, but they did not lose my respect.
The right-wing New Flemish Alliance, N-VA sent me a brief but substantive answer from a headquarters policy worker.
Geachte meneer Whyte
Dear Mr. Whyte
Beste Nicholas
Dear Nicholas
Hartelijk dank voor uw mail.
Thank you very much for your mail.
Wij willen dat Bpost een volledig privébedrijf wordt en dat er meer concurrentie in de sector komt. Als u niet tevreden bent van de service van Bpost kan u dan eenvoudig omschakelen naar een andere firma.
We want Bpost to become a completely private company and to have more competition in the sector. If you are not satisfied with Bpost’s service you can then easily switch to another company.
This was followed by some boilerplate about where to find out more about the party’s policies and candidates, signing off with an optimistic
Wij hopen u hiermee voldoende te hebben geïnformeerd.
We hope this has given you sufficient information.
Well, yes, in a sense. The thing is that if someone outside Belgium has sent me a parcel, I don’t get to choose whether or not it comes via Bpost, but I do have to pay Bpost’s exorbitant charges if I want to receive my goods. I cannot, as they put it, “easily switch to another company”, and it is difficult to see how diversification in the Belgian market is going to help me. Essentially this gaslighting reply tells me that, as with the BLANCO Party, N-VA’s ideological perspective matters more to them than my own lived experience. I wasn’t likely to vote for them anyway, but now I definitely won’t.
Late addition 1: I posted this blog on Tuesday 28 May, and on Wednesday 29 May I got a reply from the centre-left Vooruit (formerly the Flemish Socialist Party).
Dag Nicholas,
Hi Nicholas,
Bedankt voor je mail. De kosten waar je over spreekt zijn administratieve kosten die Bpost aanrekent, en dus niet de invoerrechten of de btw (waar politici zelf over beslissen).
Thank you for your email. The costs you are talking about are administrative costs that Bpost charges, and thus not import duties or VAT (which politicians decide on themselves).
Het gaat hier dus voornamelijk over een gevolg van Brexit. Dat is een jammerlijke zaak, maar daar hebben wij niet voor gekozen in België. Wij vinden het als Vooruit belangrijk dat de consument goed geïnformeerd wordt over alle kosten. We hebben daar ook de minister over ondervraagd. Dat moet duidelijk en transparant zijn, maar de administratieve kosten worden intern door Bpost bepaald. De politiek kan een publiek bedrijf daar niet zomaar iets opleggen.
So this is mainly a consequence of Brexit. That is a pity, but we did not choose that in Belgium. As Vooruit, we think it is important that consumers are well informed about all costs. We also questioned the minister about that. It has to be clear and transparent, but the administrative costs are determined internally by Bpost. Politics cannot just impose something on a public company there.
Bedankt voor het sturen.
Thank you for sending.
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
I’m not sure if this is better or worse than N-VA. They too refuse to do anything, but not because of free market ideology, but because the powers of the state are too limited. Anyway, they intend to do nothing for me, and I shall return the favour.
Late addition 2: On 30 May I heard back from the liberal Open VLD. Some of you may need clarification that in Belgium (and France) “liberal” means economically right-wing, rather than socially left-wing as in the USA. Their reply was pretty much the same as I got from N-VA:
Geachte heer Whyte
Dear Mr Whyte
Beste Nicholas
Dear Nicholas
We hebben uw mail correct ontvangen en met de nodige aandacht gelezen. Alvast bedankt om deze problematiek bij ons aan te kaarten.
We have received your email correctly and read it with due consideration. Thank you in advance for raising this issue with us.
Het feit dat Bpost 18,50 euro rekent voor douaneformaliteiten is geen Belgisch wetgeving, maar Bpost policy. Of deze 18,50 euro representatief is voor de effectieve kost van de douaneformaliteiten, dat kunnen we niet zeggen.
The fact that Bpost charges 18.50 euros for customs formalities is not Belgian law, but Bpost policy. Whether this 18.50 euros is representative of the effective cost of customs formalities, we cannot say.
Wel kunnen we u meegeven dat onze partij wil afzien van onze deelname in Bpost en Bpost van de subsidie-infuus willen halen. Op die manier zorgen we ervoor dat koerierdiensten eerlijk met elkaar kunnen concurreren. Als Bpost geen quasi monopolie heeft op de pakjesmarkt in België, kunnen andere koeriers misschien dezelfde dienst aanbieden, maar minder douanekosten aanrekenen aan consument. U kan dit ook terugvinden in ons verkiezingsprogramma, heel concreet onder resolutie 220.
But we can tell you that our party wants to renounce our participation in Bpost and take Bpost off the subsidy drip. That way, we will ensure that courier services can compete fairly with each other. If Bpost does not have a quasi monopoly on the parcel market in Belgium, other couriers may be able to offer the same service but charge less customs fees to consumers. You can also find this in our election programme, very specifically under resolution 220.
Resolutie 220: De overheid trekt zich terug uit een aantal sectoren. Ze treedt terug uit sectoren zoals telecom, post, banken en de uitbating van bedrijfsrestaurants, arbeidsbemiddeling, congrescentra of vakantiecentra. We privatiseren Bpost en Proximus. We liberaliseren het openbaar vervoer. De overheid stelt een duidelijk kwalitatief kader op voor de organisatie van openbaar vervoer en houdt zich niet bezig met het uitvoeren ervan. Dit moet maximaal aan de private sector uitbesteed worden.
Resolution 220: The government is withdrawing from a number of sectors. It is withdrawing from sectors such as telecoms, post, banking and the operation of company restaurants, employment services, convention centres or holiday centres. We are privatising Bpost and Proximus. We will liberalise public transport. The government sets a clear qualitative framework for the organisation of public transport and is not concerned with its implementation. This should be outsourced to the private sector as much as possible.
[paragraph of campaign boilerplate]
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
Unlike all the others, the message was not signed by a human being. (Was it written by an AI, I wonder?)
Anyway, as with the others, Open VLD has no intention of doing anything to help, and explained their reasoning for not doing anything in slightly more detail, which I respect although it does not incline me to vote for them.
Next is from the Belgische Unie – Union Belge, whose policy is to abolish all of the regional and community structures and transfer their powers to the central government and to the provinces. Their leader sent me this personal reply.
Meneer Whyte,
Mr Whyte,
Mijn excuses voor mijn laat antwoord. U begrijpt dat het erg druk is voor mij.
I apologise for my late reply. You understand that things are very busy for me.
Uw vraag gaat over de kosten van een autonoom “openbaar” bedrijf. Openbaar in die zin dat de staat er een meerderheidsparticipatie van 51% in heeft.
Your question is about the cost of an autonomous “public” company. Public in the sense that the state has a majority 51% stake in it.
Het probleem dat u aanhaalt, kende ik niet in die zin dat ik niet wist dat er zo’n grote prijsverschillen zijn.
I did not know the problem you raise in the sense that I did not know that there are such large price differences.
Normaal houdt de regering zich niet bezig met het beheer van een autonoom bedrijf.
Normally, the government is not involved in the management of an autonomous company.
De regering zou dit eens met BPost moeten bespreken, ook al lijkt het mij dat de baas van BPost dit soort beslissingen moet nemen en niet de regering. De regering kan wel druk uitoefenen om die kost te doen dalen. Het gaat uiteindelijk om de concurrentiepositie van een belangrijk Belgisch bedrijf.
The government should discuss this with BPost at some point, even though it seems to me that the boss of BPost should take such decisions, not the government. The government can, however, exert pressure to bring that cost down. It is ultimately about the competitive position of an important Belgian company.
Als verkozen parlementslid zou ik hierover in de Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers een parlementaire vraag kunnen stellen.
As an elected MP, I could ask a parliamentary question about this in the Chamber of Representatives.
Ik hoop dat ik volledig op uw vraag heb geantwoord.
I hope I have fully answered your question.
Beste groeten,
Best regards,
So, this loses marks on several grounds. First, no empathy is expressed for the problem. Second, it is not clear if he actually thinks anything should be done; he seems to say both that the government should not interfere and that it should. Finally, he doesn’t even commit firmly to asking a parliamentary question. So, not getting my vote.
