The history of Belgium

Belgium is a young state on old ground. For most of its history the land between the North Sea and the Ardennes was a set of counties, duchies and church principalities that passed between the great dynasties of Europe: the Franks, the dukes of Burgundy, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, and revolutionary France. Its towns, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp above all, were among the richest in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and its fields were among the most fought over. Independence came only in 1830, after which Belgium industrialised early, and its second king turned the Congo into a private colony where millions suffered and very many died. In the twentieth century the country was twice invaded by Germany, then rebuilt itself as a founding member of European integration, while tension between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia reshaped it into a federal state.

People have lived in the region since the Old Stone Age. Neanderthal remains found at Engis near Liège in 1829 were among the first ever discovered, though not recognised as such at the time. Farming arrived with the Neolithic Revolution around 5300 BCE, carried by the Linear Pottery culture that cleared the loess soils of the Hesbaye. Flint was mined on an industrial scale at Spiennes near Mons from about 4400 BCE, in shafts now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

By the late Iron Age the land was held by the Belgae, a group of peoples between the Seine and the Rhine who shared much of the culture of the Celts but who, according to Roman writers, also had Germanic connections.

Julius Caesar began his campaign against the Belgae in 57 BCE, calling them the bravest of the Gauls. The Nervii nearly destroyed his army on the Sambre, and in 54 BCE the Eburones under Ambiorix wiped out a legion and a half, provoking a campaign of extermination against them. The region then became part of the province of Gallia Belgica in the Roman Empire. Tongeren became its main town in the area, and villas spread across the fertile south. From the third century raids by Franks and Saxons weakened the frontier, and in the fourth century Rome allowed Frankish groups to settle in the sandy north as federates.

As Roman authority collapsed in the fifth century, the Salian Franks made Tournai their centre. The son of their king Childeric I, Clovis I expanded the Frankish Kingdom across Gaul and converted to Catholic Christianity. The line between Germanic and Romance speech that still divides Belgium took shape in these centuries.

The Carolingian family had its roots in the Meuse valley around Herstal and Liège, and under Charlemagne the area lay at the heart of the Carolingian Empire. When his grandsons divided the empire at Verdun in 843, the Scheldt became a border: Flanders to the west fell under the West Frankish crown, later the Kingdom of France, while the lands to the east went to Lotharingia and then to the Holy Roman Empire. Out of this division grew the medieval principalities, among them the County of Flanders, the Duchy of Brabant, Hainaut, and the prince-bishopric of Liège, a church state that lasted until 1795.

Flanders became one of the most urbanised regions of Europe. Its towns wove English wool into cloth, and Bruges became a great international market for Italian, Hanseatic and Iberian merchants. In 1302 Flemish militias defeated an army of French knights at Kortrijk in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and during the Hundred Years' War Ghent under Jacob van Artevelde sided with England to protect its supply of wool.

Through marriage and purchase, the Valois dukes of Burgundy gathered the Low Countries together. Philip the Bold inherited Flanders in 1384, and his grandson Philip the Good added Brabant, Hainaut, Holland and other territories, ruling from Brussels and Bruges over one of the richest courts in Europe. Painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden worked for this court and its cities. After Duke Charles the Bold was killed in 1477, his daughter Mary's marriage to Maximilian of Habsburg passed the inheritance to that dynasty.

Their grandson Charles V was born in Ghent in 1500 and grew up in Mechelen. As ruler of Spain, its empire and the German lands, he made the Seventeen Provinces a single unit in 1549. In this period Antwerp replaced Bruges as the chief port of northern Europe and became a centre of printing and finance, and Erasmus helped found the Collegium Trilingue at Leuven, where the university had been established in 1425.

Under Charles's son Philip II of Spain, resentment of heavy taxes, centralisation and the persecution of Protestants spread by the Protestant Reformation led to iconoclastic riots in 1566 and then to the Dutch Revolt. Despite the Duke of Alba's repression, Spain lost control of most provinces, until in 1585 Alessandro Farnese retook Antwerp after a long siege. The north went on to form the Dutch Republic, which closed the Scheldt to shipping, while the south remained Catholic and under the Spanish Empire. Tens of thousands of Protestants and skilled workers moved north. Under the archdukes Albert and Isabella the south enjoyed a Catholic revival whose greatest artist was Peter Paul Rubens.

