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Leopold II[a] (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, and the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.
Jun 12, 2020 · Leopold II ruled Belgium from 1865-1909 - activists want this statue in Brussels removed due to his brutal regime in Congo Free State. Inside the palatial walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand...
- Overview
- Domestic policies
- Leopold II and the Congo Free State
- Legacy
Although Leopold II established Belgium as a colonial power in Africa, he is best known for the widespread atrocities that were carried out under his rule, as a result of which as many as 10 million people died in the Congo Free State.
What was Leopold II’s family like?
Leopold II was the second son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Orléans. The couple's first son, Louis Philippe, died in infancy prior to Leopold II's birth.
How did Leopold II change the world?
Leopold II implemented a forced-labour system in the Congo that was quickly copied by other European colonial powers. This brutal practice was a catastrophe for the population of the Congo, and Leopold was eventually forced to give up his hold on the colony.
What was Leopold II’s legacy?
The country of Belgium itself was only about five years old at the birth of Leopold II, who became the eldest surviving son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Louise-Marie of Orléans. Then, as they would be into the 21st century, most of the royal families of Europe were related. For instance, Leopold II was a first cousin of Queen Victoria of Britain. He became duke of Brabant in 1846 and served in the Belgian army. In 1853 he married Marie-Henriette, daughter of the Austrian archduke Joseph, palatine of Hungary, and became king of the Belgians on his father’s death in December 1865.
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Most of the monarchs in western Europe had been forced to largely yield political power to the electorate by the late 19th century, so Belgium’s parliament and cabinet were the real locus of power, but Leopold used the prestige of the monarchy to lobby for pet projects. Although the domestic affairs of his reign were dominated by a growing conflict between the Liberal and Catholic parties over suffrage and education issues, Leopold concentrated on developing the country’s defenses. Aware that Belgian neutrality, maintained during the Franco-German War (1870–71), was imperilled by the increasing strength of France and Germany, he persuaded parliament in 1887 to finance the fortification of Liège and Namur.
Presenting himself as a philanthropist eager to bring the benefits of Christianity, Western civilization, and commerce to African natives—a guise that he perpetuated for many years—Leopold hosted an international conference of explorers and geographers at the royal palace in Brussels in 1876. Several years later he hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to be his man in Africa. For five years Stanley traveled up and down the immense waterways of the Congo River basin, setting up trading posts, building roads, and persuading local chiefs—almost all of them illiterate—to sign treaties with Leopold. The treaties, some of which appear to have been subsequently doctored to Leopold’s liking, were then put to use by the Belgian monarch.
Although Belgium’s government felt that colonies would be an extravagance for a small country with no navy or merchant marine, that situation suited Leopold perfectly. He persuaded first the United States and then all the major nations of western Europe to recognize a huge swath of Central Africa—roughly the same territory as the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo—as his personal property. He called it État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State. It was the world’s only private colony, and Leopold referred to himself as its “proprietor.”
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The king then embarked on an ultimately successful effort to make a vast fortune from his new possession. Initially he was most interested in ivory, a material that was greatly valued in the days before plastics because it could be carved into a great variety of shapes—statuettes, jewelry, piano keys, false teeth, and more. For some years ivory was a principal source of the great wealth that Leopold and his associates drew from the new colony. In his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890 as a steamboat officer, gives a searing picture of the brutal and voracious European quest for Congo ivory.
By the early 1890s a new source of riches had appeared. A worldwide rubber boom was under way, kicked off by the invention of the inflatable bicycle tire and spurred on by the rise of the automobile and the use of rubber in industrial belts and gaskets, as well as in coating for telephone and telegraph wires. Throughout the tropics, people rushed to sow rubber trees, but those plants could take many years to reach maturity, and in the meantime there was money to be made wherever rubber grew wild. One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. Detachments of his 19,000-man private army, the Force Publique, would march into a village and hold the women hostage, forcing the men to scatter into the rainforest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap.
By the end of his life, Leopold was unpopular with his people, but, ironically, that had much less to do with his actions in Africa than with his conduct of his personal life. He spoke contemptuously of Belgium’s small size, could not speak proper Dutch, the native language of more than half of its citizens, spent long winters in luxurious quarters on the French Riviera, and was estranged from two of his three daughters. Moreover, he had a well-known penchant for teenaged girls, and, when he was age 65, he began a liaison with a teenaged former prostitute who bore him two additional children.
He is remembered in Belgium for some of what he built with his Congo wealth, such as the monumental Arcade du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, and for his advocacy of strong fortifications in the eastern part of the country, which slowed the advance of German troops in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. His most important legacy, however, remains the human catastrophe that the rubber forced-labour system brought to the Congo—a heritage that continued to echo in that region more than a century after Leopold’s death.
Jun 12, 2020 · Leopold II ruled Belgium from 1865-1909 - activists want this statue in Brussels removed due to his brutal regime in Congo Free State. By Georgina Rannard & Eve Webster. BBC News....
Leopold II was the second King of the Belgians and the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State. He is chiefly remembered as a tyrant under whose rule over 10 million Africans were massacred in Congo.
Leopold II of the Belgians (April 9, 1835 – December 17, 1909) succeeded his father, Leopold I of Belgium, the first king of the independent Belgium, to the Belgian throne in 1865 and remained king until his death. He was the brother of Charlotte, Empress of Mexico and cousin to Queen Victoria.
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Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold II (Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor) (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was King of the Belgians. He was born in Brussels. He was the second (but oldest surviving) son of Leopold I and Louise of Orléans. He succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865.
