The people’s alarm instantly became general. They immediately began tearing up the pavement in several streets and notably on the square before the Hôtel de Ville. The merchants closed their shops, and men and women transported paving stones to their attics so that they could crush any troops that came near their houses. . . . Fearing that they would be surrounded, some 1,200 militia volunteers had rallied, taken up positions in close formation on the Grande-Place, and blocked the adjoining streets with chains.
FRENCH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES YVES HIRSINGER
ON THE 1787 BARRICADES IN BRUSSELS
On September 20,1787, residents of Brussels rose in protest against the reforming zeal of their ruler, Joseph II of Austria, building barricades and obliging the local garrison to make a forced withdrawal from their city. This blow to the pride of imperial forces was merely the opening salvo in the Belgian people’s arduous forty-year struggle to cast off the yoke of foreign domination and regain their national independence.
It is impossible to say with utter certainty where or when barricades first appeared outside their country of origin. I can only attest to the fact that by the time they reappeared in Paris on July 14, 1789, after a hiatus of more than 150 years, they had already sprung up in the neighboring capitals of Brussels and Geneva.1 Thus, barricades first spread to regions immediately adjacent to French territory and to societies with which France had close linguistic, cultural, economic, and political ties. Furthermore, diffusion occurred in a period when profound social changes had begun to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of traditional institutions. The same forces that produced the eighteenth-century anti-colonial revolts in America and the Netherlands and helped spawn the French Revolution also made the Belgian provinces (and, to a lesser extent, the French-speaking cantons of the Swiss confederation) fertile ground for social upheaval. It was in this context that the barricade, a tactic previously employed only within the confines of France, first spread.
In the 1780s, Brussels was the seat of government for the whole of the Austrian Southern Netherlands. The region known as Brabant had experienced several centuries of foreign dominion. In the fourteenth century, much of this territory fell within the sphere of influence of England, which, through its domination of the textile market, exercised effective economic and political control over districts nominally ruled by the duke of Brabant. The prospect, in 1356, of the duke’s title and possessions passing into foreign hands brought the local population to a state of extreme agitation that was only relieved with the granting of a special charter known as the Joyeuse Entrée (Joyous Entry), which not only guaranteed certain individual liberties but also granted the province a set of privileges and immunities that amounted in most respects to self-rule.2
The provisions of this charter—in effect, a written constitution—were gradually extended to the neighboring provinces and became the cornerstone of the social contract between the Belgian people and its long succession of foreign rulers. By the start of the sixteenth century, this region had passed into the hands of the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg. In 1556, the less populous Protestant region to the north began a revolt against Spanish rule that eventually led to independence for the United Provinces (or what we know today as Holland). The staunchly Catholic southern region continued under Spanish rule until 1713, when the treaty of Utrecht transferred sovereignty to the Austrian Habsburgs. These territories, corresponding roughly to present-day Belgium, resisted assimilation by their more powerful partner, managing to retain the privileged status guaranteed by their ancient charter.
Thanks to their preeminence in textile production, the Austrian Netherlands became one of the richest regions in Europe in the eighteenth century; and thanks to the attentive but respectful management of local affairs by Empress Maria Theresa, her forty-year reign was something of a golden age. In return for this period of peace and unprecedented prosperity, her Belgian subjects rewarded her with their sincere devotion. Regrettably, this relationship would take an emphatic turn for the worse with the accession of her son, Joseph II, in 1780.
For those more familiar with the history of the French Revolution, the situation in Brabant presents a series of apparent parallels that conceal more fundamental divergences. In France, the efforts of a well-meaning but ineffectual king to introduce reforms over the objections of the aristocracy and clergy, created the opportunity for a new National Assembly to seize the political initiative. By harnessing the passions of the urban crowd (and occasionally the peasantry) to ideas derived from the philosophes, they set in motion a process that would ultimately bring down the Old Regime.
In the Austrian Netherlands, on the contrary, a headstrong emperor ordained fundamental reforms—many of them rationalist, liberal, or, within the understanding of that time, even democratic. Joseph II was both an avid proponent of Enlightenment ideas and a complete autocrat. Taking Rousseau to heart, his aim seems to have been to force his recalcitrant Belgian subjects to be free. Unfortunately, he began with only a superficial knowledge of their customs or character.3 Mere months after assuming power, he promulgated an Edict of Tolerance, guaranteeing religious freedom to Protestants and Jews. This was soon followed by measures intended to assure those groups civic equality, curtail the influence of the papacy, and make local bishops more dependent on the state. These moves aroused considerable resentment among members of the clergy and the Catholic majority, feelings that were compounded when, in 1783, he replaced episcopal seminaries with the state-supervised training of priests.
The Second and Third Estates were no less upset when he went on to propose abolishing guild privileges, standardizing the system of higher learning (at the expense of the venerable University of Louvain), and unilaterally reducing the corvée obligations of peasants. But it was his attempt, on the first day of the new year in 1787, to carry out a wholesale reform of the country’s judicial and administrative system that ignited a genuine firestorm.4
These progressive reforms obviously anticipated the French Revolution’s emphasis on secularization, the elimination of privilege, economic rationalization, and political centralization. But Joseph’s edicts, however benignly motivated, seriously misjudged the essential conservatism of Belgian society and flagrantly violated the oath he had sworn to respect existing institutional arrangements by obtaining the consent of the provincial estates before making any changes. Taken together, these measures constituted a “virtual coup d’état,” which residents instantly rejected.5 A flood of pamphlets virulently critical of the emperor began to circulate. The Conseil de Brabant refused to cooperate by registering or publishing the new decrees. The provincial Estates pointed out the impossible contradiction that lay at the heart of Joseph’s plan: he derived his authority as duke of Brabant from the Joyeuse Entrée, a document whose fundamental provisions he now proposed systematically to subvert. The Estates commissioned Henri van der Noot, a Brussels lawyer, to formulate its objections. The crux of its legal case was Article 59, which absolved Belgians of any obligation to obey Joseph II once he had violated his constitutional oath. They forwarded the list of nine grievances contained in Van der Noot’s memorandum to the emperor, putting the latter on notice that they would withhold approval of any additional tax levies until the impasse had been resolved.
Joseph II may have seen himself as championing a liberal cause, but he had done so as an authoritarian ruler. By proceeding without consultation and contravening long-established political norms, he had precipitated a constitutional crisis the implications of which he was very slow to recognize. Though his reforms had mainly targeted the privileges of the First and Second Estates, those groups found a willing ally in the Third Estate, which insisted on blocking the approval of taxes until satisfaction had been received on every one of their demands.6 In the meantime, it was assumed, the Estates themselves would take over the authority Joseph had relinquished through his illegal acts.
The intransigence of the Brabant Estates was more than matched by Joseph’s own. When a delegation summoned to the imperial capital outlined Belgian objections and requested the recision of the offending decrees, he could barely repress his fury and soon sent them packing. When his governors-general tried to calm the roiled waters by suspending all edicts that violated the terms of the Joyeuse Entrée, the emperor repudiated their action and had them recalled to Vienna.7 In their place, he dispatched an interim military governor, Count Murray, whose first task was to regain control over the “bourgeois” or Civic Guard. Its ranks had been swollen by volunteers Van der Noot had actively recruited as the kernel of an emerging patriot army. Joseph warned Murray that at the first shot fired by insurgents, he would order a massive redeployment of troops from Austria’s German provinces to Belgium, committing “my last man and my last cent, if need be” to the rebels’ defeat.8 In reality, the Austrian Empire was already overextended. Embroiled in a costly war with the Ottoman Turks, Joseph II was in dire need of tax revenues and incapable of diverting a substantial armed force to pacify his wayward Belgian provinces.
Instead he issued yet another imperial decree—again published without the required approval of the Conseil d’état—banning the Civic Guard. The armed volunteers, most wearing tricolor cockades, refused to comply and continued to police the streets of Brussels.9 In theory, Murray had at his disposal 22,000 soldiers, but the loyalty of the units that had been recruited locally was uncertain. Clashes between the minority of Austrian soldiers and the volunteers of the bourgeois militia were becoming more frequent.10 Van der Noot belatedly recognized the potential for a violent outcome. On September 19, he made a futile attempt to head off the looming confrontation by asking members of the Civic Guard to turn in their cockades as a symbolic gesture of submission. His renewed efforts on September 20 achieved partial success, but too late to stop an Austrian assault on a church where many patriots had gathered for the funeral of one of their fellow guardsmen. Imperial soldiers detained volunteers, seized their weapons, and in some cases tore off their uniforms or insignia.