For the next century the Spanish Netherlands were a battlefield in the wars of Louis XIV, who took Artois and parts of Flanders and Hainaut for France. After the War of the Spanish Succession, the treaties of 1713–1714 handed the territory to the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy. The Austrian Netherlands prospered under Maria Theresa, but the centralising reforms of Joseph II provoked the Brabant Revolution of 1789, which briefly created the United Belgian States before Austrian troops returned in 1790.

The armies of the French Revolution conquered the region in 1794, and in 1795 France annexed both the Austrian Netherlands and Liège. French rule swept away the old provinces and privileges, and introduced the Napoleonic code and conscription. The end of the Napoleonic Wars came on Belgian soil, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, south of Brussels, on 18 June 1815.

The Congress of Vienna then joined the south to the north in a United Kingdom of the Netherlands under William I of Orange, intended as a buffer against France. William promoted industry, but southern Liberals and Catholics alike resented Dutch dominance of the state, his language policy and his interference in Catholic education.

On 25 August 1830 a performance of an opera about a Neapolitan uprising in Brussels set off riots, and in September Dutch troops were driven out of the city after street fighting. A provisional government declared independence in October, a national congress adopted one of the most liberal constitutions of its day, the great powers recognised the new state, and Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was sworn in as Leopold I on 21 July 1831, now the national holiday. The Netherlands accepted Belgian independence only in the Treaty of London of 1839, which also guaranteed Belgian neutrality and split Limburg and Luxembourg, the larger part of the latter becoming the separate grand duchy of Luxembourg.

Belgium was the first country on the continent to follow Britain into the Industrial Revolution. Coal mines and ironworks along the Sambre and Meuse, made Wallonia an industrial heartland, and the Brussels–Mechelen line of 1835 was continental Europe's first passenger railway. Working conditions were harsh, and Karl Marx, who lived in Brussels from 1845 to 1848, completed the Communist Manifesto there. Politics was dominated by Catholics and Liberals until the Belgian Workers' Party, founded in 1885, used general strikes to win universal male suffrage in 1893, though with extra votes for the wealthy and educated; equal suffrage for men followed in 1919, and for women in 1948.

The state was French-speaking at the top, although most Belgians spoke Dutch dialects, and a Flemish Movement campaigned for language rights that would shape Belgian politics for the next century.

Leopold II, king from 1865, was determined to acquire a colony. Through a supposedly humanitarian association, he employed the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to sign treaties with local rulers along the Congo River from 1879. The Congo basin had long been home to powerful states, among them the Kingdom of Kongo near the coast and the Luba and Lunda empires in the south-east, already weakened by the slave trade and by Swahili and Arab traders from the east. During the Scramble for Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 accepted Leopold's claim, and the Congo Free State, a territory roughly seventy-five times the size of Belgium, became his personal possession rather than a Belgian colony.

The Free State was run to make money. Leopold declared most of the land state property, gave concessions to companies in which he held stakes, and from the 1890s, as the bicycle and car created huge demand, extracted wild rubber through forced labour. Villages were given quotas, and the Force Publique, an army of African soldiers under European officers, enforced them by taking women and children hostage, flogging with the chicotte, burning villages and killing those who resisted or fell short. Soldiers were made to account for their bullets with the severed hands of their victims, and hands were cut from living people, including children. Famine, flight and epidemics of sleeping sickness and smallpox compounded the killing.

No census was taken until 1924, so the number of deaths cannot be known. Contemporary critics and some modern writers have put the population loss at around ten million, about half the population; more recent demographic research suggests a smaller but still enormous decline, of the order of one to several million, caused by violence, disease and a falling birth rate. Missionary reports, the 1904 investigation by the British consul Roger Casement and E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association made the Free State an international scandal, and even a commission appointed by Leopold confirmed the abuses. In 1908 the Belgian parliament annexed the territory, which became the Belgian Congo. Leopold burned the Free State's archives before handing it over, and he died in 1909.