I mentioned in my previous post that I had brought this problem up with one of the sitting MPs for our area a few years ago, and that she more or less told me to go pound rocks. I will reveal now that it was Els van Hoof of the Christian Democrats (CD&V), now running for re-election under the slogan “Who Els?”. I did not write to her last week, but instead contacted the party headquarters and the lead candidate of the provincial list. I got a reply from a policy worker in the central party secretariat as follows:
Geachte heer Whyte,
Dear Mr Whyte,
Onze voorzitter heeft uw bericht goed ontvangen waarvoor dank.
Our leader has received your message well, for which thanks.
We lezen uw klacht:
We read your complaint:
‘De invoerrechten zijn voordeliger in de ons omringende landen dan wat in België door BPOST wordt aangerekend op boeken die u bestelt in het V.K.’
‘Import duties are more advantageous in neighbouring countries than what is charged in Belgium by BPOST on books you order in the U.K.’
Zoals u wel weet zijn we op enkele weken verwijderd van de verkiezingen. Onze voorzitter en vele collega’s zijn nu in campagnemodus. Zij bevinden zich vooral op de baan en niet op kantoor, noch achter hun PC.
As you are well aware, we are just weeks away from the elections. Our leader and many colleagues are now in campaign mode. They are mostly on the road and not in the office, nor at their PCs.
De desbetreffende adviseur is met campagneverlof omdat hijzelf kandidaat is bij de Federale verkiezingen. Ik kan u dus geen afdoend antwoord bezorgen op uw vraag over bpost, helaas.
The relevant adviser is on leave because he himself is a candidate in the Federal elections. So I cannot provide you with a conclusive answer to your question about bpost, unfortunately.
Daar komt nog bij dat het parlement ontbonden is waardoor we ook geen schriftelijke of mondelinge vraag aan de betrokken minister kunnen stellen.
On top of that, parliament has been dissolved so we cannot put a written or oral question to the minister concerned either.
Maar ik lees ook dat u al een oplossing heeft gevonden en dat u dankzij uw vrienden in het V.K. dan toch deze extra douanekosten kan vermijden.
But I also read that you have already found a solution and that, thanks to your friends in the UK, you can avoid these extra customs charges after all.
Ik breng uw vraag alsnog onder de aandacht van onze adviseur. Hij zal zeker niet nalaten, zodra hij uit campagneverlof is, uw vraag te behandelen.
I will still bring your question to the attention of our adviser. He will certainly not fail to address your question as soon as he back from the campaign.
Dank u voor uw begrip en vriendelijke groeten,
Thank you for your understanding and kind regards,
Full marks for respectful tone, but none at all for content. “We’re all very busy” is of course completely true for any political party in campaign mode; I’ve been there myself and I have some sympathy. However, I note that the replies that I got from all three of the micro-parties were personal notes from the party leaders themselves, one of whom is a sitting MP running for re-election. Another sitting MP running for re-election replied on behalf of one of the other large parties who got back to me. All seven of the other parties gave me a policy-led reply, even if it wasn’t a very good one. Since the CD&V did not feel it worth while to give me a serious answer, I won’t waste any more time thinking about them.
Though I did appreciate the fact that the Christian Democrats encouraged me to evade the Belgian charges entirely. That’s the sort of loyalty to country that you want to see from a party that has been in government for 130 of the last 140 years. (Counting governments-in-exile.)
Late addition 3: On 4 June, two weeks after I first wrote and five days before the election, I heard back from the local lijsttrekker for the hard left PvdA. I actually voted PvdA in my first Belgian election, so was interested to see this response in particular. He said:
Beste,
Hello,
Onze standpunt is dat post een publieke dienst zou moeten zijn. In die zin zijn wij tegen de liberalisering van die markt die met zich mee hoge prijzen (bpost) en heel slechte werkomstandigheden (zie postNL) heeft gebracht. Bpost is nog steeds een overheidsbedrijf maar wordt gerund als een privé-bedrijf die winst moet maken om te concurreren met bedrijven als postNL of DPD die met een keten van onderaannemers werken om zo de lonen en werkomstandigheden nog meer te drukken.
Our position is that mail should be a public service. In that sense, we are against the liberalisation of that market which has brought with it high prices (bpost) and very poor working conditions (see postNL). Bpost is still a public company but is run as a private company that has to make a profit in order to compete with companies like postNL or DPD that work with a chain of subcontractors in order to further reduce wages and working conditions.
Wij willen dus de prijzen van bpost verlagen en een kwaliteitsvolle dienstverlening garanderen, ookal gaat ten koste van een beetje winst.
So we want to lower bpost’s prices and guarantee a quality service, even if at the cost of a little profit.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
I think this is a fine general reply; in summary, “we will throw money at the problem until it is solved”. I find it a little short on specifics with regard to the import of low-value goods, which the two other parties who responded did give me, but I give PvdA good marks for trying.
Late addition 4: A campaign officer from the central PvdA also got back to me on 6 June with this rather insubstantial response, which at least does not contradict what I got from the local candidate.
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Ik moet u helaas teleurstellen, op dit moment hebben wij daar geen standpunt over.
I regret to disappoint you, at the moment we do not have a position on that.
Wij zijn voorstander van een post in publiek beheer, een bedrijf dat niet gedreven is door winst maar door goede en betaalbare dienstverlening voor de mensen.
We are in favour of a publicly managed post office, a company driven not by profit but by good and affordable services for the people.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
This was the only party where both of my messages got replies.
The best reply from the microparties was the newly founded Voor U, set up by an MP from the Liberal Open VLD party, who parted company with them late last year. Looking at the party’s programme, I find them well to the right of me, though with some points that I approve of – abolishing the provinces, for instance. I got a personal reply from the founder and leader, who is also the lead candidate in Flemish Brabant.
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Dank u voor uw bericht.
Thank you for your message.
Het probleem dat u aankaart moet inderdaad dringend opgelost worden.
The problem you raise indeed needs to be solved urgently.
Mijn zoon studeerde in Engeland en ik ben er de afgelopen jaren vaak geweest.
My son studied in England and I have been there many times in recent years.
De Brexit is een historische vergissing. Ik hoop dat de Britten dat rechtzetten.
Brexit is a historic mistake. I hope the British will correct it.
Die douanekosten vind ik een soort EU pesterij waar we vanaf moeten. Er zou een limiet moeten komen op douanekosten bvb douanekosten mogen nooit meer bedragen dan 5% van de kostprijs van het goed (als er gehandeld wordt tussen democratische landen met een vrije markt).
I think these customs fees are a kind of EU bullying that we should get rid of. There should be a limit on customs fees e.g. customs fees should never exceed 5% of the cost price of the goods (when trading between democratic countries with a free market).
Ik heb [X] in cc gezet. Zij is onze EU lijsttrekker.
I have copied [X] on this. She is our EU list leader.
Beste groeten,
Best regards,
Full marks for empathy. Full marks for supplying an alternative policy solution. However it’s a bit ambitious to rewrite the EU VAT code single-handed, and I wouldn’t vote for a party purely on that basis unless I felt that they had a clear sense of how it could be negotiated with the other 26 member states, the Commission and the Parliament. Also, the terminology of “EU bullying” is a bit unfair when it’s specifically the Belgian charges that I was concerned with. Still, the best of the three micro-party replies by some way.
Late addition 5: I also received a reply from the Voor U lijsttrekker in Antwerp; I am not quite sure in what capacity, on 6 June, the day before the election. He wrote:
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Wat betreft Bpost: het is duidelijk dat deze organisatie inefficiënt is en zoals we gezien hebben ook niet vies van schimmige zaken. Hoog tijd voor echte concurrentie en een volledige depolitisering ervan.
As far as Bpost is concerned, it is clear that this organisation is inefficient and, as we have seen, not averse to shadowy dealings either. High time for real competition and complete depoliticisation.
Wij hopen op uw stem morgen.