The response was immediate and to all appearances entirely spontaneous. Volunteers sounded the alarm and rushed to the square that fronted the Brussels city hall. They began by stretching chains across the streets that emptied onto the square. They then pried up paving stones and “built barricades at every entrance to the Grand’ Place.” What followed was a five-hour battle during which up to fifteen Austrian soldiers were killed and a lesser number of Belgian volunteers wounded.11 Fighting ended only after a delegation of notables assured Murray that if he withdrew his troops, the volunteers would lay down their arms, thus fulfilling the last of the emperor’s conditions for the repeal of the detested edicts. These conciliatory gestures succeeded in bringing about a suspension of hostilities. The very next day, Murray announced, in the emperor’s name, that the Joyeuse Entrée would be respected in its entirety and that the Civic Guard could continue to exist. With the help of their barricades, residents of Brussels appeared to have won major concessions from their imperial master.
What to Murray seemed a humane resolution of the conflict was viewed by Joseph II as a craven capitulation. The emperor lost no time in recalling his overly complaisant governor-general and replacing him with Count Trauttmansdorf-Weinsburg. He also appointed a new military commander, who would no longer be subject to the authority of the civilian governor-general. General Richard d’Alton had already earned a reputation for the brutality of his conduct toward insurgent populations while serving the emperor in the Hungarian provinces. Within a day of his arrival in Brussels, his new repressive policies were responsible for an incident in which Austrian soldiers, confronting an angry crowd, shot and killed several unarmed protestors. Count d’Alton’s only response to the public furor was to praise the fortitude of his troops, causing the emperor to remark with pleasure that he had at last found a commander willing to act with the rigor that the circumstances called for.
This remorseless attitude did have an immediate effect. The Conseil d’état agreed to publish three decrees issued in December that it had previously vowed to resist. Moreover, the docile First and Second Estates quickly agreed to the spring 1788 tax levy. Only the Third Estate, in an uproar over the emperor’s efforts to bring the university in Louvain to heel, initially held firm by exercising its veto, but its political isolation soon undermined its resolve. Pressed from all sides to compromise, it finally relented.
With tax revenues secure, the Austrians could now target the leaders of the Third Estate, hoping to end resistance once and for all. Warrants were issued for the arrest of four key figures. The comtesse d’Yves, Madame Jeanne de Bellem, a tireless publicist for the Belgian cause, was jailed, and Van der Noot was driven into exile in London. But even in the absence of these and other principals, the Third Estate remained a thorn in Joseph’s side. When the fall tax subsidy came up for discussion in November 1788, the approval of the first two estates was again met with a veto by the third. This time the emperor opted for open confrontation, declaring that if his tax subsidy were denied, he would no longer consider himself bound by the oaths he had sworn at the time of his inauguration. His transfer of additional troops to the capital in January 1789 signaled that he was prepared to impose his will by force. Under the circumstances, the Third Estate of Brabant, which had been supported only by its counterpart in Hainault province, was once again forced to approve the payment of taxes.
Joseph II resolved to capitalize on this favorable turn of fortune by aggressively going on the offensive. In characteristic fashion, he settled on a strategy that seemed designed to consolidate all opposition forces against him. He began by alienating the First Estate, whose acquiescence had been so important in his recent triumphs, by commanding bishops to send all students to the new General Seminary he had established in Louvain. He then sought to dilute the influence of meddlesome members of the Third Estate by increasing representation to include every village in the province. The Conseil de Brabant refused to publish this reform on the usual grounds that it violated the sacred constitution.12 In response, Trauttmansdorff assembled the provincial Estates and demanded that they agree to a permanent tax levy (thus exempting the government from having to obtain biannual approval) and to reforms of the Third Estate, the courts, and the Conseil de Brabant that would have ensured their political impotence. When the Third Estate flatly refused, soldiers surrounded the Hôtel de Ville, holding the delegates prisoner while a proclamation from the emperor was distributed, unilaterally declaring all provincial privileges annulled and the Joyeuse Entrée revoked.
This stroke may have given Joseph exclusive control over the reins of government, but with the Brabant Estates disbanded, many of their leaders in exile, and lawful protest prohibited, an underground movement now thrived. Van der Noot, patriarch of its conservative wing, set himself up in Breda, just across the border in the United Provinces, where he was soon joined by other opposition figures. The goal of the conservatives was to undo the emperor’s reforms, restore the integrity of traditional institutions (above all, the provincial Estates), and revert to the status quo ante (allowing for the possibility that this would take place under the tutelage of a different foreign protector). Their strategy was to enlist the military assistance of one or more of the states of the Triple Alliance (England, Prussia, and the Netherlands) in driving out the Austrians. As head of the so-called Breda Committee, Van de Noot spent the summer months of 1789 vainly trying to obtain a commitment for the necessary troops.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, a new secret society calling itself Pro Aris et Focis (usually loosely translated as “For Hearth and Home”) was founded. This organization, whose animating spirit was another Brabançon lawyer, Jan François Vonck, represented the liberal wing of the patriotic movement. Members generally subscribed to the ideas of the French Enlightenment and might have looked favorably on the substance of many of Joseph II’s reforms had they not been imposed at the whim of a tyrant. These “Vonckists” were more moderate than the leftists of the French Revolution—in part because the provinces already possessed centuries of experience in what amounted to constitutional self-government—but they had no hesitation about emulating the examples of the United States and the Protestant Netherlands—or, much more recently, neighboring France—by mobilizing popular forces in an effort to regain lost privileges or win their independence.13 They focused their efforts on encouraging desertions from the Austrian ranks, procuring arms and ammunition, and enlisting and training a volunteer army. Their policy of self-reliance set them at odds with the Breda leaders, but Pro Aris et Focis had done such an effective job of concealing their activities from the authorities that most grassroots patriots were unaware of the differences that separated them from the “Van der Nootists.”
In the end, Vonck’s most critical contribution was to identify and recruit Jean André van der Mersch as commander of the patriot forces. This career officer had served the king of France with great distinction during the Seven Years’ War before accepting a commission in the Austrian army in 1778. Disillusioned by his lack of advancement, he had retired with the rank of colonel in the expectation that his military career was over, but he now accepted Vonck’s offer with alacrity.14 Within two weeks, he was drilling volunteers at a safe location in the principality of Liége, beyond Alton’s reach.
Austrian authorities initiated a crackdown in response to a stepped-up pamphlet campaign in September 1789. With the help of a paid informant, they managed to arrest a few leaders of Pro Aris et Focis. Vonck and the others still at liberty retreated across the border to Breda, where they entered into an uneasy alliance with the Van der Nootists. The hope was to mount a formidable challenge to Austrian hegemony by combining the complementary approaches of the two groups: a foreign-backed invasion and a series of local uprisings. By early October, however, Van der Noot had received a flat refusal even from Prussia, the most favorably disposed of his potential allies, and the patriots were forced to rely on their own resources.
Driven together by forces beyond their control, the two camps formed a revolutionary committee that issued a Belgian Declaration of Independence on October 24. On that same day, Van der Mersch led his band of 2,800 untried recruits across the border into the duchy of Brabant. Well acquainted with the limitations of the forces under his command, he was determined to avoid any encounter with the Austrians in open country, an eventuality that would have resulted in the obliteration of the rebel army in its first engagement.15 Instead, he moved from one town to the next, eventually seeking refuge in Turnhout, where he was gratified to find local residents and villagers from the surrounding countryside rallying to his cause. Dinne’s contemporaneous account emphasizes the role of the town’s inhabitants in digging up paving stones and using their own household furniture to tie these loose materials together into solid fortifications.16
An Austrian column under the command of Major-General Schroeder approached Turnhout early on the morning of October 27. This commander made the fateful decision not to wait for the arrival of two additional columns that Alton had dispatched to the area. According to Schroeder’s own report, the town’s defenders had built barricades made of trees at the entrance gate and piled up paving stones to block the main access points. As his soldiers advanced, snipers fired from the windows of adjacent buildings, and residents, mainly women, hurled paving stones from the rooftops on the hapless Austrians. Progress was slow and casualties were heavy. At the end of five hours of fighting, the Austrians gave way in a disorderly retreat, abandoning to the insurgents the five cannon they had brought with them and suffering casualties that included 110 dead and 60 wounded.17 The insurgents sustained losses only half as great. In brief, a ragtag army of irregulars, whose commander had conceded in advance that his men were no match for trained troops in a pitched battle, had, by joining forces with civilian insurgents and adopting the barricade as their principal tactic, succeeded in inflicting a stinging defeat on the vaunted troops of the Austrian emperor.