Under Belgian rule the worst abuses ended, but forced labour, racial segregation and a paternalistic system run by the state, the Catholic missions and mining companies continued. After the First World War Belgium also gained the League of Nations mandate over Ruanda-Urundi, where its administration hardened the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi, entering ethnicity on identity cards.

On 2 August 1914 Germany demanded passage for its armies through Belgium on the way to France. The government of Albert I refused, and Germany invaded two days later, bringing Britain into the First World War in defence of the neutrality it had guaranteed. In the first weeks German troops, claiming to face civilian snipers, shot about 5,500 Belgian civilians in towns such as Dinant, Andenne, Tamines and Leuven, where the university library was deliberately burned. Almost the whole country was occupied for four years, and more than 100,000 men were deported for forced labour in Germany. The Belgian army held a strip of land behind the flooded Yser, and around Ypres some of the war's bloodiest battles were fought. After the war Belgium gained the German-speaking districts of Eupen and Malmedy.

Belgium returned to neutrality in 1936, but on 10 May 1940 Germany invaded again as part of its western offensive in the Second World War. After eighteen days of fighting, King Leopold III surrendered and remained in the country as a prisoner, while the government continued the war from exile in London. Some Belgians collaborated, notably the Flemish nationalist VNV and Léon Degrelle's Rexists, while others joined the resistance.

As part of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany deported 25,490 Jews and 353 Roma from the Dossin barracks in Mechelen between 1942 and 1944, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and few survived. Many other Jews survived in hiding, often with help from ordinary Belgians and resistance groups, which in April 1943 attacked a deportation train. Allied forces liberated most of the country in September 1944, though the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944, the Battle of the Bulge, brought fighting back to the south-east.

Leopold III's conduct during the war divided the country. A 1950 referendum approved his return by 58 per cent, with Flanders in favour and Wallonia against, but violent strikes followed and he abdicated in 1951 for his son Baudouin. Belgium abandoned neutrality, formed the Benelux customs union with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and was a founder of NATO in 1949, of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Economic Community in 1957. Brussels became the main seat of the European institutions and, from 1967, of NATO's headquarters.

In the Congo, riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 shook Belgian confidence, and a round-table conference in 1960 agreed to independence within months. The Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Within days an army mutiny brought Belgian troops back, and mineral-rich Katanga seceded with Belgian support. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed, handed to his enemies in Katanga, and shot there on 17 January 1961 in the presence of Belgian officers. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry in 2001 concluded that the Belgian state bore a moral responsibility for his death. Rwanda and Burundi became independent in 1962.

At home, the balance of the country shifted. Walloon coal and steel declined while Flanders grew richer. Laws of 1962–1963 fixed the language border, the University of Leuven split in 1968, and the national parties divided along language lines. Successive state reforms from 1970 onward transferred powers to language communities and to the regions of Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, and the reform of 1993 declared Belgium a federal state.

In 1996 the Marc Dutroux child-murder case exposed failings in the police and courts and brought some 300,000 people onto the streets of Brussels in the White March. As politics fragmented, forming a government after the June 2010 election took a record 541 days. King Albert II, who had succeeded his brother Baudouin in 1993, abdicated in 2013 in favour of his son Philippe. On 22 March 2016 suicide bombers of the Islamic State killed 32 people at Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station.

The colonial past has received renewed attention. On 30 June 2020 King Philippe expressed regret to the Congo for the violence and cruelty of the Free State and the colonial era, and in a speech to the Congolese parliament in June 2022 he called colonial rule a regime of unequal relations marked by paternalism, discrimination and racism. That month Belgium returned the only surviving remains of Lumumba, a single tooth, to his family, and Prime Minister Alexander De Croo apologised for the Belgian government's role in his killing. In 2025 prosecutors sought the trial of a former diplomat, Étienne Davignon, over Lumumba's detention, and a court approved it in March 2026, but he died in May 2026 before the case could be heard.

After the June 2024 elections, Bart De Wever of the New Flemish Alliance became prime minister in February 2025 at the head of a five-party coalition, the first Flemish nationalist to hold the office. Its austerity and budget plans have been met by repeated national strikes and demonstrations in 2025 and 2026.