We hope for your vote tomorrow.
Vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
Sympathetic but short on detail.
I’m glad to say that one of the mainstream parties came back with a thoroughly satisfactory reply, and unless someone else comes up with anything better, this reply probably gets my vote – the online stemtest indicated anyway that they are among the closest of the parties to my own views on many other issues. The provincial lead candidate, who is also a sitting MP, sent me this:
Dag Nicholas,
Hello Nicholas,
Wij begrijpen uw vraag. De ombudsmannen post hebben deze problematiek ook aangestipt in het jaarverslag. De situatie inzake postzendingen met de UK is complexer geworden sinds Brexit. Bovendien is er een nieuwe Europese richtlijn die strengere regels oplegt voor e-commerce met landen buiten de EU. Bpost moet aan deze regels voldoen, en dat brengt inderdaad kosten met zich mee.
We understand your question. The postal ombudsmen also touched upon this issue in their annual report. The situation regarding postal shipments with the UK has become more complex since Brexit. Moreover, there is a new European directive imposing stricter rules for e-commerce with countries outside the EU. Bpost has to comply with these rules, and this does indeed entail costs.
Wat de tarieven van bpost betreft, deze worden autonoom bepaald door het bedrijf, daar komt de overheid niet in tussen. Bpost heeft ook geen monopolie-positie, dus u kan eventueel de prijzen vergelijken met andere spelers.
As for bpost’s rates, they are determined autonomously by the company, the government does not intervene. Bpost does not have a monopoly position either, so you can possibly compare prices with other players.
Wat betreft uw vraag inzake geschenken: ook dit is een vaak terugkerende klacht. Indien bpost uw zending niet als geschenk heeft geïdentificeerd, dan raden wij u aan klacht in te dienen. Bpost verzekert er ons van dat dan de nodige rechtzetting gebeuren.
As for your question regarding gifts: this is also a frequent complaint. If bpost has not identified your shipment as a gift, we recommend you file a complaint. Bpost assures us that the necessary rectification will then take place.
Overkoepelend heeft de Minister van Post, op basis het jaarverslag van de ombudsman post, een dialoog gestart met bpost en de FOD Economie om te kijken waar zaken verbeterd kunnen worden.
Overall, based on the annual report of the postal ombudsman, the Minister of Post has initiated a dialogue with bpost and the Federal Public Service for the Economy to see where things can be improved.
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
So, full marks again for empathy with the problem; full marks for explaining the background to the existing practice and for addressing my point about the inefficiency of the service; and full marks for pointing to a policy path forward. (Though as with the N-VA, I fear he is thinking wishfully about the reality of bpost’s monopoly position.)
This was from the representative of Groen, the Flemish Green party, whose deputy prime minister Petra De Sutter is in fact the responsible minister in the outgoing government, so perhaps they had an advantage; but the chap who wrote to me is not directly responsible for that dossier, so either he is very well-informed, or else he actually did some research before replying.
I will vote for him, and Groen therefore gets my support for the Federal House of Representatives – as previously noted, I am voting for Volt EU for the European and Flemish Parliaments.
Unless, that is, one of the other parties gets back to me with an even better reply. Let the record show that I contacted the other micro-party, L’Unie, eight days ago, with a chaser message four days ago, and have not heard back from any of them. There are twelve days left until the election.
Looking for culture on the public holiday last Monday, I found that most of the fine arts museum in Brussels were closed, but the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren was open. It was a very long time since we last visited, so I headed off to explore; it’s an hour’s drive from us and I didn’t persuade anyone else to come with me.
I really enjoyed it. It actually starts from the Neanderthals and works through my old friends the Michelsbergers before getting to the Celts and Romans. Tongeren was the biggest Roman town in what is now Belgium and they have a lot of archaeological finds.
As so often, I was especially struck by the three-dimensional representations of the human body. This is Amor and Psyche cuddling, with Mercury looking on from behind – very small figures all three.
Here’s an even smaller but very cute lamp oil holder.
Here is (headless) Jupiter trampling two men with tentacles for legs. I am impressed by the expression on the face of the first tramplee.
Here is a broken vase from a household shrine which would have originally had seven face representing the seven planets who give their names to the days of the week.
Here is a very characterful Venus, on loan from the Vatican collection. You can see that her right arm would originally have crossed her chest to rest her hand on her left arm, and her left hand would have been modestly on her right thigh.
There is also a temporary exhibition making the argument that most of the classical statues were brightly painted, and extrapolating from the traces of pigment left on them. I don’t know how reliable this is, but the results are certainly striking. Here, for instance, is the proposed original appearance of Augustus:
We have elections coming up on 9 June, for the European Parliament, the Belgian Federal House of Representatives, and the Flemish Parliament. For two of these my choice is simple: my old friend Sophie in ‘t Veld, who has been a Dutch MEP for twenty years, is running for the European Parliament again, but this time as the lead candidate in the Dutch-speaking Belgian electoral college for the new pan-European political party Volt Europa, and another friend, Bianca Bäumler, is also on that list. The lead Volt Europa candidate in the French-speaking Belgian electoral college, Suzana Carp, is also a friend, as is Rick Zednik, one of the candidates in Slovakia, but I can’t vote for them.
Volt Europa also has candidates for the Flemish Parliament in the Flemish Brabant constituency, where we live, and one of them is a chap who I know very vaguely back in Livejournal days. He is not in a position where he is at all likely to get elected, but I’ll give them my vote at regional level too. They are a small new party, and their chances in either the European or Flemish Parliaments are not brilliant, but I’m backing them anyway. A sceptical colleague said to me, “Yeah, Volt is a party full of people like you, Nicholas”; personally I’m not sure that that is such a bad thing – people like me deserve to be represented too!
However, Volt were not able to get candidates registered in our district for the Belgian Federal House of Representatives (they do have lists in Brussels and Antwerp), so for what is arguably the most important election, I consider myself a free agent. Back in 2009, my first election as a Belgian citizen, I asked all of the parties about their position on the burka ban, and voted accordingly. I also asked the local parties about local issues for the municipal elections in 2012 (with a late response) and 2018.
For the last Belgian elections I used online resources to help me decide. This time I’m going to take a number of factors into account, but one important issue for me is the extortionate charges levied by bpost, the Belgian postal service, on parcels sent here from outside the EU. I have therefore written to all of the political parties who have candidates in Flemish Brabant (except for the extreme right Vlaams Belang, who will never get my vote anyway) as follows – I sent the Dutch version, but am providing the English here for clarity:
Hello,
Hallo,
I have been a Belgian citizen since 2008, and I am deciding how to vote in the coming federal elections.
Ik heb sinds 2008 de Belgische nationaliteit en ik beslis hoe ik ga stemmen bij de komende federale verkiezingen.
One issue is of particular concern to me. I collect old books – not expensive ones, but usually in English and usually for sale from small businesses in the UK. Many of these businesses are not registered for the EU Import One Stop Shop (IOSS), because they have lost their trade with the EU since Brexit.
Eén kwestie baart me bijzonder veel zorgen. Ik verzamel oude boeken – geen dure, maar meestal in het Engels en meestal te koop bij kleine bedrijven in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Veel van deze bedrijven zijn niet geregistreerd voor de EU Import One Stop Shop (IOSS), omdat ze sinds de Brexit hun handel met de EU zijn kwijtgeraakt.
If the seller is not registered for VAT, then I must pay €18.50 for “douaneformaliteiten” if the value of the book is less than €150, and €39 if the value is more. Usually the value of the book is less than €10, so I am paying almost twice its value just for the douaneformaliteiten.
Als de verkoper niet btw-geregistreerd is, dan moet ik €18,50 betalen voor douaneformaliteiten als de waarde van het boek minder dan €150 is, en €39 als de waarde meer is. Meestal is de waarde van het boek minder dan €10, dus alleen al voor de douaneformaliteiten betaal ik bijna het dubbele van de waarde.