Van der Mersch might reasonably have expected this stunning victory to boost the morale of his volunteers and elicit an outpouring of support among the populace. But, as he now led his column south towards Brussels, he was passing through territory on which the Austrians had recently focused a campaign of sharp repression. The response of the intimidated rural population to the patriot army was therefore subdued. Van der Mersch—realizing that he could not count on local inhabitants to supply provisions, logistical support, or new recruits—decided not to run the risk of crossing paths with the enemy on unfavorable terrain. He abruptly reversed direction and retired across the border to the Breda sanctuary to consider his options.
The drubbing the Austrians had endured at Turnhout caused a furor in the Belgian provinces and beyond. Censorship prevented local newspapers from publishing the story, but an Amsterdam gazette circulated an account of the battle, and smuggled copies quickly made the rounds of Brussels taverns.18 In Mons, the local patriot association printed up a pamphlet that embellished upon the incident in Turnhout. According to the Belgian historian Suzanne Tassier, people fought to get their hands on a copy, and even Austrian officers read it with interest.19 The fact that this barricade event was so well publicized in Mons is significant because, within a mere matter of weeks, that city would be the scene of its own insurrection, complete with barricades.
That further development was the result of Van der Mersch’s decision to pursue a new offensive in Flanders, where he believed inhabitants were more favorably disposed. Overruling the objections of the Van der Noot faction, he dispatched about 1,000 men to Ghent with the captured cannon in tow.20 Their arrival on November 13 caused that city to rise en masse. The insurgents were able to force the garrison to retreat to their barracks and the citadel. Count d’Arberg, the Austrian commander, received substantial reinforcements and appeared to be in a position to take the offensive, but when he carried out his threat to bombard the city with incendiary shells, the population became so infuriated that patriotic forces mounted an all-out attack. On November 16, they surrounded the Saint-Pierre barracks and obliged the troops within to surrender. Realizing that his situation was hopeless, Arberg abandoned the citadel and evacuated the city under cover of night. Within days, the towns of Bruges, Ostend, Ypres, Courtai, and Nieuport followed Ghent’s example, and within a week the whole of Flanders had been liberated. Only now did the emperor adopt a conciliatory tone and reverse course by closing the General Seminary, revoking his political reforms, and issuing a general amnesty for those who had taken part in the various uprisings. The people ignored his appeals for calm.
Unable to restrain themselves from meddling in military affairs, civilian members of Van der Noot’s revolutionary committee now authorized an expedition led by two French adventurers, which came to a sudden and disastrous end in its first encounter with Austrian troops at Dinant in Namur Province. This fiasco did, however, produce an opportunity that the insurgents were quick to exploit. The Austrian colonel, fearing a follow-up attack on the town of Namur, sent an urgent request to his counterpart in Mons, asking for immediate reinforcements. The commander there proceeded to pull his entire complement of soldiers from Mons on November 21. This was a colossal blunder, for no sooner had they left than the insurgent banner was unfurled. Residents were quickly joined by a contingent of Van der Mersch’s volunteers. Together, these forces managed to prevent the garrison from reentering their city by adopting the tactics that had earlier succeeded in Turnhout: “As the Austrian troops advanced to meet the patriot army in Mons, battalions of villagers ripped paving stones from the streets, building barricades from which they stoned the approaching Austrian army. Together, the patriot army and the villagers again routed the Austrians.”21
Inspired by insurgent victories in Flanders and Hainault, the Brabant revolution now culminated in a full-scale revolt, which began in Brussels on December 11, 1789.22 There, residents captured the city’s gates and drove the Austrians from their neighborhoods. The troops’ ability to respond effectively was crippled by a soaring rate of desertion. Forced to give ground, they were soon confined to the upper districts of the city center. When General d’Alton received word on the morning of December 12 that two entire companies had defected, he began preparations for a complete withdrawal. The first group to attempt to leave included Trauttmansdorff and other high officials, but when they arrived in the suburb of Ixelles, they found their route barricaded and the local population determined not to let them pass. D’Alton personally led the attack that captured and cleared that obstacle, but by the time he rejoined the main force in central Brussels, it had already begun a hasty evacuation that resulted in the abandonment of much of its matériel, as well as all government records.
Thus, in a mere six weeks, the Belgian people appeared to have accomplished the impossible. The imperial army, led by Joseph II’s hand-picked general, had been driven out of the capital of the Austrian Netherlands. A series of urban insurrections had liberated the provinces of Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant and forced the Austrians to take refuge in Luxembourg. With their territory now completely purged of foreign troops, Belgians soon proclaimed their independence.
Polasky has pointed out that “All the Belgian victories had been won with guerrilla tactics within town walls. The Belgian army had relied on the villagers, their paving stones, their barricades, and their knowledge of the city’s by-ways.”23 Much like the French, the Belgians had learned that this style of urban warfare was a potent weapon, capable of overcoming the inherent advantage that normally accrued to trained troops when they were allowed to choose the field and method of battle. This lesson would not be lost, though it was forty years before it could be used to permanently secure nationhood for the Belgian people.
Van der Mersch’s tactical brilliance and the élan of the civilian population had produced miraculous results. Unfortunately, as bright as Belgian prospects appeared at the end of 1789, independence proved short-lived. The combination of Van der Noot’s incompetence as a leader and deep divisions between the principal political factions eviscerated the nationalist movement and led to a virtual civil war. The unexpected death of Joseph II actually ended up strengthening the Empire’s bid to reconquer its lost provinces, for he was succeeded by his brother Leopold II, a more astute judge of both political and military affairs. The Austrian army began its invasion at the end of November 1790 and triumphantly entered Brussels less than two weeks later. Within a year of having declared their autonomy, Belgians found themselves again an appendage of the Austrian empire. Time would show that their travails had only just begun.
The Austrian restoration proved to be just as ephemeral as Belgians’ first taste of independence. Leopold II died in March 1792, passing the crown to his son Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor. Soon thereafter, France declared war on Austria and the French Legislative Assembly issued its famous declaration of la patrie en danger. Following the fall of the monarchy in August, the newly instituted French Republic, in a burst of proselytizing zeal, offered its help to Belgian patriots in driving out the Austrians for a second time. Before the end of that year, the French victory at Jemappes allowed General Charles Dumouriez’s troops to occupy the Belgian provinces.24
The French were initially welcomed as liberators on the strength of Dumouriez’s pledge to support the formation of an autonomous Belgian republic. Unfortunately, the newly formed National Convention refused to honor those promises, even though it had earlier, in an outpouring of republican idealism, formally renounced wars of foreign conquest. When therefore, in the spring of 1793, Dumouriez was soundly defeated by the Austrians at the battle of Neer-winden, the Belgians expressed few regrets over the departure of French troops.
The second Austrian restoration proved equally short-lived. The French victory at Fleurus in June 1794 drove the emperor’s soldiers from the Belgian provinces for good. This time, however, France was not content merely to occupy this strategic territory. In October 1795, without making any effort to consult the wishes of those affected, the post-Thermidorian Convention laid claim to the French nation’s “natural boundaries” by annexing the former Austrian Netherlands (plus the province of Liège) as departments of France.
Overnight, the newest citizens of the First Republic became subject to the Constitution of the Year III, which imposed all the reforms once proposed by Joseph II and more! Attacks on privilege, policies of state centralization, and an anticlerical campaign were all carried forward further and faster than the Austrian emperor had dared imagine. Flemish-speaking areas took particular offense at the requirement that they use French to conduct official business, and even French-speakers resented the fact that for the first time in centuries, non-Belgians occupied many positions of authority. The heavy toll of the revolutionary wars in which France engaged throughout this period led to the introduction of mass conscription, which prompted an unsuccessful rebellion of Belgian peasants in 1798.
French rule, which cut the Belgian provinces off from most of their former trading partners, initially devastated the local economy. This improved somewhat under Napoléon’s personal reign, as Belgian textiles and farm goods now gained privileged access to the French market. But the lack of political liberty and the cost in lives of defending France’s burgeoning empire fed Belgians’ smoldering resentment. It was therefore natural that they welcomed the arrival of allied armies beginning in 1813, anticipating a peace settlement that would at last recognize their right to self-determination.
The organizers of the 1815 Congress of Vienna dashed those hopes by sacrificing Belgian independence to the perceived need to contain French expansionism. The Belgian provinces were attached to the Netherlands with the thought that together they would be better able to resist foreign encroachment. Except for a minority of Flemish nationalists, this was a deeply disappointing outcome for the Belgian people. This time, it was the establishment of Dutch as the official language that grated on the majority of French-speakers, and conflicts over economic issues were a constant irritant. The contrast in religious values and general culture between the Protestant (mainly Calvinist) north and the Catholic south proved impossible to reconcile. A joint constitution—the “Fundamental Law”—was implemented despite its rejection by referendum in the Belgian provinces. Though capitals were maintained in both the Hague and Brussels, this legal framework accorded the same representation in the Estates General to the Dutch population of two million as to the roughly three and a half million Belgians. Under William of Orange—now King William I—Belgians prospered economically but chafed politically.
