Leopold II

King of Belgium (r. 1865-1909)

• Born: April 9, 1835
• Birthplace: Brussels, Belgium
• Died: December 17, 1909
• Place of death: Laeken, Belgium

Leopold was the second constitutional monarch of the Belgian kingdom created during the 1830’s. Frustrated by the constitutional restraints on his authority, he set up his own predatory private empire in Central Africa and earned a reputation as one of the most ruthless and unprincipled rulers in modern history.

Early Life

Belgium’s King Leopold II was born Louis-Philippe-Marie-Victor of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. As the oldest son of Leopold I, king of the Belgians and his French queen, Louise-Marie Therese (Bourbon-Orleans), he was the heir to the throne to which his father had been elevated only five years earlier, and was, accordingly, named duke of Brabant at the age of eleven. His relationship to his parents was formal and distant, and he could often talk to his father only by appointment. During his adolescence, he was entered into the Belgian army and rose to the largely ceremonial rank of lieutenant general at the age of twenty.

On August 22, 1853, Leopold married the Austrian archduchess Marie-Henriette Anne von Hapsburg-Lothringen (1836-1902). With her, he had four children: one son, Leopold Ferdinand, and three daughters, Louise-Marie, Stephanie, and Clementine. However, his marriage was cold and devoid of affection, with little communication between husband and wife. Marie-Henriette Anne spent an inordinate amount of her time engaging in her passion for horses and horseback riding, and Leopold became increasingly obsessed with overseas trade, world geography, and imperial colonization schemes. Perhaps in part to offset what was lacking in his personal life, he traveled extensively. His globe-trotting took him to eastern Europe, Egypt, Spain, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). On December 10, 1865, King Leopold I died and his son came to the crown as Leopold II, the second king of the Belgians.

Life’s Work

Even prior to the beginning his reign, Leopold II evinced a restless energy and tendencies toward authoritarianism. Chafing under his constitutional role in the recently created kingdom of Belgium and the subordination of the monarchy to the Belgian parliament, he yearned to play a larger part in public affairs. He enthusiastically embraced the imperialist mentality that was sweeping across Europe during the mid-nineteenth century and was being championed by such articulate advocates as Great Britain’s Benjamin Disraeli. Leopold fixed on the idea that Belgium must enter into the list of colonial powers and begin to carve out an overseas empire in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as Britain and France were in the process of doing. To that end, he lobbied and campaigned with increasing intensity.

However, the political leadership, and indeed the climate of public opinion in Belgium, proved unfavorable to Leopold’s ideas. Most Belgians believed that because their nation was small, it lacked the resources to acquire, maintain, and defend a far-flung empire. Leopold also met resistance to his ideas of increasing the size of the Belgian military establishment and felt further isolated from his own people when his legislative proposals to expand spending on the army and navy were rejected.

Early in 1869, Leopold’s only son, and heir, Leopold Ferdinand, the duke of Brabant, contracted pneumonia as a result of a fall into a frozen pond and died at the age of nine. After the child’s death, Leopold seems to have become even more fanatical over the acquisition of colonies, drifting from one impractical scheme to another to secure a colonial possession through his own means and efforts, even if his nation would not do so. He considered such diverse areas as Argentina and Fiji before narrowing his interests to Central Africa during the early 1880’s.

The explorations and reports of Henry Morton Stanley piqued Leopold’s interest, and Leopold achieved a major public relations coup by recruiting Stanley—who by then was taking on a heroic stature—as his spokesperson. He adroitly employed diplomacy, well-placed gifts, receptions, conferences, and connections to gain support for what he presented as a philanthropic program to eliminate Arab slave trading in the Congo River basin and to improve the living conditions of its peoples. To that end, he enlisted the support of U.S. president Chester A. Arthur, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and others.

Bismarck’s support was especially important, as he personally convened the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 in which most of Africa was partitioned among European nations. Leopold II was confirmed as the personal proprietor of a massive area of land south of the Congo and Ubangi Rivers. With Leopold himself—not Belgium—administering that vast area, the colony was dubbed the Congo Free State and an administrative center was set up in the town of Boma. The administrative apparatus set up under Leopold’s ultimate control included his personal army and gendarmerie, the so-called Force Publique, and a corporative-governing structure, the International Association of the Congo.

