Louis de Lichtervelde, Léopold II (Brussels, 1926), 213-227. The unusual character of this imperial structure—which studiously avoided the word “colony”—needs re-emphasizing.
I examine this Belgian modern style in other publications and in my forthcoming book. See, for example, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness, African Lineages of Belgian Modernism,” Parts I, II,II, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (2011-2013); “‘Modernité sans frontières’: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of the Avant-Garde in King Leopold’s Belgium, 1885-1910,” American Imago 68, no.4, (Winter 2012): 707-797; “Henry Van de Velde: Art Nouveau as Style Congo, 1895-97,” in Style Congo: Heritage and Heresy, ed. Sammy Baloji et al.. (Brussels: CIVA/Leipzig, 2023), 7-16; and “‘Percer les Ténèbres’: Traces of the Congo in Victor Horta’s Art Nouveau,” in Horta and the Grammar of Art Nouveau, eds. Iwan Strauwen and Benjamin Zurstrassen (Brussels: Mercatorfonds & Bozar Books, 2023), 131-141.
In 1895 Emile Verhaeren published a book of poems celebrating Belgium’s industrial power, Les villes tentaculaires. “Tentacular capitalism” is my play on, and extension of, Verhaeren’s invocation of tentacularism as the only apt way to characterize Belgium’s industrial and financial might. See Debora Silverman, “Boundaries: Bourgeois Belgium and 'Tentacular Modernism,'” Modern Intellectual History, 15, no. 1 (2018): 261–284.
On Rogier and the king’s ambitions as urbanist, see Lichtervelde, Léopold II, 43-60; Colonel B. E. M. G. Stinglhamber and Paul Dresse, Léopold II au travail (Brussels, 1945), 221-259.
Speeches of 1857-1862, cited in Lichtervelde, Léopold II, 48-51; Stinglhamber and Dresse, Léopold II au travail, 222-223. He used the terms “étonne”, “l’assaut,” “frappe”—terms of physical force and sneak attack, not by military means but by streetscape capture.
Silverman, “Modernité sans frontières,” 714-720.
Léon Daudet, cited in Stinglhamber and Dresse, Léopold II au travail, 240. On Leopold’s architectural expansionism in 1905, see Liane Rainieri, “Léopold II: Ses conceptions urbanistiques, ses constructions monumentales,” in La dynastie et la culture en Belgique, ed. Herman Balthazar and Jean Stengers (Brussels, 1990), 173–92; Rainieri, Léopold II urbaniste (Brussels, 1973); Georges-Henri Dumont, La vie quotidienne en Belgique sous le règne de Léopold II, 1865–1909 (Brussels, 1999), 18–28; Piet Lombaerde, Léopold II, roi-bâtisseur (Ostend/Ghent, 1995), 88-91; Charles Girault, “L’Oeuvre architecturale de Léopold II,” L’Émulation 11 (1926): 137-147. On tracking the Congo revenues in the Fondation de la Couronne that funded monumental national architecture and private real-estate ventures in 1905, see A. J. Wauters, Histoire politique du Congo belge (Brussels, 1911), 248–51, where they are described as “a véritable débauche”; Félix Cattier’s itemization in Étude sur la situation de l’État indépendent du Congo (Brussels, 1906),. 219–40; Jean Stengers, Combien le Congo a-t-il côuté à la Belgique? (Brussels, 1957), 150–51, 144–294; Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo (London, 1963, New York, Granta Books, 2001)), 273–78; and Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin Reprint, 1999), 165–70, 255–59.
Architects’ drawings for vast reception halls are included in Rainieri, “Léopold II,” and Lombaerde, Léopold II. On the greenhouses see Irene Smets, The Royal Greenhouses, Laeken (Ghent, 2001). These enormous structures are open to the public once a year in May. On the Japanese and Chinese pavilions purchased at the Paris 1900 exhibition and reassembled on site, see Thierry Demey, Le domaine royal de Laeken (Brussels, 2005); and Chantal Kozyreff, La tour japonaise de Laeken (Brussels, 1989).
On the Rue Brederode Congo company offices and personnel, see Debora Silverman, “Gold Rush, Congo Style: Gustav Klimt’s ‘Expectation and Fulfillment’ in the Palais Stoclet,” in Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design, eds. Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz (New York and London: Routledge, 2023),173-185; Colette Braeckman, Jean-Francois Munster, and Oliver Mouton, “Les traces du Congo demeurent à Bruxelles,” Le Soir, April 28, 2010, ➝.