Dissatisfaction simmered barely beneath the surface but had little impact until 1828, when the liberal and Catholic wings of the opposition movement joined forces. A petition drive advocating the administrative separation of the Dutch and Belgian provinces gave impetus to a resurgence of nationalist sentiment. Those feelings were further enflamed by the government’s prosecution and banishment of journalists like Louis de Potter and Jean-François Tielemans. As Belgians mobilized, they reclaimed the symbols as well as the political objectives of the Brabant revolution. By 1830, the red, yellow, and black banners that had flown over the liberated cities of Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault during the 1787 to 1789 rebellion reappeared. Soon, Belgians would also revert to the crucial insurrectionary tactic—the construction of barricades—that had served them so well in that earlier conflict. This time, however, they were taking their cue from the French, who had set the stage with an orgy of barricade construction such as the world has never witnessed, before or since.
I do not propose to review the events of the 1830 revolution in detail. The literature on the subject is vast, and interested readers should have no difficulty identifying authors far better qualified than I to place those events in their proper context.25 My aim here is simply to assess the historical role and significance of barricades in the so-called Trois Glorieuses, the “three glorious days”—July 27, 28, and 29, 1830—that overthrew Charles X and installed Louis-Philippe on the throne under the title, revived from the Revolution of 1789, “King of the French.”
The July revolution was the first modern event comparable to the great Paris insurrections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of the prominence of barricades. The latter’s role in the events of 1789 to 1795 had been secondary, and the uprisings of 1814 and 1827 had been of limited historical significance. In 1830, on the contrary, barricades were the most striking and memorable aspect of a revolution that mobilized the entire population of the French capital and brought an end to the Bourbon Restoration. According to the best informed sources, no fewer than 4,000 barricades were built during the July Days, by far the highest total ever recorded in a single event.26 This equates to one barricade for every 200 men, women, and children living in a city of roughly three-quarters of a million inhabitants. It had been nearly 200 years since a civil conflict had produced this level of participation, with residents of nearly every block in nearly every neighborhood in the city collaborating on their own barricade. The result was an insurgency that possessed a character at once highly localized and highly generalized.
The fact that these structures were the defining feature of the July Days explains why that conflict yielded the richest collection of contemporary barricade maps ever produced, some drawn in loving detail, using color-coded symbols to indicate the positions taken by specific military units and bands of insurgents, as well as the emplacement of each cannon and barricade. In some districts, barricades were built so close together that one wonders whom they were intended to defend against and how they were meant to function (questions that will be deferred to chapter 7). The distribution of barricades, as described in contemporary accounts as well as in these graphic representations, can be used to show how the July uprising developed over time and the leading role played by districts of known socioeconomic composition like the working-class faubourg Saint-Antoine. Above all, the ubiquity of barricades by the end of the fighting gives us some measure of how thoroughly Charles X had alienated the residents of the capital and how enthusiastically they responded to the prospect of ending his rule. The sheer disparity in numbers is what enabled insurgents, astutely exploiting a technique revived from an earlier era, to overwhelm the forces representing the regime in power.
Maréchal Auguste Wiesse de Marmont, created duke of Ragusa by Napoléon, had the task of quelling the initial disturbances thrust upon him without warning. He quickly learned that no special military preparations had been made by Charles X or the ministers responsible for the four ordinances that precipitated the revolt. Though at first he followed the standard practice of dispatching small patrols to attack and dismantle barricades wherever they appeared, he soon realized that the 15,000 royal guards and troops of the line at his disposal were inadequate. To prevent their being attacked and disarmed—and, first and foremost, to put a stop to the scattered desertions among his soldiers that began to be reported as early as the morning of July 28—he revised his tactics and allowed only large columns to make forays into the city.27
Though the army had already used ordnance to put down civil unrest, the attempt to repress the 1830 insurrection broke new ground by employing artillery on a much larger scale than in 1795 or 1827 and making its deployment against barricades a standard part of military doctrine. Insurgents naturally responded in kind, introducing new forms of barricade construction aimed at neutralizing the effectiveness of cannon fire and cavalry charges, innovations that will be more closely examined in chapter 7.
Fighting remained desultory through the evening of July 27. The seizure or destruction of the presses used to publish newspapers in defiance of the new regulations prompted reactions on the part of belligerent Parisians that are by now familiar as the preliminaries to full-blown insurrection: shops closed, crowds formed, coats of arms and other symbols of royal authority were defaced, the tocsin rang, and by nightfall street lamps were broken throughout the affected areas. When gendarmes tried to clear the square in front of the Palais-Royal—the Paris home of the ducs d’Orléans and, since 1789, a perennial breeding ground for revolutionary agitation—rioters greeted them with a hail of stones. The troops responded with a volley of rifle fire, striking down the nascent rebellion’s first victims. Their lifeless bodies were soon being paraded through the streets as evidence of the regime’s careless disregard for residents’ lives. After making a first attempt at fraternization with army units, the insurgents dispersed for the night around 10 P.M.
The gravity of the situation became evident to Marmont when the rebels demonstrated their staying power by appearing in greater numbers on the morning of July 28 and renewing barricade construction on a larger scale. Marmont’s words and deeds immediately assumed more ominous overtones. In a written communication to Charles X reminiscent of the duc de La Rochefoucauld’s famous exchange with Louis XVI, he averred, “This is no longer a riot, this is a revolution.”28 He declared martial law and arranged for four additional batteries of artillery to be brought into the city by that evening. But even when the rebels were driven to seek temporary shelter by a salvo of grapeshot, they soon reappeared in some new location. Meanwhile, troops found that their mobility was being severely restricted by “barricade after barricade” blocking their line of march. Worse still, more of these structures were erected behind them as they advanced, cutting off their avenue of retreat and leaving them vulnerable to the deadly sniper fire coming from adjoining buildings. Barricades continued to multiply and spread, soon engulfing the western and northern sectors of the capital. Insurgents now redoubled their fraternization efforts and, by late morning, defections reached a level that threatened to splinter the ranks of regular army units.
The historian David Pinkney’s description of the fighting in the rue Saint-Antoine on that pivotal day gives a lively sense of the confusion that reigned:
The insurgents chose for their barricade the point where the street narrowed just to the west of its junction with the Rue du Jouy. When [General] Saint-Chalman’s column left the place de la Bastille, its drums rolling, armed men gathered in overlooking houses and in nearby streets; others collected stones and other projectiles at windows and on rooftops. They allowed the infantry leading the column to break through the barricade unopposed and to continue on toward the Hôtel de Ville, but as the cavalry, slowed by the debris in the street, moved through, the people opened fire and rained paving stones, roof tiles, and pieces of furniture on the exposed men in the streets. The column hastily withdrew. The cavalry made a second attempt to pass but was again forced back. With the street again clear people swarmed out of the houses, and, spurred by their first success, built seven new barricades in about 1000 feet of the rue Saint-Antoine between the rue du Jouy and the Church of Saint-Paul.
In a subsequent incident in that same rue du Jouy, insurgents managed to strike down the three officers leading a column of infantrymen of the 1st Guard Regiment, two by rifle fire and one with a paving stone, and very nearly succeeded in winning over the now leaderless troops. Only the rapid deployment of artillery prevented a demoralizing mass defection.29
This style of combat at close quarters resulted in heavy casualties on both sides. According to compensation records, 496 insurgents died and 849 were wounded. The corresponding numbers among defenders of the regime were 150 and 580 respectively, with a considerable number also reported missing. The bulk of the casualties were sustained on July 28, the fiercest day of fighting. Insurgents, apprehensive about what the next day would bring, did their best to consolidate their positions during the night, building barricades “in almost every street in the city.” What they did not know was that Marmont’s forces were on the point of disintegration. Deprived of supplies of food and ammunition, completely drained and profoundly disheartened, they were all but incapable of carrying on the fight. Marmont, unable to blunt Charles’s ill-founded confidence, finally had to suspend offensive operations on July 29 and take up defensive positions around the Louvre and along the Champs-Elysées to the Etoile, the only parts of Paris that royal forces still controlled. Soon, even this precarious toehold was placed in jeopardy, as desertions, which had been individual on July 28, now began to involve whole units of the army and even to affect the Royal Guard. When the 5th and 53rd Regiments of the Line, holding a key position at the place Vendôme, went over to the insurrection on the morning of July 29, Marmont was obliged to abandon the Louvre itself. News of this further disaster at last persuaded Charles to announce the formation of a new ministry, the withdrawal of the hated ordinances, and the convening of the recently elected Chamber of Deputies. But all this came too late, as the spontaneously reconstituted National Guard had already assumed responsibility for policing the capital—with the seventy-two-year-old Lafayette reprising his 1789 role as its commander—under a five-member Municipal Commission acting as an informally constituted provisional government.30
No one could have predicted the rapidity with which events unfolded in 1830. The overthrow of the king, which in 1789 had taken three years, was accomplished in just three days in 1830. This drastic time compression was possible only because the Great Revolution had refined the issues and set the stage for its sequel. Even the choice of Louis-Philippe to succeed Charles X was a legacy of that earlier period. Among the new king’s crucial qualifications were the fact that he could boast of having fought under the tricolor flag (and, unlike so many other members of the aristocracy, of never having taken up arms against his native country). The vocal minority of militant republicans among those who fought on the July barricades might claim that their revolution had been stolen from them, but their real enemy was the memory of the Terror and the excesses that had accompanied republican government in the 1790s.