Because of EU rules, all EU countries must make some charge for this service, but bpost charges more than any of the neighbouring countries. Post NL charges €13. Post Luxembourg charges €5 if the value of the parcel is less than €22, and €15 if it is more. La Poste in France charges a maximum of €8. Deutsche Post AG charges €6.50.
Vanwege de EU-regels moeten alle EU-landen een bepaald bedrag vragen voor deze dienst, maar bpost brengt meer kosten in rekening dan alle buurlanden. Post NL rekent €13. Post Luxemburg rekent €5 als de waarde van het pakket minder is dan €22, en €15 als het meer is. La Poste in Frankrijk rekent maximaal €8. Deutsche Post AG rekent €6,50.
In addition, the service that we get from paying these fees is very poor. I have sometimes had to pay douaneformaliteiten for gifts, although they are supposed to be exempt. One of my parcels was lost between customs and bpost for six months.
Bovendien is de service die we krijgen als we deze kosten betalen erg slecht. Ik heb soms douaneformaliteiten moeten betalen voor geschenken, terwijl die vrijgesteld zouden moeten zijn. Eén van mijn pakketten is zes maanden lang verloren gegaan tussen de douane en bpost.
Bpost is now losing my business, because I now find it easier to ship my UK purchases to friends in the UK and pick up from them in person when I cross the Channel.
Bpost verliest nu mijn zaken, omdat ik het nu gemakkelijker vind om mijn Britse aankopen naar vrienden in het Verenigd Koninkrijk te sturen en ze persoonlijk op te halen als ik het Kanaal oversteek.
What is your party’s stance on the exorbitant fees charged by bpost?
Wat is het standpunt van uw partij over de exorbitante kosten die bpost aanrekent?
Bpost is of course a private company, but its majority shareholder is the Belgian federal government, and even if that were not the case, the Belgian federal government can act to regulate permissible charges. I’ll report back in due course on what, if anything, I get from the parties. (I should add that I complained about this in 2021 to one of our current local MPs, who replied two months later telling me to lump it; her party therefore starts at a disadvantage for getting my vote.)
Incidentally, of the ten parties with federal election lists in Flemish Brabant (other than Vlaams Belang, who I didn’t check), six had central email addresses, three had online forms and one had no means of contact at all. Of the ten lead candidates, seven had public email addresses, one had an online form and I contacted the other two via LinkedIn messaging.
It’s the first sunny and warm Saturday of the year, and the rest of the family all had other plans, and also I discovered that I had missed half a dozen megaliths to the east of us in my previous explorations of Belgium’s prehistoric heritage. So I recruited H, once again my partner in crime, and we spent the day exploring them.
The big news is that over at Wéris, where I have been a couple of times previously, a new alignment of standing stones has been discovered, excavated and re-erected, giving an intensified sense of the sacred landscape of the town. I’m glad to say that it is in the same linear arrangement as most of the known Wéris monuments. This was the fourth of the seven new places (to me) that we visited, so it’s halfway down this page.
Holsteen
(50.996000N 5.417000E)
The very first rock that we visited is the Holsteen, in an attractive park in Zonhoven, northeast of Hasselt and northwest of Genk. The setting is lovely, but the stone itself a little disappointing despite its size; it appears to be a natural outcrop, which was however used by Stone Age humans for sharpening their tools.
The Devil’s Stones of Langerlo
(50.945160N 5.498960E)
On the other side of Genk, these are a little more exciting, two of them aligned with a rather ugly flower pot, and a Christian chapel in the background:
And a third a bit farther off at the other end of the green.
The Devil’s Dolmen
(50.601360N 5.666010E)
Next was a long drive south to Fléron on the outskirts of Liège, for what was frankly the least impressive thing we saw today; some rather small overgrown rocks at the base of a steep slope.
Someone had shoved a brick inside it, and it had a bit of a Stone’enge vibe, as in Spın̈al Tap.
The Danthine Alignment (and Wéris)
(50.325970N 5.516960E)
On the other hand, the entire day’s trip was justified by the new alignment of standing stones at Wéris. These were discovered a couple of years ago, and re-erected last year; they had been buried in the 16th or 17th century, presumably as part of the fight against superstition. They’re a spectacular addition to the already well-endowed spiritual geography of the location.
Still photos don’t give a really good sense of the alignment, so here’s a blustery video.
It was H’s first visit to Wéris, so we had to also visit the two big dolmens, both within easy walking distance of the new alignment with is directly between them. Here’s Wéris I, in photographs taken today and in 2009:
And the dolmen and nearby menhirs at Wéris II.
Great Stone of Ellemelle
(50.464000N 5.432000E)
The Great Stone of Ellemelle is either a fallen menhir or a dolmen with its legs knocked out. Stark and alone in a field far from anywhere, it’s pretty big but doesn’t have much to say.
Menhir du Grand Bois (Jehay Castle)
(50.575688N 5.323281E)
The second last of today’s stones has been transferred to the formal gardens of Jehay Castle, whose owner, Count Van den Steen, married one of the last heiresses of the Marquesses of Ormond, and left it to the Belgian state on his death in 1999. The building is undergoing refurbishment but is spectacular.
The menhir itself is regarded as of dubious authenticity by experts, but is nicely presented for what it is.
There are numerous statues in the grounds, all I think by Count Van den Steen himself. This nymph is particularly striking:
Time was pressing, so we did not give the castle the attention it deserved, but I’ll definitely go back some time – only 5 euro for entry (and just 2.50 if you are only doing the gardens).
The Stone of Saint-Gitter
(50.746175N 5.063662E)
B lives in the vicinity of the last stone of the trip and joined us for that part of the itinerary, and in fact I realised that I had brought her to the site in 2010 without noticing that there was a menhir there too. The site combines a tumulus with a small museum showing the Merovingian palace of Pepin the Elder, who was Charlemagne’s great-great-great-grandfather and therefore probably an ancestor of yours too, if you are of European descent.
The Stone of Saint Gitter has been moved to a corner of the museum, and B enjoyed the feel of it against her tummy and also liked watching the shadown of her fingers on the rock surface.
On the way back, we took her to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, where as usual she enjoyed lighting a candle.
So, in summary, Wéris remains a key Belgian attraction; Jehay is worth a return visit; and some day I’ll find time to go to the Sint-Gitter museum when it is open. Thanks to H (and B in her own way) for travelling companionship.
From the upper windows of the Golden Court, Brunhild saw not just the river Moselle and the bridge spanning it. She could also see straight down into a small amphitheatre inside the city walls. Gladiator games had long been outlawed, but exotic animal hunts and bear baiting were still held there. These, sadly, seemed to be the main entertainment. The new queen quickly discovered that even what luxuries the Merovingian courts offered left something to be desired. There were mimes and actors in residence for instance – predecessors of the minstrels and jesters later found in medieval courts – but mostly, these performers recited long-winded national epics.
This is a book about two queens of the sixth century, both probably born in the early 540s: Fredegund of Neustria (died 597) and Brunhilda of Austrasia (died 613). You may not have heard of Neustria or Austrasia; these were old kingdoms of the pre-Charlemagne era, the tail end of the Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis, King of the Franks, in the late 5th century. This is a period which we learned nothing at all about at school in Belfast, and if your native language is not French, Dutch or German, you’re probably in the same boat. My previous exposure to it amounted to a 2021 exhibition of Merovingian metalwork in Mariemont, off to the south of Belgium.
Neither of the two queens was in fact a Merovingian by birth, but they married two brothers, grandsons of Clovis, who ruled between them large chunks of what are now northern France, central Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of the Netherlands, with Burgundy also in the mix at various times.
Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess from Spain, who married Sigebert of Austrasia (the eastern bit) in 567. He was murdered, probably on her orders, in 575 and she ruled in Metz off and on, in her own right and as regent for the next generation, for four decades. Fredegund was a slave girl from the western chunk, Neustria, ruled from Soissons; she caught the eye of Chilperic, the local overlord, and replaced his wife (Brunhilda’s sister) as queen.
Brunhilda and Fredegund feuded bitterly until Fredegund’s death in 597, but eventually in 613 Chilperic and Fredegund’s son Clotaire managed to conquer both kingdoms, and Brunhilda (who must have been well into her 60s at this point) was executed by a gruesome method which remains obscure but definitely involved horses.