This incident, an open secret and delicious victory for Leopold at the time of the arch’s inauguration, is recounted in Cattier, Étude sur la situation, 240–41; see also Stengers, Combien le Congo a-t-il côuté?, 194–99; and Ascherson, King Incorporated, 275. On the structure, plans, and building of the new gargantuan arch, see Rainieri, “Léopold II,” and Rainieri, Léopold II urbaniste; the latter includes a rare photograph of the 1880 incomplete arch with missing middle that was the dismembered gateway to Brussels for twenty-five years.
Wiliam Bourton and Daniel Couvreur, “Le Centenaire de l’Avenue de Tervueren (I): La Voie royale de l’Expo coloniale, La mémoire vivante de Léopold II à 80 ans,” Le Soir, May 28, 1997; M. Merlot, “Le Centenaire de L’Avenue de Tervueren (III): Les Sentinelles vertes de Léopold II, des tombes de Congolais,” Le Soir, May 30, 1997.
“Discours du Roi au Président du Sénat le 1er Janvier 1905,” in André de Robiano, Le Baron Lambermont, Sa vie et son oeuvre (Brussels, 1905) 201-202.
Verhaeren calls Antwerp “the tentacular city and port,” 1895.
This discussion and what follows are based on the informative online pamphlet and history of the station, “Welcome to Antwerp Central, Railway Cathedral of the 20th and 21st Century,” in plantlocation Europe.eu.doc
“Welcome to Antwerp Central,” and quote in postcard of the period. W. G. Sebald writes a powerful description of the massive scale of the Antwerp station and the dizzying view of the dome as travelers moved through it in his novel, Austerlitz.
Silverman, “Modernité sans frontières,” 714-720; 741-751. The term “empyrean heights” in the Poelaert Palace is that of Count Henry Carton de Wiart, one of the young literati-lawyer circles that clustered around Edmond Picard there in the 1890s.
“Welcome to Antwerp Central.”
The renovated Antwerp Town Hall added a succession of these types of seals with the castle and severed hands when it modernized between 1889 and 1902. On the revival of the symbolism, the legend of Brabo, and the 1887 statue, see Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness,” Part III, 26-30; and Debora Silverman, “La Main lancée, Hiding in Plain Sight,” in The Grand Rotunda in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, ed. Aimé Mpane and Jean Pierre Müller (Tervuren: MRAC & BAI, 2023), 172-178.
Edmund Dene Morel, Affairs of West Africa (London, 1902), 335.
Morel, Affairs of West Africa, 337 figures, and 335-337; Robert Harms, “The World ABIR Made: The Margina-Lopari Basin, 1885-1913,” African Economic History 12 (1983): 122-139, especially 131; Robert Harms, “The End of Red Rubber: A Reassessment,” The Journal of African History 16, no. 1 (1975): 73-88; John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 403; and Robert Harms, Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 361-470. Useful and revealing contemporary charts tracking the quantity of rubber exports and profits accrued between 1892 and 1897 can be found in Lieutenant Th. Masui, Guide de la Section de L’État indépendante du Congo à l’Exposition de Bruxelles-Tervueren en 1897 (Brussels, 1897), 411.
Patrick Florizoone, Les Bains à Ostende (Brussels, 1996), 17-79, ➝.
The small-scale ferries were replaced by turbine steamers, which were shown in travel posters with elegant and affluent crowds. Local fishermen’s livelihoods were threatened by this new technology, and conflict ensued. In the 1896 novel Birch Mitsu by Georges Eekhoud, for example, the writer captures the destruction of fishing by steamer traffic and tourism, and the violence of fishermens’ strikes. One such Ostend strike took place in 1887, and Eekhoud’s friend, James Ensor, made a famous, colored print representing the violence of the local militia against the popular protesters. On Ensor, Ostend, and the Congo, see Debora Silverman, “Ensor’s Panache: Army and Empire in ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ and in Belgium, 1887,” ➝.
The words of a travel journalist of 1900 in Kathy Warnes, “Historical Time and Tides Ebb and Flow in Ostend, Belgium,” Windows to World History, ➝; Derke Blythe, Flemish Cities Explored: Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Mechelen, Leuvem & Ostend (London: Pallas Athene, 2013).