The July Days were momentous because they confirmed the view that the Revolution begun in 1789 was not yet over. Instead, its promise needed to be redeemed and its gains reaffirmed through a further insurrectionary contest pitting the French people against a resurgence of Bourbon absolutism. The editors of the Orléanist newspaper Le National had developed the thesis that all good revolutions needed two tries to achieve the definitive triumph of moderate and stable government. Adolphe Thiers and François-Auguste Mignet, both of whom had written histories of the 1789 Revolution, were fond of invoking the example of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 (as distinct from the bloody and protracted English Civil War of 1640) and of pointing out that the outcome had been a constitutional monarchy.
As for the barricade itself, the revolution of 1830 bestowed upon it an almost legendary status, a burnished and much embellished version of the reputation it retained from its two spectacular appearances in the early modern period. Once again, the barricade and all that it signified became central to popular political awareness. Suddenly, allusions to barricades seemed to spring up everywhere.
Though the technical means of mass production of images had not yet been perfected, representations of barricades achieved wide circulation. Deferring for the moment a discussion of the manifestations in high culture for which Delacroix and his peers were responsible in 1830 and the years that followed, we might simply stipulate that engravings and popular lithographs of barricade combat had an enormous impact both in France and beyond. Language also reflected the new heights to which barricade consciousness had risen. When the initial impasse created by the abdication of Charles X was resolved with the accession of Louis-Philippe, he was instantly dubbed “king of the barricades” as a way of underscoring the revolutionary origins of the new regime. In common parlance, people began to qualify an individual’s political views and values by specifying “on which side of the barricade he stands.” Indeed, a reference to the barricade could be used as a shorthand way of denoting the phenomenon of revolution itself. More important, the victory of July 1830 engendered a set of deeply held beliefs that, though not self-evidently true, nonetheless persisted through the classic era of the barricade. These included the notion that, while the people united might never be defeated, barricades remained the indispensable instrument of their victory. In short, in many ways the July Days set the pattern that major French insurrections would follow for the remainder of the nineteenth century. But it was not just in their country of origination that the Paris barricades of 1830 proved influential. Within mere months, France’s Belgian neighbors would use the technique of barricade construction to establish, once and for all, their right to national independence.
Reports that a new revolution had broken out in France electrified the Belgian people in late July 1830. A common language and the constant flow of migratory workers between Brussels and Paris—just 180 miles apart—fostered the close connection between the two societies. Many Brussels residents, including a number of French political exiles, regularly read the Paris newspapers. They now scanned the daily news for any clue as to the political and economic implications of the change of regime. The possibility that France would seek to propagate its revolutionary principles abroad, as the Jacobins had done in the 1790s, was met with hope in some quarters and trepidation in others.31
Following Charles X’s flight and the formation of a relatively liberal French government, Belgian nationalists had no difficulty persuading themselves that an insurrection in Brussels would enjoy immediate support in Paris. In reality, the new Orléanist government was paralyzed by the fear that the least hint of revolutionary fervor would raise the specter of French imperialism and provoke a military response from allied powers at a time when the army inherited from the previous regime was too disorganized and overcommitted to fight effectively. Over the next month, Louis-Philippe’s ministers therefore did all they could to dampen Belgian expectations.32
But the diplomatic situation was the furthest thing from the minds of those who attended the performance in Brussels on the evening of August 25, 1830, of the French composer Daniel-François Auber’s opera La muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici), whose subject is an uprising in seventeenth-century Naples.33 The opera, premiered in Paris in 1828, had been revived there immediately after the Trois Glorieuses, and a duet from it highlighting the theme of national liberation, “Sacred Love of the Fatherland,” had been adopted as a revolutionary anthem. It did not fail to evoke a rhapsodic response from the Brussels audience, which proceeded to carry its exuberance out into the streets. Late that evening, the city experienced a first round of rioting. Crowds roamed freely, attacking the houses of prominent Dutch officials and causing considerable property damage before troops arrived to disperse them. But the temperate response of the Dutch authorities failed to contain the disruption for long. Roving bands soon re-formed and, just as in the Parisian events they seemed to mimic, tried to obliterate the coat of arms of the House of Orange or the word “royal” wherever they found them publicly displayed. Participants seized guns and powder from the shops of arms merchants and used them to threaten—and, in a couple of instances, even to disarm—isolated patrols of Dutch soldiers, going so far as to warn gendarmes, “Stay neutral and we’ll do you no harm!” Soon they were breaking street lamps and felling trees to build the first barricades.34
Rioting continued for two days. Delirious patriots joined in singing “La Parisienne,” an air then popular in French republican circles. A red flag was flown by a column of insurgents on its way to plunder the headquarters of the provincial government. After workers attacked factories where power machinery had recently been introduced, property-owning residents, recognizing the grave threat that these disorders presented, formed an urban militia.35 Since they lacked uniforms, they adopted as an identifying sign the red, yellow, and black colors employed by the volunteers of the Brabant revolution forty years earlier. Eight hundred of them guarded the city on the night of August 26 and attempted the next day to interpose themselves between the crowd and royal soldiers. They even managed to disarm some of the unruly elements prowling through the city by buying back the arms they carried. By the evening of August 27, this Civic Guard was in effective control of Brussels.36
On August 28, the Dutch King, William I of Nassau, ordered troops withdrawn from the city and called for a meeting of the Estates General to begin on September 13. What his Belgian subjects did not know was that, in a private communication sent to his cousin, Frederick William III, he had made a simultaneous request for Prussian military support in case the forces at his immediate disposal proved insufficient to put down the unrest.37
Though the king’s apparent concessions had briefly restored Brussels to a state of relative calm, this did not last. On the final day of August, word spread that a Dutch army was approaching the city, and residents of all classes took up arms and once again set about digging up streets, cutting down trees, and constructing barricades.38 The alarm proved premature. The force in question turned out to be nothing more than Crown Prince William and his retinue. The prince entered the city peacefully enough on September 1 and made his way to the palace without incident, though the pavement had been torn up in places, and at one point he had to clamber across a barricade.39 Residents were somewhat mollified when Dutch troops, under the command of the king’s younger son, Prince Frederick, moved a certain distance away from the capital. On September 3, having completed his reconnaissance and assessed the state of popular sentiment, Prince William left for the Hague to consult with his father.
In the meantime, other Belgian cities had begun rallying to the cause of “separation,” sending columns of volunteers and cases of arms to Brussels.40 The contingents that set out from Liège on September 3 and 4 were particularly welcome, for that city was then, as it remains today, a center of European arms manufacture, and its residents did not arrive empty-handed.41 Charles Rogier, who would emerge as the overall leader of the movement, organized one such band, whose members left Liège singing the “Marseillaise.” The combined Liègeois forces made a triumphal entry into Brussels on September 7.
Anticipation of the upcoming meeting of the Estates General was somewhat muted in view of the fact that the constitution assigned half the votes to representatives of the much smaller Dutch population. The king was also quick to point out that that the Estates’ deliberations could result only in proposals for modifications to the Fundamental Law, and that actual changes would require the consent of the allied nations that had signed the Treaty of Paris as guarantors of the existing arrangement. Behind the scenes, William I was trying to get those same European powers to commit the troops necessary to uphold the treaty provisions unmodified. Russia was receptive to that view, but with the outbreak of a rebellion in Poland, the tsar was soon distracted by a crisis much closer to his own borders. King Frederick William of Prussia was sympathetic to his cousin’s plight, but wary of becoming involved in a war with France. In the end, what tipped the scales was England’s decision not to become involved unless it was necessary to counter direct French engagement in the conflict. The implied threat appears to have been sufficient, given Louis-Philippe’s desire to avoid any action that might serve as a pretext for allied intervention. The Belgians were therefore left to work out their destiny without outside help or interference.