Both women have been largely written out of history. Clotaire emphasised his own legitimate descent from Clovis, not his usurping aunt or indeed his low-born mother. No men wanted to commemorate women who had survived and ruled for many years. The major contemporary witness, Gregory of Tours, is very partisan and clearly incomplete. Fredegund’s tomb has an image of her whose face has been erased. Brunhilda’s tomb has been lost, apart from two chunks of marble.
Shelley Puhak has done an entertaining job of pulling together the threads of history and legend to tell the story of the two women. She occasionally falters under the weight of detail, and at other times is forced to adopt a very chatty style to compensate for the absence of reliable sources, but one feels that she has done her best with what is available. I got what I wanted from The Dark Queens; you can get it here.
The largest menhir in Belgium is known as the Pierre Brunehaut; I visited it in February 2021. It is near to one of the many old roads known as chaussées Brunehaut in northern France and southern Belgium.
The Pierre Brunehaut near Tournai, which I visited in February 2021 with my friend J, who gives it a sense of scale.
Some speculate that the chaussées Brunehaut are the paths supposedly taken by the horses participating in her execution, but there are too many roads for that; I prefer to think that in her many years as queen, she dedicated state resources to the upkeep of the transport infrastructure, and (rather like Mussolini making the trains run on time) this has been dimly remembered by local lore. There are worse possible memorials.
As previously mentioned, last Christmas I got F a book about the craziest places of Belgium, liberally scattered around the kingdom, and not that many of them within easy reach. I did find one not too far away: the Post-Industrial Pagodas.
These 36 towers were built in 1999, from industrial cable spools, by singer, actor and artist Julos Beaucarne, to channel positive energy into the new millennium. They embodied a poem he had written in the early 1990s, for his album Tours, Temples & Pagodes Post-Industriels:
Le constructeur de pagodes veut toucher le ciel Planter des antennes immenses pour capter les messages Qui viennent du fin fond de la nuit et du bout du jour Il veut que le voyageur s’arrête et regarde soudain se déplier tous les plis de son âme
The pagoda builder wants to touch the sky Plant huge antennas to capture messages Which come from the depths of the night and the end of the day He wants the traveler to stop and suddenly watch all the creases of his soul unfold
Il veut pénétrer la matière même de l’univers Il veut faire signe à toutes les planètes, à toutes les galaxies Il veut lancer des messages, jeter des ponts entre tous les êtres, entre tout le vivant Le constructeur de pagodes, de temples et de tours médite sur la verticalité
He wants to penetrate the very matter of the universe He wants to signal to all the planets, to all the galaxies He wants to send messages, build bridges between all beings, between all living things The builder of pagodas, temples and towers meditates on verticality
Il récupère les matériaux usés dont plus personne ne veut Il les empile à la manière des enfants Petit Poucet, il sème sur son passage des repères géants Et ce faisant, il signe éperdument le paysage post-industriel
He recovers used materials that no one wants anymore He stacks them like children do Like Hop-o’-My-Thumb, he sows giant landmarks along his path And in doing so, he indelibly marks the post-industrial landscape
As the years wore on, the pagodas became increasingly dilapidated, as was always the artist’s intention.
The site of the pagodas is the farm of Wahenge, which has a pleasant but coincidental euphony with Stonehenge, near Beauvechain which is mainly famous for its air base.
It’s not too far off my route to and from the girls in Tienen, so I went to look for it last weekend, and was astonished to discover that the Post-Industrial Pagodas had simply vanished.
taken by me on 17 September 2023
It turned out that there was a simple explanation. In January 2021, eight months before Beaucarne’s death, he agreed with the landowner and the municipality that they would simply burn down the pagodas, leaving only a patch of scorched grass. One mysterious capsule and one surviving spool mark the scene.
also taken by me on 17 September 2o23
But apart from that, the Post-Industrial Pagodas are marked by their absence. Consider yourselves duly informed.
In one of my insomniac browsings of Wikipedia, I came across the interesting factoid that the valley of the River Meuse in Belgium is perhaps the second oldest river valley in the world, after an occasionally flowing river in the Australian desert.
I began to wonder if this could possibly be true. The argument is that between Charleville-Mezieres and Namur, the river cuts through Paleozoic rocks which were raised up to the surface between 320 and 340 million years ago, in what is called the Variscan or Hercynian orogeny, the process which created the Pyrenees, the mountains of southwestern Ireland, Cornwall, Devon, much of Wales, Brittany, the Ardennes, the Massif Central, the Vosges, Corsica, Sardinia, the Eifel, the Hunsrück, the Taunus, the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains. The Appalachians were being formed at the same time.
But the source cited by Wikipedia, Environmental History of the Rhine-Meuse Delta by P.N. Nienhuis, doesn’t say this at all. It says only that the river “transects the Paleozoic rock of the Ardennes Massif”. The Paleozoic era is basically anything before 250 million years ago. But the fact that the river cuts through rock of a certain age shows only that it is younger than those rocks, not that it is the same age.
Now, there is a thing that needs to be explained. The river has eroded its way through the Ardennes, producing an impressive gorge, and also terraces higher up the valley showing where the water level once was. In particular, it winds through the Rocroi Inlier, a chunk of ancient rock which the Franco-Belgian border winds through, all that is left of one of the offshore islands of the ancient lost continent of Avalonia.
The Rocroi Inlier is not soft rock; it’s hardened and mostly igneous, though crushed and faulted. So on the face of it, it seems odd that the Meuse flows across it, rather than turning west and feeding the Oise to join the Seine. The traditional theory, mentioned without adequate citation in Wikipedia, was proposed by Charles-Louis-Joseph-Xavier de la Vallée Poussin in 1875: that the river flowed north before the Ardennes ever rose and continued to erode its traditional path even as the hills rose around it. There are plenty of cases like this worldwide, the best known being the New River of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, which flows through the Appalachians and is thought to pre-date them.
Not everyone agrees that the Meuse is so old. One other explanation that I’ve seen and tend to reject is the idea that this is a case of stream capture: that the northern lower Meuse gradually eroded back across the granite to capture the southern higher waters. Stream capture is very clearly the case further up the Meuse in France, where the Moselle captured its upper streams. You can still see the old Meuse valley in the landscape west of Toul. But that’s in a flatter and more forgiving landscape than the Ardennes. I don’t see the Meuse gradually eroding southwards back through the granite, eventually breaking though to France.
There’s another problem too. It looks like the area of the Meuse valley may have been underwater during the Hettangian age, roughly 200 million years ago. That would rather kill the notion that the river could be as much as 320 million years old.
In fact, the current consensus appears to be that it is much younger. In their 2000 paper “Sediment budget and tectonic evolution of the Meuse catchment in the Ardennes and the Roer Valley Rift System”, Van Balen and four co-authors state as if it were generally accepted that “The Meuse river system developed in its current position despite the uplift of the Ardennes since the Eocene [which ended 34 million years ago]. In the Ardennes, the present-day system was to a large extent established in the Pliocene [5 to 2.5 million years ago]; only minor changes occurred in the pattern of the drainage system during the Quaternary [since 2.5 million years ago]. During the Plio–Pleistocene [the last 5 million years], the rivers incised and a terrace sequence developed[.]”
I am not a geologist, and my French is not all that good, but Francis Meilliez in his 2018 paper Le Massif Ardenno-Rhénan, un massif ancien en cure de rajeunissement also has the Meuse happily flowing north, finding its way through the faults in the crushed granite of the Rocroi Inlier, until the Ardennes and Rocroi Inlier very slowly rose in the last few tens of millions of years, the river eroding its way down to its current level. This would explain why the Meuse river terraces, showing where it was previously, are not especially ancient.
I’d love to read some more about this, but I’m satisfied for now. The Meuse is not really so very ancient as all that – certainly not as ancient as the Rhine – but these are still processes that take periods of time which are impossible for us to comprehend. It makes you feel rather small, really.
