Wallonia

Wallonia receives much of its intellectual food, of its literature and its science, from France. Many ties of sympathy unite the Walloons with the French, and these ties had grown stronger since the Great War. Holland is to Flanders what France is to Wallonia.

The surface of Wallonia, which is more rolling than that of Flanders, exhibits some genuine plains; its Hautet-Fagnes, or miry plateaus, and its hills and mountains, which are connected with the French Ardennes, raise the mean altitude of Belgium to 535 feet; the aridity of the Belgian Ardennes, their landes, swamps, and sombre, chill woods, form a striking contrast to the flatness of Flanders, a few leagues distant. These eminences are low; their culminating summit, near the famous watering-place of Spa, has an altitude of only 2261 feet; it barely rises above the surrounding regions. But the valleys are beautiful: the Mouse, the excessively winding Semoy, the picturesque Ourthe, the Ambleve and Vesdre falling in cataracts between the rocks of the Hautes-Fagnes, the Lesse, which wanders for hours in the obscurity of the cavern of Han, — all these rivers are charming, and at times they are grand.

Wallonia embraces four provinces, namely, Hainault, Namur, Liege, and Luxembourg; it includes, besides, the southern third of Brabant. The manufacturing element, which predominates so largely in Flanders, gives place here to the agricultural, and the towns are smaller and less numerous on the average; shops are less common, except in the coal basins, and the population is less crowded than in the Flemish districts. Luxembourg, a high, rugged, rocky region, having a harsh climate, has only 128 inhabitants to the square mile, the province of Namur 240, but Liege has 680, and Hainault 737; the density of population in these last provinces is due to the masses of coal, iron, and metals buried in their hills. If Flanders was a Manchester of the continent, Mons and Charleroi were its Newcastle, and Liege its Birmingham.

The Walloon Belgians are French; they speak the French language in all its purity in the cities, and use French dialects in the country districts. Outside of Wallonia, Brussels, which was once exclusively Flemish, is fully half French, and throughout the whole of Flanders this Neo-Latin idiom is the language of the wealthy and educated classes, of the newspapers and reviews, and of public life.

The growing dominance of French as the language of politics and culture was reinforced by the Austrians and particularly by the French occupation of 1795—1814. By the end of the occupation, Belgium was, in the words of a noted scholar, "nothing but an intellectual and cultural province of France." In 1805, although the Walloon Belgians were closer to the French in outlook and customs than the Flemish Belgians, neither was particularly francophile. There was no sense of a Flemish or Walloon "people," and no real geographic distinction was made. The term "Flanders" still referred to the administrative unit of the Austrian Netherlands, and the word Wallonia had not yet been coined.

Under the Kingdom of the United Netherlands, however, William I attempted to reverse the trend of French dominance and replace it with his own "Dutchification" (vernederlandsing). The basis of the campaign was political — to end Belgium's ties with his enemy, France, and create a strong Dutch political entity capable of competing with France on its own terms. The establishment of Dutch as a language on a par with French was a crucial aspect of the policy. In the late 1840s and 1850s, a pattern of disequilibrium between the economic growth in Flanders and Wallonia became apparent. Wallonia (which acquired its name only in the 1850s), blessed with abundant coal, was undergoing a discernible burst of industrialization after 1850.

As Flemish demands escalated, Wailoon rhetoric did likewise. A Walloon national movement arose as a defensive reaction, which significantly raised the stakes in the language issue. Walloons in general, unlike the Flemings, had no complaints against the requirement of French as the language of administration, government, and education and feared that fDrced bilingualism and proportional distribution of political beriefits would condemn them to a minority position within the political system and society.

The first Walloon societies were established in Flanders, and together they held a conference in Brussels in 1884. Four years later the Walloon Union (Union Walionne) was created in Liege and held annual congresses from 1890 to 1893. Walloon and French-speaking defense associations sprang up all over the country, particularly targeting the French-speaking Fiemings (Franskiijons), who were the main focus of the Flemish movernent's ire. The Wailoon movement was by no means a mass movement until well after World War II.

Economic trends that were barely visible 20 years before became quite apparent in the late 1950s. Capital investment, industrial development, and creation of new jobs rose markedly in Flanders, while in Wallonia antiquated industries and depleted coal reserves resulted in a general decline. In addition, the Flemings were pulling far ahead of the Walloons in population growth. Walloon nationalism, therefore, focused primarily on economic issues and became for the first time a popular movement. The territorial or regional component of the language question, first broached by the Flemish movement at the turn of the century, was reinforced by the obvious regional disequilibrium.