Walloon literature

Walloon literature refers to literary works written in the French dialect of the Wallonia region of southern Belgium. Belgium is a divided nation, with the northern section, known as Flanders, primarily Dutch-speaking, and the southern section French-speaking. The divide can be traced back more than a thousand years, but it truly came to the forefront when Belgium declared independence in 1830. Both Flanders and Wallonia are deeply invested in their language and cultural identity. Walloon literature is representative of this language divide, with authors writing exclusively in French. The earliest literature that could be classified as distinctly Walloon dates to the seventeenth century but achieved its greatest extent in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Wallonia and its culture often take a back seat to the Dutch culture of Flanders, but several Walloon authors have found success. Chief among them was twentieth-century author Arthur Masson, who created the character Toine Culot, the mayor of a fictional Walloon village.

Background

The name Belgium comes from the Belgae, a Celtic people who arrived in the region in about the second century BCE. The Belgae controlled the area until about 56 BCE when Roman forces led by Julius Caesar conquered the region. This period was later played for laughs in the popular comic book series Asterix, first written in 1959 by French writer René Goscinny. In the comic, the titular character defends his village from the Romans with the help of a magic potion.

Rome controlled the region of Belgium and most of Central Europe for more than four hundred years before the empire began to crumble in the fourth and fifth centuries. At that time, the Germanic Franks began to whittle away at the Roman borders near the area that separates modern-day Flanders and Wallonia. With Rome’s power waning, the Franks settled throughout the region, bringing with them their own language, an early form of Dutch. The people who lived in the region of modern Wallonia were under Roman control the longest and spoke a different language based on Old French. The Walloon dialect of French is believed to have originated between the eighth and twelfth centuries, although the oldest surviving writing in the language comes from the fifteenth century.

During the Middle Ages, the region of Belgium was alternately a part of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire, ravaged by Viking invaders, and absorbed by the Spanish, Austrians, French, and Dutch. In the early 1920s, William I of the Netherlands tried to make Dutch the official language of Belgium and took control of the nation’s education system. Members of the French majority declared independence from the Netherlands in 1830, with the intention of becoming a French-speaking nation. However, the Dutch residents of Flanders fiercely resisted this and successfully pushed for Dutch to be declared one of Belgium’s official languages.

For much of the nineteenth century, Wallonia was one of the world’s largest industrialized regions, making it more powerful than northern Flanders. However, Wallonia’s industrial capabilities were damaged by the twentieth century’s two world wars, and Flanders had established itself as Belgium’s leading economy by the 1960s. With Wallonia now fearing a loss of cultural identity, the two sides agreed to divide Belgium based on language. The Dutch-speaking Flanders would occupy the northern section of the nation, while the French-speaking Wallonia dominated the south. A bilingual area surrounded the capital of Brussels, and several small German-speaking areas were established in eastern Belgium.

Overview

The tenth-century manuscript Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie (Canticle of Saint Eulalia) is considered one of the earliest-known works in French that may have come from the Wallonia region. Although its origins are unknown, its style and language suggest that it came from Wallonia or northeastern France. The Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie is a poem about the life of Spanish martyr St. Eulalia, who was said to have died in the persecution of Diocletian about 300 CE.

Much of the literature produced in the region during the next few centuries was anonymous religious poems with twelve-syllable lines. The oldest-known works that could be called distinctly Walloon appeared in the seventeenth century. One of these was an ode written in about 1620 in a French dialect common to the city of Liège, the cultural center of the Walloon region. Other works from the time include poems known as pasquèyes, which chronicled local Walloon life and history.

Literature written in the Walloon French dialect began to find its own success in the eighteenth century, most notably in operas. In 1757, Jean-Noël Hamal wrote the comic opera Li Voyadjue di Tchaudfontaine (The Journey to Chaudfontaine). Hamal’s work involved writing absurd, often made-up, lyrics to classical opera music. In addition to Li Voyadjue di Tchaudfontaine, Hamal also wrote other comic operas, including Li Lîdjwès Egagî (The Enlisted Liégeois) and Les Hypocondres (The Hypochondriacs).

Most scholars believe Walloon literature peaked in the nineteenth century, when Wallonia was at the height of its power. In 1822, Charles-Nicolas Simonon wrote the poem Li Côparèye, named after the bell of Saint-Lambert Cathedral in Liège. Simonon’s poem is thirty-six stanzas long and is an ode to the bell and the demolition of the cathedral. Nicolas Defrecheux was one of the first lyric poets from Wallonia. His 1854 poem Leyiz-m’plorer (Let Me Weep) recalls the grief he suffered by the death of a loved one.

In 1851, blind composer Nicolas Bosret wrote “Bia Bouquet” about a young man preparing for his wedding the next day. The song proved so popular that it became the official hymn of the Walloon city of Namur, where Bosret lived. Abbé Michel Renard was a Catholic priest and poet who wrote the epic L’Argayon el Gèant d’Nivelles in 1893. Renard’s poem incorporates the folklore form in the Walloon city of Nivelles. The Argayon is a giant figure that originally represented the biblical character of Goliath. The people of Nivelles march the Argayon and his family through the town each year during an annual carnival. In 1885, Edward Remouchamps premiered Tatî l'pèriquî (Tati the Barber), a vaudevillian farce written in verse. The story involves a barber who mistakenly believes he has won a large sum of money and will marry a beautiful woman.

Perhaps the best-known Walloon writer was Arthur Masson, born in 1896 in the southern Belgian town of Rièzes. Masson put his familiarity with the people and rural geography of his homeland into the character of Toine Culot, the mayor of the fictional Walloon town of Trignolles. The character debuted in the 1938 novel Vie du Bienheureux Toine Culot (Life of Blessed Toine Culot) and appeared in five more novels until 1966. Toine Culot proved so popular that the character is celebrated as part of an annual festival honoring Masson. The festival is held in Treignes, home of the Arthur Masson Museum. In addition to his Toine Culot novels, Masson also wrote more than twenty other books and three plays, many of which were notable for featuring the Walloon countryside as a backdrop.

Georges Simenon was a prolific writer who published over five hundred books before his death in 1989. Simenon is most famous for creating Commissaire Jules Maigret, a detective with the Paris police. Maigret debuted in the 1931 novel, Pietr-le-Letton (The Strange Case of Peter the Lett) and would go on to appear in seventy-five novels and numerous short stories. The character of Maigret was a burly, pipe-smoking detective who wore a distinctive bowler hat. He has been prorated numerous times in film and television, including the 1949 English-language film The Man on the Eiffel Tower, starring Charles Laughton.

In the 1990s, author Amélie Nothomb became the modern face of Walloon literature by publishing at least one novel per year. Her first novel, Hygiène de l’Assassin (Hygiene and the Assassin), is about a dying novelist whose past contains dark and disturbing secrets. Her 1999 satirical novel, Fear and Trembling, is about a young Belgian woman trapped in a Japanese corporate nightmare. The novel was awarded a prestigious French literary prize in 1999. In 2014, Nothomb wrote Pétronille, a fictional account in which the author portrays herself as a main character who sets out in search of a new drinking companion. Her 2021 novel, Premier sang (First Blood) won the 2021 Prix Renaudot, a French literary prize. She also published Psychopompe in 2023 and L'impossible retour in 2024.

Another modern Walloon writer, Nicolas Ancion, has gained a reputation for his imaginative stories. One of them, 2009’s short-story collection, Sommes Tous des Playmobiles (We Are All Playmobiles), depicts Brussels as a city of plastic people where anything, from a stapler to a pack of cigarettes, can spark an adventure.

Bibliography

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