The header picture I’m currently using was taken last July on the Lesse, a tributary of the Meuse right in the middle of the Ardennes.
Anne and I had a little 24-hour excursion at the end of the long weekend just gone, mainly exploring the arrondissement of Avesnes-sur-Helpe in the département du Nord of the Hauts-de-France region, a small corner of the Republic that ended up French rather than Belgian due to the 1678 Treaty of Nijmegen which allowed Louis XIV to take it from the County of Hainaut. It has been rather neglected by its overlords in the 345 years since.
But before we got there, we stopped off at the Collegiate Church of St Ursmer in the small town of Lobbes near Charleroi. It is supposedly the oldest church in Belgium, and this year is celebrating the 1200th anniversary of its consecration in 823. Little is known of St Ursmer, a local boy who became bishop and is buried in the crypt (well, most of him; bits and bobs are in reliquaries). But the crisp, clean geometrical arches of the ninth-century church fabric are currently crowded with an exhibition of the iconography of the saint and how this affected the church.
The external view shows the ancient core and 19th-century spire.
St Ursmer’s major miracle was exorcising a demon from a nun, whose name has been forgotten, though artists agree that the demonic presence was expelled from her mouth.
The exhibition will stay in the church until, er, next Monday, and will then transfer to the former sacristy of the Abbey of Good Hope in Lobbes from 18 June, if you want to catch it there.
The church is only 10km from the border with France, and so we slipped across to the small French village of Sars-Poteries where various menhirs from the neighbourhood have been collected. My Celtic soul is still a bit revolted at the thought of moving the sacred monoliths from the places where their builders put them, but I suppose it is better than losing them altogether. One of them stands proud and upright in the centre of the village; the others recline in retirement nearby.
We stayed at Les Mout’ânes, a pension in the small town of Saint-Hilaire-sur-Helpe, where a luxurious double room with breakfast costs a mere € 89. Strongly recommended. They also have donkeys.
They don’t, unfortunately, do dinner for groups of less than four, so in the evening we headed down to La Petite Ferme de Lucien in Fourmies, a steakhouse in the style of an American diner except with French culinary standards. Very yummy.
On Monday morning we decided to explore the Parc naturel régional de l’Avesnois, which occupies most of the land surface of the arrondissement. This proved a little difficult; there are no real centres of tourist information, no established walks, and not a lot of information on the ground. We stopped at the arboretum in the Forest of Mormal near Locquignol where there are a couple of amusing wooden statues.
As we drove on to our next destination, we passed a sign labelled “Wilfred Owen”, and went back to investigate. Like all UKanian schoolkids, we were taught several of his gut-wrenching war poems in our English Literature classes. The house where he wrote his last letter to his mother on 31 October 1918 has been transformed into a large sculptural memorial, but sadly was not open on 1 May.
We parked there anyway and walked for twenty minutes through the woods to his grave in the nearby village of Ors; a few dozen British soldiers are buried in the municipal cemetery, including Wilfred Owen, who was killed exactly a week before the war ended. The woods were alive with birdsong and the cemetery was quiet. It was a thought-provoking walk.
I should add that I had consulted many French tourism websites about things to see in the arrondissement, and not one of them mentioned Wilfred Owen’s grave. We found it completely by accident.
Our destination at that point was the Matisse museum in the former bishop’s palace at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the town where he was born. As is often the case with such museums, most of his best known art is elsewhere – there are two other museums in France alone which have more of his work. But there is enough here to show his evolution as a painter, from the 1899 First Still Life with Orange:
…to the 1906/07 portrait of his daughter Marguerite:
…to his later experiments with cut-outs, as with the 1946 Océanie – La Mer.
Upstairs, the museum has a lot more art by modern artists – lots of Alberto Giacometti, some Miró, a Picasso, a few by Fernand Léger (who impressed me at the Kröller-Müller Museum last year); and a large collection of art by Auguste Herbin, another local boy who neither Anne nor I had previously heard of, but who completely wowed us. This is a case where almost none of his art is elsewhere and the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis has almost all of it. He started fairly representational, eg these early Chrysanthemums:
But then he went completely geometric in various media. Here’s a flat piece with the title Napoleon:
Here’s a more three-dimensional piece whose title I failed to record:
Here are two stools with Herbin covers:
And most spectacular of all, here’s a stained glass window, with the title Joy, that he designed for a local elementary school (this is an exact copy; the original is still in the school, where we later saw it from the outside).
This stunning museum charged us € 4 each as the cost of entry. I can certainly think of many occasions when I have spent five times as much to have five times less fun. It was practically empty and it was well worth the trip. (The same, sadly, could not be said for the lunch at the Restaurant du Musée Matisse across the street, where the service was slow and the food a bit disappointing.)
Finally we stopped off at Bavay for a look at the huge ancient Roman forum there; but unfortunately it was closed due to the bank holiday. We’ll have to go back.
For Christmas, I got F a book called De Gekste Plek van België, a list of 111 weird and wonderful places in this country, which is after all the home of surrealism; and this weekend I offered him his choice of place to visit for a day trip. He picked one of the Cubes of Herne – only one is mentioned in the book, but it turns out that there are five altogether. Belgian public art has its moments, and this is one of them.
Herne is about an hour’s drive from us, as far on one side of Brussels as we are on the other. A few years ago, local campaigners persuaded various funders (mostly taxpayers) to support the construction of the wooden cubes. They are all open in one way or another, all embrace the landscape and the surroundings, and four of the five celebrate the painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who among other things painted Flemish landscapes, though I am not aware of any that have been specifically tied to Herne.
The first cube (at 50.73154, 4.03759) commemorates Brueghel himself. Like all of them, it’s 3m x 3m x 3m. There’s a Little Free Library outside.
It’s a straightforward open box, with the words “connected”, “resilient”, “respectful” and “authentic” inscribed on one wall.Someone on Facebook asked when our album is gonna drop.
Thought to be a self-portrait of Brueghel.
The second cube (50.71373, 4.06526) commemorates Brueghels’ famous painting, “The Fall of Icarus”. (Some sources, including the information boards by the cubes themselves, have the identities of the second and third cubes the other way round; but checking local information I think this is Icarus and the next is Mayke.)
It sits in a river valley, with a pattern of open slats on the sides, maybe making you think of a catastrophic fall which leaves the surroundings untouched? Or possibly echoing the shapes of the original picture?
Icarus’ feet.
According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring
a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry
of the year was awake tingling near
the edge of the sea concerned with itself
sweating in the sun that melted the wings’ wax
unsignificantly off the coast there was
a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, William Carlos Williams
The third cube, “Mayken”, is named after Brueghel’s wife, Maria or Mayken Coeck. We have no records of what she looked like. She is said to have been a painter too, but no identified works have survived. The cube sits on a hill (at 50.74158, 4.10979) with good views of the surrounding countryside; it’s a long way from the centre of Herne.
We came seriously unstuck visiting the fourth cube (at 50.71207, 3.99217). It is named “Dulle Griet” after the woman in Flemish folklore who raided Hell, and is the subject of a very Boschian painting by Brueghel.
Perhaps the shape of the cube reflects the opening of Hell, a place of transition? But then why is it aligned with a distant church steeple?
It turns out that our gallant steed is not well suited for off-road action, and it managed to dig an impressive hole in the mud, attracting much scorn from passers by (including a club of elderly hunters with rifles). But a man came with a long cable and a thick accent and got us out of it.
Finally, the fifth cube, so far unnamed, sits outside a Dominican convent just north of the linguistic frontier (at 50.7009, 4.03758), welcoming visitors.
You could visit all the cubes as a long day’s walk (as this couple did), but my recommendation would be to do it by bike, starting and finishing at Herne and Enghien. We discovered the hard way that you cannot drive all the way up to some of them.
Chisom’s mother agreed. ‘Yes, indeed. If only we had stayed in touch.’