This situation hardly offered much encouragement for patriotic forces, especially the Liègeois, who increasingly rejected the goal of “separation,” a form of coexistence with the Dutch on more equal terms, in favor of outright Belgian independence. The lines of authority in Brussels seemed hopelessly confused. Neither the Estates General nor the Regency Council, institutions tied to the status quo, seemed likely to advance the rebels’ cause. The general staff of the Brussels militia and the Comité de sûreté publique (Committee of Public Security), established on September 11, played a useful role in coordinating the major political groups, but both of these bodies remained committed to change by legal means alone. Indeed, the call for separation they jointly issued on September 15 was so moderate in tone that it infuriated radicals to the point of demanding that a provisional government be formed to replace the existing authorities.
Lacking as yet the popular support necessary to carry out their program, the advocates of independence instead formed, on September 16, the Réunion centrale, in imitation of a Paris political society. (Informally, it was sometimes referred to as the “Jacobin Club.”) Its membership, drawn from the vanguard of the nationalist movement, included provincials and foreigners as well as residents of Brussels who favored a revolutionary solution. Under the energetic leadership of Rogier, it proposed the democratization of the militia and the formation of an independent Belgian army. On September 18, this association called for the construction of barricades throughout the city and decided that if the Comité de sûreté refused to issue the order, that it would do so on its own authority. On the following day, the call for a provisional government was renewed and the names of three specific individuals advanced, though no such body actually took shape until after the battle for control of the capital had begun.42 Collisions between bourgeois militia units and the Brussels crowd, ending in an exchange of gunfire and several casualties, led to the transfer of 1,500 rifles into the hands of the popular forces that now controlled the streets of Brussels. On the evening of September 20, the Réunion centrale issued a proclamation urging all Belgians to take up arms against Holland.
William I had already made the decision to march against Brussels on September 17, instructing his son Frederick to recapture the city and expel the “foreign bands” occupying it.43 On September 21, the first Dutch soldiers were sighted in the outskirts of the capital. The tocsin was sounded and the people began building barricades in scattered locations. With an attack presumed to be imminent, the Réunion centrale seized control of the city, even though it had only a few hundred armed men it could count on. On the following day, as Dutch dragoons appeared in the vicinity of the porte de Schaerbeek, the générale, or general call to arms, summoned members of the militia to assemble at the main gates of the city. With the help of the men, women, and children of Brussels, militia members now set about erecting barricades in a frenzied rush.44 In the initial skirmishes, units of the Civic Guard sustained disquieting losses. On the afternoon of September 22, Prince Frederick issued a harsh and uncompromising decree, again blaming “foreigners” for the unrest.45 Outnumbered, outgunned, and lacking stable organization, Belgian patriots appeared to have such poor prospects of success that, even as Brussels was preparing to repel a full-scale assault, virtually the entire rebel leadership—members of the Comité de sûreté, the high command of the urban militia, and even the revolutionaries of the Réunion centrale—deserted the city.
The Dutch attack began very early on the morning of September 23. Over the next several days, the people of Brussels, with the aid of their provincial and foreign allies, performed the miracle of turning back a professional army easily four time larger than the number of armed rebels. The casualty rate among those fighting for Belgian independence was horrendous, with as many as one-fourth of all insurgents dying in combat.46 This willingness to endure heavy losses, along with the effective use of street-fighting tactics—most visibly, the construction of barricades—goes a long way toward explaining a victory that not even the most committed leaders of the nationalist movement appear to have believed in.
FIGURE 13. The reception of the Dutch troops in the rue de Flandre, Brussels, September 1830. As in France, the insurgents have used barrels, paving stones, planks, and beams to build their barricade. Van Neck 1905, 43.
The Dutch strategy was to overwhelm resistance with four simultaneous military charges. Two feinting incursions at the Flanders and Laeken gates, located at the lower end of the city, each involved 800 or 900 men. A more serious thrust by 2,500 men was aimed at the Louvain gate. The main assault was made on the Schaerbeek gate by a force of some 4,700 men.47 In every one of these locations, the royal army encountered insurgents heavily entrenched behind massive barricades.
At the porte de Flandre, troops were at first welcomed by a group of bourgeois who voluntarily began dismantling their barricade and offered the soldiers beer. However, once the troops advanced as far as the marché aux Porcs, they were greeted in an entirely different manner. After parleying for several minutes, General van Balveren, whose orders instructed him only to make a show of force in the hope of diverting insurgent resources from the other sites of combat, decided to withdraw. At this point, militia members fired into the mass of retreating soldiers, prompting an immediate riposte from the troops. This exchange was the signal for residents in adjoining buildings to begin hurling paving stones, wood, scrap metal, furniture, pots, bottles, boiling water, hot lime, and even a burning stove, down on the heads of their attackers.48 In streets encumbered with barricades that denied them freedom of movement, the infantrymen succumbed to panic. In the ensuing rout, dozens of Dutch soldiers lost their lives.
A similar outcome was achieved at the porte de Laeken. It was there that the Dutch first used cannon fire to batter a Belgian barricade, built in the classic fashion from trees, vehicles, planks, “and an enormous quantity of paving stones.”49 But after initially making satisfactory progress, Dutch forces soon had to seek cover against the murderous fire coming from the houses that adjoined the city gate. After sustaining heavy casualties, this force, whose purpose was also diversionary, withdrew to a defensive position just outside the city.
The attack on the porte de Louvain was more successful, at least in its early stages. After breaking through the iron gate, Major General Post’s troops split into two columns. The larger one quickly reached and secured the porte de Namur. The smaller one was stymied when it came up against a barricade in the rue Notre-Dame-aux-Neiges and soon rejoined the rest of the battalion. The advance of this combined force was then halted by sharpshooters posted at the windows of houses along the boulevard de Waterloo and the two cannon the insurgents were able to bring into play.
Still, the outcome of the struggle for control of the capital largely hinged upon the progress of the nearly 5,000 men sent against the porte de Schaerbeek under the command of Major General Schuerman. Confident of an easy victory, they had begun their approach at 6 A.M. under cover of an artillery bombardment. When they found the gate heavily defended, two cannon were used to force a passage and to attack the substantial barricades the insurgents had built to guard this key access to the city’s high ground.50 Amid the acrid smell of powder and the incessant tolling of the tocsin, royal troops made their way along the main boulevards to the rue Royale, where a detachment of grenadiers cleared two more troublesome barricades. By 9:30 the Dutch army had planted the orange flag in the Parc Royal and occupied the two adjoining palaces. General Schuerman had accomplished his immediate objective at the cost of roughly one hundred casualties. But the decision to consolidate his soldiers’ position rather than following up on their success by seizing the adjoining square, still lightly held by the insurgents, would prove fatal. One hour later, the rebel position had been reinforced, pinning down the soldiers in the park. The artillery duel that ensued never resulted in a decisive advantage to either side. Despite some ebb and flow in the morale of the two camps during the first few hours of fighting, no significant change in positions took place over the next four days.
The insurgents’ style of combat was well adapted to their circumstances and resources. Women, children, and old men played a crucial role by carrying paving stones up to the rooftops and heaving them down on the soldiers with deadly effect.51 As long as the sun shone, the fighting was unremitting; but after defending their barricades with remarkable determination all day, insurgents abruptly abandoned them at nightfall. Most returned home to reassure family, eat a nourishing meal, and sleep in a comfortable bed. A good many stopped off at the neighborhood café to share the day’s experiences. These hours of respite were also put to practical use by those who made up cartridges or searched for powder.52 By 6 A.M. the next morning, insurgents had again taken their places behind the barricades, and combat resumed.
FIGURE 14. Volunteers defend the Hôtel de Belle-Vue in Brussels, September 1830. It is difficult to discern differences in outward form or method of deployment between this barricade, constructed in the later stages of the fighting in Brussels, and those built by Parisian insurgents during the July Days. Van Neck 1905, 80.
The second day of the insurrection witnessed a small but discernible shift in the general tide of battle. Juan van Halen, a Spaniard of Belgian origin, was named commander of insurgent forces in Brussels in recognition of his military experience and his exemplary role in the early fighting.53 The first rebel reinforcements arrived from the provinces that evening. By the following day, this early trickle had turned into a torrent. Encouraged by these developments, local residents who had held back as long as the patriot cause seemed hopeless, now joined the fray. For the Dutch army, on the contrary, there was no relief in sight. Units suffered mounting casualties from sniper fire and occasional artillery exchanges, while the logistical situation steadily deteriorated. Although Prince Frederick had opened cease-fire negotiations, the insurgents, now sensing a shift in the balance of forces, were disinclined to compromise.
