Leopold II of Belgium

Leopold II reigned as king of Belgium for 44 years, from 1865 to 1909, and at the same time ruled the Congo Free State in central Africa as his own private possession from 1885 to 1908. At home he is remembered as the "Builder King" for his monuments and public works. In the Congo his regime extracted ivory and rubber through forced labour enforced by killings, hostage-taking and mutilation, and is one of the most notorious episodes of colonial rule.

Leopold was born in Brussels on 9 April 1835, the eldest surviving son of Leopold I, the first king of the Belgians, and Louise of Orléans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe. Queen Victoria was his first cousin. He was heir from birth, sat in the Senate from 1855 and travelled widely in Asia and North Africa, returning convinced that a small country needed colonies to be great. In 1853 he married Marie Henriette of Austria; their only son died in 1869, aged nine. Leopold became king on his father's death in December 1865.

Leopold's powers as a constitutional monarch were limited, and much of the political change of his reign came from parliament: the struggle between Liberals and Catholics over schools, the founding of the Labour Party in 1885, and the introduction of universal male suffrage, tempered by plural voting, in 1893. He kept Belgium neutral during the Franco-Prussian War, pressed for fortresses at Liège, Namur and Antwerp, and only on his deathbed won army reform. He spent lavishly on buildings in Brussels, Ostend, Tervuren and Antwerp, much of it funded, according to some historians, by Congo profits, though this is disputed.

After failed attempts to buy or lease territory, including the Philippines from Spain, Leopold set up a supposedly scientific and humanitarian body in 1876 and in 1878 hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to secure treaties along the Congo River. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 the European powers and the United States recognised him as sovereign of most of this land. The Congo Free State, some 76 times the size of Belgium, was proclaimed in 1885 under his personal rule, policed by a private army, the Force Publique. He never visited it.

Leopold declared "vacant" land and its produce state property, giving his administration and concession companies a monopoly. When world demand for rubber soared in the 1890s, villages were given collection quotas. Failure was punished with beatings, killings and the taking of hostages; soldiers had to account for bullets with severed hands, and the hands of living people were also cut off. The British consul Roger Casement documented the abuses, and the Congo Reform Association, led by E. D. Morel and supported by writers such as Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle, made them an international scandal.

How many people died is uncertain, because no reliable population figures exist for the period. Estimates of the population decline range from 1 million to 15 million. The historian Adam Hochschild, drawing on local studies and a 1919 Belgian commission that judged roughly half the population had perished, suggested a fall of about 10 million; other historians dispute such figures. Violence, famine, a collapsing birth rate and epidemics of smallpox and sleeping sickness all contributed.

Under international and domestic pressure, the Belgian parliament forced Leopold to hand the Congo over to the state in 1908, when it became the Belgian Congo. He had the Free State's archives burned. He died at Laeken on 17 December 1909 and was succeeded by his nephew Albert I; crowds booed his funeral procession. His legacy remains bitterly contested in Belgium and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2020 several of his statues were removed, and King Philippe expressed his "deepest regret" for colonial violence.

Our 1880 map shows central Africa just before the Scramble for Africa; the 1900 map shows the huge territory Leopold ruled personally, and the 1914 map shows it as a Belgian colony.