A 2009 novel set in Belgium, about four women who have been trafficked from Nigeria for sex work in Antwerp (on Zwartzusterstraat, though in the novel the street name gets an extra ‘e’). Their back stories in Nigeria (and in one case Southern Sudan, as it then was) are well depicted, but the Antwerp sections are inconsistent, sometimes tightly described, but particularly towards the denouement at the end (which is signalled from the beginning) rather under-written in places. It’s important to give the victims of human trafficking their voices, and the novel asks and answers important questions, but I was a bit frustrated by the inconsistencies of structure and style. You can get it here.
This is the last blog post about a book that I finished in 2022, other than the Clarke nominees. (The last book I finished in December was Matt Ruff’s Sewer, Gas & Electric, but I have already written it up.)
Voor Marie Rixen, het dienstmeisje in Düsseldorf, is alles pas begonnen met die fijne, zwarte knoopjes, of beter: is alles misgelopen bij die knoopjes, onherroepelijk misgelopen. Na enkele maanden zegt ze het hem, prevelend, ze liggen naast elkaar. Ineens is het gedaan met zijn lieve handen op haar huid, met zijn volle vochtige lippen in haar hals. Zijn mond is zijn mond niet meer, maar een zwarte vlek die brult als een van zijn staalovens. Uit zijn ogen. Uit zijn huis. Dat ze maar had moeten oppassen. Dat het een schande is. Is ze niet beschaamd? In zijn eigen huis? Hij als familieman! Trouwens, is het wel van hem? Hoe durft ze dat te beweren? Hij kent haar soort volk! En nog huilen ook?
For Marie Rixen, the maid in Düsseldorf, everything just started with those fine, black buttons, or rather: everything went wrong with those buttons, went irrevocably wrong. After a few months she tells him, muttering, they are lying next to each other. Suddenly there’s an end to his sweet hands on her skin, his full moist lips on her neck. His mouth is no longer his mouth, but a black smudge roaring flame like one of his steel furnaces. Out of his sight. Out of his house. She should have been careful. It’s a scandal. Isn’t she ashamed? In his own house? He, a family man! By the way, is it his? How dare she say that? He knows her kind of people! And now the waterworks?
David Van Reybrouck is one of Belgium’s best known public intellectuals, and this was his essay commissioned for the annual Dutch language Book Week Essay in 2016. It’s the story of the peculiar enclave of Neutral Moresnet, a small territory run jointly by Prussia and the Netherlands, later Belgium and Germany, from 1815 until the first world war, noted for its zinc mine, casino, gin distilleries and freedom from neighbouring jurisdictions. It was annexed by Germany in the first world war, and by Belgium afterwards, and survives only in its boundary markers today.
Van Reybrouck tells the story of one of its inhabitants, born Joseph Rixen in 1903 but brought up as Emil Pauly, and explains the shifting concept of Neutral Moresnet’s identity through his story. There are also diversions to Esperanto, which claimed Moresnet as its world capital at one point, and to the last living person who was born there, Catharina Meessen. Overall it’s a fascinating glimpse at a forgotten corner of Western European history. You can get it here in Dutch and here in German (no English translation as far as I know).
This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2016. Next on that pile, if I can find it, is God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, by Rupert Shortt.
Hoegaarden is a white beer for most of us, and a small town near Tienen for some of us; it is the home of my daughter’s secret boyfriend. I also discovered, via the Megalithic Portal site, that it has a potential menhir, standing by the river of a side street. There is very little detail available about this stone (some mutter darkly that it’s a deliberate imitation of the Pierre de Brunehaut, the largest menhir in Belgium). The Megalithic Portal site says that it was “found at the end of the 1990’s, a bit further down the road, near the river where it was lying flat. Hardly documented so far, and little known. Its overall shape and type of stone are common characteristics of several menhirs found in the region.” There used to be a much bigger megalith in the neighbourhood, but it is long gone.
So I went to see it with B. It was a cold day and she was not prepared to give me a smile, but she gives the stone a sense of scale.
As Spın̈al Tap almost put it,
No one knows who they were or what they were doing But their legacy remains Hewn into the living rock… Of Hoegaarden
We stopped off to visit B’s secret boyfriend as well. He got a bit of a smile.
We spent most of yesterday up at Laeken, in the northwest of Brussels, where a team of colleagues from my office were running a relay marathon – very kindly, raising funds for the institution where our daughters live. A marathon is 42 km in metric, more or less; the six runners do 5 km, 10 km, 5 km, 10 km, 5km and then the last 7km in turn, handing on the team sash at each step.
We went to cheer them on, along with Liz who is visiting Brussels from Thailand. It was a big event, hubbed at the King Baudouin (formerly Heysel) stadium, with several hundred teams (we saw teams numbered in the 900s, but we don’t know if every hundred was full). Most of the teams seemed to be corporate like ours, but there were also a few athletics clubs who were going much faster.
The usual approaches to the stadium had been blocked off so it took us a while to find our way in. By the time we had located the fearless APCOnauts, the first runner, Greg, had already done his stint and the third, Dania, was waiting to take over from the second, Edo.
Lea, our fifth runner; Anne; Liz, visiting from Thailand; Greg, our first runner; Augustin, our sixth runner; Bart, our fourth runnerDania (in black) waiting for Edo to finish his 10kEdo hands over the sash to Dania
It was a surprisingly sunny and warm day for late October, and a good atmosphere among runners and supporters. We walked Liz over to the Atomium and said goodbye to her there, returning to the stadium to take a few more pictures and videos (which annoyingly did not come out due to low phone battery).
And a lone piper was serenading the runners. All perfectly normal in the land of surrealism.
There’s an exhibition on in Leuven at present featuring fifteen works involving sound in one way or another, in different historic locations around the city. F and I did it in two hours this afternoon; it is only on until 6 June, so you will need to hurry.
The standout exhibit – for me and for other visitors whose photos I have seen online – is a piece called “Clinamen” by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, a couple of dozen porcelain bowls gently colliding in a pool located in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ter-Koorts chapel. Really rather soothing.
The best of the others is called “Antenna”, by Floris Vanhoof: a grand piano stood on its edge, being “played” by the signals picked up by a large hexagonal antenna on top of it, in the Bac Art Lab at Vital Decosterstraat 102.
I have to say that some of the rest left me rather unmoved, but those two pieces alone are well worth looking at. You can pick up a guide at the tourist office in Leuven, as long as you get there before the exhibition’s last day, tomorrow week.
First off, I came across this Facebook post by Jan Caluwaerts on the documentary records of Hansche’s life – and I actually went and had a good long conversation with Jan Caluwaerts about it yesterday, for which many thanks. It turns out that Hansche was from the town of Olfen in Germany, not so far from Kleve and Wesel where we know he worked. His three children were baptised in Brussels in 1651, 1653 and 1654. In 1661 he applied for (and got) citizenship in Brussels, along with his assistant Hendrick Daelemans.
In his citizenship application, he claims that he has lived in Brussels for ten years, and has worked inside and outside of the city, in churches, monasteries, and the homes of prelates, princes and lords, and that his fame has spread to Italy, Austria and Germany. Given that only the Antwerp, Horst and Machelen ceilings survive from before 1661, and the only surviving Brussels work is from 1684, there must have been a lot of Hansche’s work in Brussels which was destroyed by the French bombardment in 1695.
Brussels, then as now, was the regional capital and the ideal place to pick up commissions. But it was necessary for Hansche to join the Guild of Plasterers and Stuccadors, who did their best to regulate him to do things their way – in particular, they tried to force him to accept a Brussels-born apprentice (and eventually succeeded), and made him pay fines for non-compliance with the regulations; when he paid the fines out of the massive fees he had got for his ceilings, they tried to raise the fines. Eventually in 1666 he just left Brussels; whether he established a permanent base elsewhere is not recorded, but the big later projects in Leuven, Modave and Gent must have required him to be on-site most of the time.
Speaking of Gent: five panels by Hansche survive from the house of the Canfyn family, which was demolished in 1902. I have spoken to two people who have seen them, but they are in storage in a workshop near Gent, waiting for the right moment to put them on display. The panels represent Time and the Four Seasons, and fortunately photographs of all five are in the online Gent city archive.