By Sunday, September 26, the spirits of the insurgents were further buoyed by expressions of support from every one of the Belgian provinces, as well as by the arrival of fresh waves of patriots. On the opposite side of the barricades, the army’s spiraling losses first undermined morale and then gave rise to outright dissension. A fourth day of military stalemate had made it obvious to Prince Frederick that the only hope of victory lay in a general bombardment of the city, an expedient that would render a future reconciliation between the king and his rebellious subjects all but impossible. In the end, he was deprived of that option, even as a last resort or a bargaining chip, when the minority of Belgians within the army’s officer corps gave notice that they would refuse to take part in the destruction of their country’s capital city.54 The rank and file were similarly divided along lines of national origin. The military high command had done its best to assign predominantly Dutch regiments to put down the insurrection in Brussels but was unable to avoid deploying units of mixed nationality, particularly in the all-important cavalry corps.55 The desertion rate among Belgian soldiers, whose loyalty in the early fighting had been commendable, continued to rise at a disconcerting pace. Retreat became the sole means of preventing the total disintegration of the royal army.
The withdrawal of Dutch forces took place in the middle of the night of September 26 to 27. Infantry units were accompanied by eighty wagons carrying the wounded and the bodies of some of the dead. The cavalry covered the hooves of their horses to muffle the noise of their departure. The next morning, insurgents were first surprised, then overjoyed to learn the enemy had decamped. Their jubilation at having accomplished the impossible was capped on the 28th by the return of several prominent leaders, most notably de Potter, from their exile in France.
The liberation of Brussels had been effected against all odds and thanks to techniques the insurgents extrapolated from the Brabant revolution as well as the July Days in Paris. The special strategic importance of a dozen specific Brussels barricades explains why their location and defense was described in extravagant detail by contemporary sources, but this narrow focus has tended to obscure the fact that scores more were built.56 Belgians’ revival of this tactic had denied William’s forces, vastly superior in both numbers and armament, control over the city and dealt them a staggering defeat.
Prince Frederick promptly withdrew to the countryside. Though his clear intention was to concentrate on cutting lines of communications between Brussels and other Belgian cities and limit the spread of disaffection, he was already too late. The astonishing victory in Brussels caused Belgians everywhere to take up the cause of national independence. Within days, the uprising had been generalized throughout the Belgian provinces. Louvain, fifteen miles east, rose up and chased its garrison from the city. When that retreating army sought refuge in Tirlemont (Tienen) on September 23, residents refused them entry by barricading the city’s gates.57 The next day, Liège, which had provided much of the impetus for the insurgents’ success in Brussels, experienced its own flurry of barricade construction. The appearance of soldiers in the city was at first thought to signify a Dutch attack. Though these forays turned out to represent nothing more than scattered marauders sent out from the citadel to scavenge for food, the Liègeois, once mobilized, proceeded to lay siege to the fortress, beginning on September 27. Efforts to relieve the troops trapped there were thwarted when the inhabitants of nearby Sainte-Walburge denied passage to the Dutch relief column by building barricades.58 When news of the successful Brussels insurrection reached Ghent on September 28, residents resolved to drive out their own local garrison of 2,000 royal soldiers. Two days of barricade fighting forced the Dutch to retreat to the citadel; the arrival of the Belgo-Parisian Legion a couple of weeks later, which seemed to portend a direct assault on the fortress, was the final blow: the military had no choice but to capitulate.59
The royal army, harried by insurgents at every turn, found itself faced with imminent internal collapse. Unlike the units that had been specially selected for use against Brussels, garrisons in other towns and in the principal fortresses included substantial contingents of Belgian soldiers, now fully awakened to the nationalist struggle. Their presence “broke the homogeneity and resistance of the army.”60 With the rate of desertion soaring, all Dutch military units had to be withdrawn from Belgian soil without delay. Though William I for years maintained the hollow pretense that this outcome was not definitive, the provisional government wasted no time in proclaiming Belgian independence and convoking a National Congress to oversee the creation of a new state.
The occurrence, between 1787 and 1789, of multiple barricade events in the Belgian provinces poses the question of how repertoires of collective action diffuse—or, perhaps more accurately, whether in the case of the barricade routine specifically, the Belgian events represent a process of diffusion or were simply the result of independent invention, whether that occurred in the late eighteenth century or earlier. What concepts and what evidence can be brought to bear in deciding such a question?
Everett Rogers’s classic work Diffusion of Inventions highlights the role of relational ties. He uses the term “channels” to refer to the chains of human contact that allow novel ideas or behaviors to pass from initiators to subsequent adopters through everyday, face-to-face social interactions that bind the parties into a rudimentary social system. Rogers’s main point is that scientific innovations, like all other forms of learning and social influence, typically follow channels defined by preexisting lines of interpersonal communication. In brief, diffusion is a function of network ties. Rogers goes on to propose the principle of “homophily”—the degree to which interacting individuals possess common attributes—to explain why the transfer of ideas is most likely to occur among those who share similar outlooks or experiences.61
However, relational transmission has a more difficult time explaining forms of diffusion where direct personal contact among initiators and emulators is limited or nonexistent. David Strang and John W. Meyer have investigated cases where, for example, the spread of strategies of economic development to far-flung corners of the globe could not be adequately accounted for either as the result of autonomous invention on the part of experts and politicians working in isolation or as a consequence of relational ties among key actors, most of whom, it was easy to demonstrate, never came into direct contact. Strang and Meyer directed attention instead to processes of nonrelational or cultural transmission that often supplement or substitute for unmediated personal interaction. The point is that cultural transmission, though it may be reinforced by relational ties, regularly occurs even in the absence of such contact when the parties share common reservoirs of meaning, operate in similar institutional environments, and rely upon the same sources of information. Freed from the necessity of direct individual interchange, nonrelational or cultural transmission has the potential to vastly increase the speed and scope of the diffusion process and often exerts a powerful homogenizing influence on the nature of what is transmitted.62
In the realm of social movement theory, Doug McAdam and Dieter Rucht have built upon and adapted these insights to the specific problem of tactical innovations, here exemplified by the spread of barricades.63 For them, there are three critical considerations in attempting to establish a link between initiators and emulators. One is the existence of common elements in the objectives, ideologies, or styles of protest adopted by the groups concerned. Another is the ability to identify mechanisms that might plausibly account for the passage of those shared elements from one set of actors to another, whether the channels in question are relational or cultural. In addition, one needs to demonstrate that the observed temporal lags are consistent with the hypothesized mode of transmission.
In the Belgian case, it is possible to show that both relational and cultural diffusion played some role in the spread of the barricade, though the lack of source materials dealing with pivotal events, particularly during the crucial period from 1787 to 1789, limits our ability to draw inferences that are more than conjectural.64 We do know, for example, that as far back as the 1770s, a period of great turmoil in France, the Gazette des Pays-Bas gave detailed coverage to the French monarchy’s dispute with the French parlements and to the widespread unrest occasioned by the “flour wars” during the final, troubled years of Louis XV’s reign.65 In the decade leading to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Belgians were enthralled by the spectacle of the so-called Revolt of the Nobles in France, which showed that even the king of the most powerful nation on the Continent could be humbled by his subjects’ refusal to bend to his will. And quite clearly, Belgians’ reaction to Joseph’s administrative coup of June 16, 1789, was sharpened by the arrival on the previous day of news that the French Third Estate had declared itself a National Assembly, effectively usurping a portion of Louis XVI’s legislative authority.66 Just one month later, Belgians reveled in an account of the storming of the Bastille that included mention of the use of barricades.67
Austrian officials were well aware that a wind of revolution was sweeping across the border from France, but they remained powerless to prevent Belgians from breathing deeply of its intoxicating aroma. In secret correspondence, the emperor’s minister plenipotentiary, Trauttmansdorff, reported that “people await and receive the news from France with an incredible avidity” and “were speaking aloud about following the example of the French.” Brussels was swamped with handbills that read simply “Here as in Paris!” The gravity of the situation could hardly have escaped Joseph II’s attention, since Alton, his hand-picked general, had already written him on July 6 that “France, so near to us, furnishes at this moment an example of authority being successfully attacked and of an entire army that is forgetting its duty.”68 The Vonckist party, one of the two major factions that directed the successful effort to drive the Austrian army out of the Belgian provinces in 1789, was self-avowedly pro-French. Its leader dispatched an envoy to the French National Assembly after Brussels newspapers reported how that body had dismantled the feudal system during the late-night session of August 4, 1789. This emissary’s primary mission was to learn what response was to be expected from the National Assembly should a major insurrection occur in the Austrian Netherlands.69 All of this suggests that developments in France exerted at least an indirect influence on the progress of the Brabant revolution.