Neal Ascherson indicates that it is likely that North may even have been a “front man,” using Leopold’s monies for ABIR as well; in any case, Ascherson and others remind us that Leopold and the Crown Domain of the Congo Free State owned 50% of all ABIR shares.
The British Architect, August 16, 1895, 124.
Rainieri, Léopold II, urbaniste, 209-239. Rainieri’s research showed how the king worked in concert with North and Mols, though not enough notice has been made of this, especially regarding the sudden profusion of cash that poured in to develop Ostend from the Congo rubber companies.
Warnes, “Historical Time and Tides Ebb and Flow in Ostend.”
Warnes, “Historical Time and Tides Ebb and Flow in Ostend.”
For an examination of the later period, also with a long-hidden history, see the discussion of the financial entanglements of the Banque Lambert, Umicore, the Union Minière, and the Belgian Congo in Neil Munchi, “Belgium’s Reckoning with a Brutal History in Congo,” Financial Times, Nov. 12, 2020.
The new museum is now also known as the Africa Museum.
Aimé Mpane and Jean Pierre Müller, The Grand Rotunda of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, RE/STORE (Tervuren: MRAC & BAI, 2023).
I have written extensively about this sculpture, its violent theme and technical handling, and its relation to violence and disguise in the Congo Free State. See Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness,” Part I, 141-151; and Debora Silverman, “Diasporas of Art: History, The Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885-2014 ,” Journal of Modern History (2015), 23-34.
Silverman, “Diasporas of Art and the Politics of Memory”; Silverman, “Modernité sans frontières,” 747-751, 788-791. Just this year, the renovated Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts drew attention for the first time to the Congo Free State connections of its chryselephantine sculpture, Diana the Huntress, in a new label for its display case.
Silverman, “Art Nouveau,” Part I, 163-170; Silverman, “Horta’s Terres Vacantes and the Van Eetvelde House,” in Horta and the Grammar of Art Nouveau (Brussels, 2023), 131-141.
A. Merlon, Le Congo producteur (1888), 87, 93.
“Sammy Baloji: The Long Hand,” Middelheim Museum, ➝.
See ➝.
Ibid.
Alexandre Delcommune, Vingt années de vie africaine, 1874-1893, récits de voyages, d’aventures et d’explorations au Congo Belge, Vol. 1 (Brussels, 1922); Camille Coquilhat, Sur le Haut-Congo (Paris, 1888).
Émile Verhaeren, “Le Port” and “Et la ville comme une main, les doigts ouverts/Se refermant sur l’univers,” in Les Villes tentaculaires (1895), see ➝.
Key evidence and photographs of mains coupées appeared in books by E. D. Morel, the shipping clerk turned journalist who exposed forced labor and violence in King Leopold’s Congo, such as Affairs of West Africa (London, 1902), 324-342; King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo (London, 1904); Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo (London, 1906); and Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquoy (Boston, 1906). See also Harms, Land of Tears, 373-389; and Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 164-166, 226-227. Morel is one contemporary who suggested that the Antwerp city symbol of the severed hands and the practice of severing hands in the Congo were deeply intertwined. Explanations for the uniqueness of Belgian imperial violence are incomplete and usually attributed, if at all, to Belgians’ excessive thrift and punctiliousness. I have long argued that this was not simply a pathology of accounting but part of a cultural framework Belgians brought with them. I analyze the 1887 Lambeaux statue and identify the late nineteenth century visual culture of severed hands in Antwerp, as well as the broader expressive culture of violence and dismemberment within Belgium that predates and interacts with imperialism in the Congo Free State in Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness,” Part III, 22-30; 50-55; Silverman, “La Main lancée,” 172-178; and Silverman, “Modernité sans frontières,” 778-791.
This blind spot has recently been brought to light: in 2020 artist Jean Pierre Müller made a large print recreating Lambeaux’s 1887 statue of Brabo throwing the giant’s hand as a floating veil in the permanent installation in the rotunda of the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, provoking visitors to see the connection between l’expansion belge and the imperial violence of severing hands in the Congo Free State. A controversy has broken out about the ubiquity of chocolate hands in Antwerp as souvenirs, suggesting they are not whimsical evocations of a city myth and “logo,” but charged with a deeply fraught history and horror. Mayor Bart de Wever has weighed in on this debate to defend the city legend. On Müller’s Brabo at Tervuren, see Mpane and Müller, The Grand Rotunda; and Silverman, “La Main lancée,” 172-178.