Between 1885 and 1908, Leopold’s Congo Free State degenerated into a regime of terror and exploitation. Although the Force Publique drove Arab slave traders from the region, a more vicious brand of slavery was established by Leopold’s own minions. Leopold secured a monopoly on the increasingly lucrative world trade in ivory and rubber. Africans were forcibly conscripted for hard labor while their families and villages were held hostage, and severe penalties were inflicted when their productivity failed to meet designated quotas. As time went on the atrocities worsened into genocidal proportions: Villagers were burned alive, and the hands and feet of workers were cut off. Unconfirmed contemporary estimates of the numbers of people killed ran into the millions.

As revelations of the extent of the brutality leaked out, Leopold came under increased scrutiny. In response to pressure from international public opinion, he launched a propaganda campaign to gloss over the truth about his regime. In part, he sought to deflect attention by sponsoring a series of construction projects in Belgium, which were financed by proceeds from his Congo enterprise. However, evidence in published accounts, first by George Washington Williams in 1890, and later by E. D. Morel, Joseph Conrad, and William H. Sheppard, brought to light more gruesome details and led to the famous 1904 British parliamentary report on the Congo by Roger Casement.

On September 20, 1902, Queen Marie-Henriette Anne died. While returning from her subsequent funeral, Leopold survived an assassination attempt when an Italian anarchist fired into his coach. He was unscathed but afterward became more open about his affair with the former Parisian prostitute Caroline (or Blanche) Delacroix, who had given him two sons. Disclosure of Leopold’s affair, and his attempts to legitimize Caroline’s children, made him even more unpopular with his subjects.

In March of 1904, Casement and Morel established the Congo Reform Association, and on May 10 of that same year, Stanley, Leopold’s most powerful defender, died in London. Under mounting pressure, and in the face of further damning revelations, the Belgian parliament formally took the Congo away from Leopold on August 10, 1908, and placed it under national colonial governance. The colony was then known as the Belgian Congo until it became independent in 1960. Meanwhile, Leopold, who was discredited and still under fire, died on December 17, 1909. He was succeeded by his nephew, Albert I.

Significance

Leopold’s legacy was an ambivalent one for a long time after his death. The Congo atrocities for which he was responsible were to a great extent forgotten, or at least relegated to a historical footnote, and for many years Leopold was remembered in more benevolent terms as an empire-builder and sponsor of building projects. However, the troubles of the independent Congo after 1960 are traceable to the unprecedented level of exploitation, depopulation, and social disruption occurring during the Congo Free State years. It may also not be far from the truth that the rapid way in which the Congo atrocities, or “Rubber Terror,” were lost to European memory may have instilled in the mind of German chancellor Adolf Hitler that when leaders of nations are involved in crimes, posterity is likely to look the other way, no matter how massive the crime.

Bibliography

Gann, L. H., and Peter Duignan. The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884-1914. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Describes the administration of the Congo Free State in terms of the day-today activities of the soldiers, police officers, and civil servants who carried out Leopold’s directives.

Gondola, Charles Didier. The History of the Congo. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Sees Leopold as an arch-manipulator and public relations practitioner who was particularly adept at discovering the most effective ways of marshaling international support for his schemes.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. The most nearly definitive work on the subject of Leopold and the Congo Free State. The narrative is well constructed, and global reaction to the Congo genocide raises some particularly controversial points.

Kossman, E. H. The Low Countries, 1780-1940. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978. General history of the Low Countries that sees Leopold as less of a manipulator and more of an inept manager whose avarice allowed a bad situation to spiral out of control.

Morel, E. D. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906. 1906. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. The book that was instrumental in exposing details of atrocities committed within the Congo Free State and launching an international investigation.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila—A People’s History. New York: Zed Books, 2002. Views Leopold’s regime as having set the stage for the pattern of brutality, violence, and instability that have plagued the Congo to the present day.

Twain, Mark. King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule. Boston: P. R. Warren, 1905. Tract written by Mark Twain, who called Leopold a “bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history.” All proceeds from the tract’s publication went to the Congo Reform Association. Its soliloquy is a polemic in which Leopold examines the charges made against him and replies with pious hypocrisies that ultimately condemn him. The booklet is illustrated with photographs of atrocities in the Congo; it has been reprinted several times, and some of the reprint editions contain the original illustrations.