In short, there is ample evidence that political developments in Brussels and Paris were mutually reinforcing, even if we retain no record of actual movements of money, arms, or men. But the Belgian revolution of 1830 presents a far more promising context in which to study the diffusion process. Contemporary public opinion certainly considered the connection between the two great revolutionary events of that year to be self-evident. Barricades went up in Brussels less than a month after reappearing in Paris, and neither participants nor observers considered the timing mere coincidence. Eyewitnesses cited as evidence Belgians’ readiness to borrow highly visible French symbols. Thus, on August 26, 1830, the first full day of insurrectionary activity in Brussels, the blue, white, and red French flag flew above the Hôtel de Ville for several hours before being replaced by the Brabant tricolor, a passing of the torch that was eloquent in its symbolism. Throughout the initial week of unrest, residents were reported to have spontaneously broken into choruses of the “Marseillaise” to mark their patriotic fervor. Demonstrators in the streets of Brussels raised cries of “Vive la liberté! Vive de Potter! Vive Napoléon!” and the general public seemed ready to welcome even the most implausible reports, like the mid-September rumor that 40,000 French national guards were preparing to march to the aid of Brussels.70
The appropriation of French symbols, though widespread, was never altogether uncritical. When residents of Liège set up a shadow government, they briefly considered calling it the Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut publique) but decided that this name “sounded bad due to its associations” with the Jacobin Terror.71 They had no qualms, however, about calling the new revolutionary association they set up in September the Réunion centrale, in conscious imitation of French militants who had recently founded the club of the same name in Paris. Moreover, the inner circle of that organization, though based in Brussels, included not only Belgian provincials (notably its leader, the Liégeois Charles Rogier) but also a number of French nationals (among them, Pierre Chazal, Ernest Grégoire, Charles Niellon, Charles Culhat, and Anne-François Mellinet, all of whom distinguished themselves in combat on behalf of Belgian independence).72
In Paris, meantime, the expatriate Belgian community was in a state of frenetic activity. Even after the transfer to Dutch rule in 1815, the migratory current of Belgians flocking to the French capital had continued unabated. Despite the diminutive size and population of the Belgian provinces, natives of that region almost certainly represented the single largest contingent of foreign residents in Paris.73 A tiny but highly influential subgroup consisted of political activists seeking refuge from William I’s efforts to repress the independence movement. Among the most recent arrivals were Louis de Potter and François Tielemans. Though they had applied for asylum immediately after being banished in the summer of 1830, Charles X’s prime minister Jules-Armand de Polignac flatly rejected their request. It was only with the change of French regimes in late July that access to French territory was granted by the new government, and not until August 24 that de Potter and Tielemans, like their compatriots Adolph Bartels and P. Nève, arrived in Paris.74
Over the next few weeks, de Potter, the most widely recognized representative of the Belgian nationalist movement in France, was showered with offers of assistance. He was made the guest of honor at political banquets and met with Lafayette, who not only endorsed the concept of Belgian independence but gave his personal guarantee to a loan of 12,000 francs from his political ally, the banker Lafitte. De Potter’s role was key not only because of his visibility and moral force but also because he had maintained close ties with the “pro-French” faction back in Brussels from whom he now earnestly sought instructions.75
As for the thousands of ordinary Belgian workers who resided in the French capital, their enthusiasm was, by late August, boundless. Many had been witnesses to if not participants in the Trois Glorieuses. The French nobleman Ponté-coulant would later claim that he led his Parisian sharpshooters to Brussels after being “besieged on all sides by the ardent solicitations of young men who, like myself, had fought in the streets of Paris.”76 Patriotic Belgians, intent on applying the lessons learned during the July Days to the challenge facing their own country, found sympathetic Parisians eager to help.
The largest political organizations in Paris—the Amis du peuple and Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera—began signing up volunteers, both Belgian and French, and promised to provide weapons for the struggle to win separation from the Netherlands.77 When news of the outbreak of rioting in Brussels arrived, workers who frequented the Café Belge, located at 22 rue Grenelle Saint-Honoré in Paris, formed the Bureau central, a political club that held stormy discussions of the latest developments back home. This drew a vehement reaction from the Dutch ambassador. On September 23, he wrote to his superior in the Hague, Foreign Minister van Soelen, urging him to call Louis-Philippe’s attention to this recruitment effort in the hope that the French government would put an immediate stop to all such activities.78 Dutch fears have to be understood in light of newspaper reports like the one that appeared on September 30 telling of 300 Belgians who paraded through various quarters of the French capital, waving a Brabançon flag, singing “La Parisienne,” and being acclaimed by local residents to cries of “Vivent les Belges!”79 In the few weeks that had elapsed since hostilities erupted in Brussels, at least a half dozen columns of volunteers had been organized, armed, and dispatched to Belgium.80
Thus, a combination of relational and cultural connections appear to have facilitated the diffusion of barricades from France to Belgium over the period extending from 1787 to 1830. Unfortunately, the more closely we examine the evidence, the less conclusive it appears. The most obvious stumbling block regarding the first Belgian barricades is the fact that they appeared in Brussels a year and a half before Parisians dusted off this venerable tactic for use on July 14, 1789. As the French journalist Linguet would point out to Trauttmansdorff, “it was the Belgians who had given the French the example of popular resistance in the first place.”81 The timing of the 1830 events plainly suggests that Belgians were influenced by the French example, but few of the presumed links turn out to have been terribly efficacious. For example, the Dutch ambassador almost immediately retracted the protest he had filed with the French government concerning attempts to recruit Parisian volunteers to come to the aid of the Belgian revolution. His reason was simple. After more detailed inquiries, he no longer considered the “collection of blunderers” headquartered at the Café Belge to be of real consequence.82 As for de Potter, the linchpin of the Paris-Brussels connection, his activities never really achieved any concrete result. His arrival in the French capital on August 24, literally on the eve of the first Brussels barricades, came too late to have had any practical impact on those events. He spent the next three weeks fending off unsolicited offers from prospective freedom fighters, while vainly awaiting orders from those heading up the movement back in Belgium. In frustration, he left Paris on September 18 for a meeting with Gendebien in Lille, but it was not until the 28th, the day after Dutch troops had withdrawn, that he finally set foot in Brussels. None of his activities can be shown to have been of any consequence to the outcome of that struggle. As for the much-touted volunteer legions, they were all small, and de facto independence was achieved so quickly that not one of them arrived in time to have the slightest influence on the barricade fighting.83
I have, in fact, been unable to document a single instance in which relational ties directly linked the French and Belgian barricades of 1830. Though ties of a more diffuse nature abounded, they do not always provide satisfying proof of a direct relationship. As Demoulin emphasized, Brussels insurgents may have adopted the French flag and national anthem as generic emblems of revolt, but this could not be taken to signify direct French involvement in their struggles, much less a desire on the part of the local population to be reabsorbed by France.84 In the end, the most substantive connection between the two revolutions may have been the simple fact that the change of regimes in France deprived the Dutch of the support they might have expected from Charles X’s ultraconservative government, while leaving open the possibility—or so Belgian patriots persisted in believing—that Louis-Philippe, the “king of the barricades,” would intervene on their behalf.
Lacking the level of detail we might hope for, particularly regarding the 1787 events, the Belgian case allows us to draw only general conclusions. It suggests that geographical proximity—and more particularly a common border served by efficient modes of transport over hospitable terrain—translated into an ease of access that increased social interchange between the two capitals. At the same time, a set of cultural affinities rooted in part in a common language and many common values favored the movement of ideas across the porous boundary separating the two societies. The history of the Belgian provinces, specifically the experience of political integration, enhanced the sense of connection, since as erstwhile departments of France, they possessed direct knowledge of that country’s laws and institutions. The combination of frequent interpersonal contact, a substantial current of cross-migration, and a shared cultural context created multiple channels with the potential to facilitate the adoption of the barricade as an insurrectionary technique.
It seems especially fitting that Belgians were the first to build barricades outside France, since that act closed a circle dating back to Etienne Marcel’s borrowing of the custom of stretching the chains from fourteenth-century Flemish towns.85 Chains were still in use in the 1780s in Ghent and Brussels as well as Paris, testimony to the longevity that such innovations sometimes achieve. The irony is that, in contrast to the spread of the practice of using chains more than 600 years ago, we know so little about the precise mechanism of transmission that brought the barricade to the Belgian provinces in 1787 just over two hundred years ago. A mere four Belgian barricade events in the crucial 1787–1789 period, all thinly documented, are insufficient to establish in a definitive way whether that local adaptation represented a process of diffusion or a case of independent invention. The more ample record of the Belgian revolution argues strongly (without quite pinning down) that the appearance of barricades in Brussels in 1830 was a direct consequence of events in Paris a month earlier. However, if our goal is to understand the dynamic of the diffusion process more fully, we need to turn to the richly documented events of the year 1848, responsible for the most rapid and comprehensive spread of barricade construction ever witnessed.