Here is Time (not sure about the iconography here – could it actually be the Assumption?):
A slightly blurry Spring, but helpfully the date is clear:
A more blurry Summer, though you can see that the figure at bottom right leans out of the panel:
A clearer Autumn, with fauns and humans making wine, several of them instruding into our space:
And a much clearer Winter. Look at the firewood protruding to the right.
I don’t see an actual signature by Hansche here, but maybe it’s in a part of the artwork that was not photographed (or has been lost).
Today I completed my tour of the surviving Hansche ceilings with a visit to the Castle of Horst, between Leuven and Aarschot. It’s usually closed, but they are having a Heritage Day today, and I was greeted at the gates by a piper.
The castle itself is rather gorgeous, and is the base for the Red Knight in the well-known Flemish series of comics.
Sadly the castle is in very poor shape, though repairs are scheduled to start Real Soon Now. There are three rooms with Hansche ceilings – not quite as elaborate as some (he seems to have really got into his groove after 1655, when these are dated) but interesting enough. Here’s the ceiling of the antechamber, two panorama shots taken from opposite sides of the room so that the middle panel is there twice from different angles.
The badly damaged cartouche on the right has the date 1655.
The ceilings were commissioned by the owner of the castle, Maria-Anna van den Tympel after her husband, Albert Mulert, had died in 1644. She herself died in 1658, so had only three years to enjoy Hansche’s stuccos, which have lasted more than three and a half centuries since.
Upstairs are two rooms with much more impressive stuff from Hansche. The biggest room shows stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The first panel shows the story of Battus being turned into a stone for being indiscreet. Apollo, on the left, has got too distracted playing his pipes to look after his cattle; Mercury, on the right, steals the cattle and realises that Battus, in the middle, is likely to snitch on him, and transforms him to stone; you can see his legs becoming rock. (What secret was the baroness worrying about?)
The next two show the much better known story of Jason and Medea. Jason and the Argonauts had come from afar to Colchis (now Georgia, of course) in search of the Golden Fleece, guarded by a dragon. Medea, the daughter of the king, falls in love with Jason and in the first panel he meets her at the temple of Hecate, where she provides him with herbs to drug the dragon. In the second panel he pours the drugs onto the dragon, to make it fall asleep so that he can grab the Golden Fleece off the tree behind it. It’s a story that fascinates me for other reasons.
The next two panels show the story of Cephalus and Procris, a king and queen who had a rather on-again, off-again relationship. In the first frame, they are getting back together again after one of their arguments, and Procris presents Cephalus with a hunting dog and a spear that never misses. Alas, she became suspicious of him and followed him while he was hunting; he threw the inerrant spear at the suspicious rustle where she was hiding in the bushes, and killed her. (I would add that poor dying Procris has the most realistic female torso of any of Hansche’s figures that I have seen anywhere.)
Finally, we have Narcissus, falling in love with his own reflection and about to be transformed into a daffodil, to the dismay of his dog (or dogs).
The final room has just four allegorical panels, three of which do not seem linked to any particular myth. It also has badly decayed biblical scenes pained on the walls.
The fabric of the building is generally in poor shape.
Anyway, here is a woodcutter, having a go at the tree and realising that NON VNO STERNITUR ICTV (it is not felled with one blow), a standard saying about the virtues of perseverance.
Here’s King David, playing the harp to the motto MVSICA SERVA DEI (music is the handmaid of God). Note the Tetragrammaton יהוה in wobbly Hebrew script crammed into the upper right corner.
By the fireplace is a more enigmatic piece, Mars and Minerva holding cornucopias, and the slogan IN NOCTE CONSILIVM (council by night).
And finally, at the other end of the room, it’s Mars again but this time with Venus and the slogan ARTE ET MARTE (by skill and valour). It also has Hansche’s own signoff – the date ANNO 1655 and his initials I C H (for Ian Christian Hansche).
These are not as daring as Hansche’s later work – perhaps he was still struggling to find a way for limbs, weapons and monsters to emerge from the ceiling. But they somehow feel more personal. I am struck that in the Ovid room the first panel (Battus) is about betrayal of a confidence about a sin and the other three feature doomed love (Jason and Medea, Cephalus and Procris, and Narcissus with himself). It’s also interesting that the well-educated woman who commissioned the work has the goddesses of wisdom and of love separately consorting with Mars in the last room.
Unfortunately we know little more of her except the dates of her birth (1606), marriage (1636), widowhood (1644), inheritance of the castle from a cousin (1650) and her own death (1658). She had no surviving children, and after her death the castle went to her nephew, who was married to a niece of her husband’s. We can make some guesses, I think.
So, that’s the end for now of my search for Hansche’s work. There are precisely ten places where it can still be seen in situ, chronologically as follows:
There are a lot of gaps in the above. We only know of three that have been destroyed in the last century or so; there must have been a lot more once, especially before 1695 in Brussels.
I am thinking of putting all of this together into a small but lavishly illustrated ebook, and there are one or two other research ends that I still want to pursue. But the main chunk of this project is over, for now.
The king died suddenly, aged 62, on 31 July 1993, on holiday in Spain. He is affectionately but not deeply remembered in a country where people are generally positive but unenthusiastic about the monarchy. A modest man, there are not many things named after him, apart from the country’s major football stadium and the canal from Bruges to Zeebrugge.
There is one small corner of land dedicated to his memory. Hoegaarden, 40 km east of Brussels, is most famous for its distinctive white beer. Like many small Belgian towns, it was originally a settlement around a monastery. The monks were kicked out in the late eighteenth century revolutionary period, and the chapterhouse with its gardens sold to a local family. The last of the family died in 1980 (murdered by his gardener, as it happens) and the municipality took over the property, renting out the gardens to the Flemish Show Garden Association from 1991. They weren’t able to maintain it in the long term, and management has now reverted back to the municipality.
A number of small show gardens were set up in the park in the 1990s, and a year after the king died, a special patch was created in his honour, a prize-winning design by Ingrid Garcia Fernandez. In 1998 a terracotta bust of the late monarch was unveiled, produced by local artist Karel Hadermann. The king’s dovecote was moved to be near the bust and garden, but unfortunately the doves were all eaten by stone martens and the dovecote itself was allowed to decay. It has now been demolished and there is a new entrance to the park at the corner of Elst and Maagdenblokstraat, opening straight onto the memorial garden.
My daughters live close to Hoegaarden, and it’s one of the places I sometimes take my older daughter B when I visit. The first couple of times that we went, I got the feeling that she didn’t really like it that much, and then in the summer of 2016 she spotted the king, and fell in love.
I don’t bring her all that often – you don’t want the charm to wear off – but I take her one a year or so. Here she is in 2018, getting up close to the king.
In 2020 I got a short video of her interaction with him.
And we went back again last weekend, where I took the picture at the top of this post.
I think that for someone like B, people are fundamentally puzzling and not always attractive to engage with. She often likes to get up close and stare into people’s faces. The king doesn’t mind her doing that, and he doesn’t mind her poking him with her fingers. Looking at these pictures again, I think she’s also interested by the way his body merges with the plinth. He has a somewhat enigmatic and intriguing expression, which on the other hand is not at all threatening. (Here’s a better shot of his face, with F beside him.)
So, if you’re in the Hoegaarden area, do pop by and visit the king; and say hi from me and B.
Edited to add:
I sent this post to the sculptor. He replied:
Dear Nicholas Whyte,
I was very moved by your email and the information on the webpage. The statue of King Boudewijn was my first commissioned statue. King Boudewijn was not a very happy man. He loved children very much but did not succeeded in having one of his own. He was very young and rather unprepared when he was put upon the throne after the abdication of his father King Leopold III. So I gave him that look that is at the same time worrying and friendly. I have since that statue evolved in the use of techniques and materials. Your daughter demonstrates exactly what I think that art should do. It cannot make the world a better place but when it succeeds – even for a short moment – to bring joy (or another emotion) to a person it has fulfilled his goal. Many thanks for sharing this with me.
