Brussels. A cultural and literary history 1902669460, 1902669479

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Cities of the Imagination Buenos Aires by Jason Wilson Oxford by David Horan Mexico City by Nick Caistor Rome by Jonathan Boardman Madrid by Elizabeth Nash Venice by Martin Garrett Lisbon by Paul Buck Havana by Claudia Lightfoot New York City by Eric Hornberger Kingston by David Howard Prague by Richard Burton Calcutta by Krishna Dutta

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of the Imagination

A cultural and literary history

Andre de Vries

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Signal Books

Oxford

First published in 2003 by Signal Books Limited 36 Minster Road Oxford OX41LY

www.signalbooks.co.uk © Andre de Vries, 2003 Foreword © Jacques De Decker, 2003

FOREWORD by Jacques De Decker (ix) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (xiii)

INTRODUCTION Beyond Stereotypes (1); Brussels Identity (5); A History of Occupations (9); The Changing Shape of the City (13); Administrative Structure (15)

CHAPTER ONE All rights reserved . T,he who le of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stor_ed, manipul~ted, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electroni c or mech anical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner. The right of Andre de Vries to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

ILE ST. GERY: A SWAMP AND AN INVISIBLE RIVER A House in a Marsh (20); Rue de Laeken and the Beguines (22); Chess and Haute Couture (23); The River Senne (24)

CHAPTER TWO THE GRAND-PLACE: THE RISE OF BRUSSELS The First Brussels Market (30); Hotel de Ville (32); Around the GrandPlace (34); Emblems and Statues (38); The Sacred Isle and Victor Hugo (40); Rue de la rnte d'Or et Rue Chair-et-Pain (42); Restaurant Culture

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

(43); Rue des Bouchers (46); Theatre Toone: Wooden People with Souls (48)

ISBN 1-902669-46-0 Cloth ISBN 1-902669-47-9 Paper Drawings by Nicki Averill Cover Design : Baseline Arts Typesetting: Devdan Sen Cover Images: Andre de Vries; Belgian Tourist Office

CHAPTER TH REE THE MANN EKEN PIS: BRUSSELS' OLDEST CITIZEN Medieval Class Struggle (50); The Palladium of Brussels (51); Verlaine and Mes Prisons (54); Karl Marx in Jail (55); Rue du Lombard (56); Rue de la Violette: Lace Making (57); Place Vieille Halle aux Bies and the Fondation Jacques Brei (58); Rue des Bogards (63); Rue des Pierres (63); Van Helmont: Philosophus per lgnem (64)

V

CHAPTER FOUR

4.

CATHEDRALE ST. GUDULE: SAINTS, SINNERS,

CHAPTER EIGHT THE ROAD TO WATERLOO French Occupation (139); Napoleon and the Palais de Laeken (140);

AND CARTOON HEROES

Waterloo: A Near Thing (142); A Last Dance (144); Battlefield Tourists

The Miracle of the Rue des Sols: An Anti-Semitic Legend (69); Rue St.

(146); Byron in Brussels (150); James Joyce (151)

Laurent: Red Light Zone (70); Rue des Sables: The Comic Strip Museum (74); Herge and Tintin (76)

CHAPTER FIVE CITY OF PALACES: ROYAL BRUSSELS Life at the Palace (So); The Burgundians (82); The Habsburgs (84); The Couden berg (85); The End of the Couden berg (88); Palais Royal (89); Pare de Bruxelles (90); Rue Royale (90); Rue Isabelle: Charlotte Bronte

CHAPTER NINE THEATRE DE LA MONNAIE: BIRTHPLACE OF THE NAllON The 1830 Revolution (154); La Malibran (156); The Monnaie in Modern Times (157); Cafe Culture (158); Literary Cafes (160); Galeries St-Hubert: Shopping Innovation (162); La Mort Subite: Brussels and Beer (164); Baudelaire and the Rue de la Montagne (168)

and the Professor (91); Notre-Dame-aux-Neiges and Victor Hugo (94); Mont des Arts and the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (97)

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER SIX

VILVOORDE AND MOLEN BEEK: THE INDUSTRIAL

THE SOUTH: MYSTICS AND HERETICS

REVOLUTION

John of Ruysbroeck and Groenendael (100); Erasmus and the

The Canal de Willebroeck and the Port of Brussels (172); Brussels

Reformation (102); The Inquisition (107); Anderlecht: Martyrdom of a

Changes Languages (175); The Canals and L'Allee Verte (180); Vilvoorde and William Tyndale (182); Molenbeek and Industrial Archaeology (183);

Supporter (108); The Southern Communes: Uccle (110); Foret de Soignes (112); Watermael-Boitsfort (114); La Hulpe (114); Auderghem and Hugo van der Goes (115); Woluwe (116); Woluwe St. Pierre and Eddy Merckx

The Bassins and Place St. Catherine (184); Industrialization in Art and Literature (187)

(117); The Chocolate Tram and the Vicinal (118)

CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAROLLES: WORKING-CLASS BRUSSELS

ART FOR SALE: BRUEGHEL, SURREALISM, AND HIGH

Rue Haute: High and Low Life (192); Vesalius and the Rue des Minimes

CULTURE

(194); Rue des Brigittines and Georges Eekhoud (196); Place du Jeu de

Louis XIV: Brussels Bombarded (121); The Brueghel Factory (122); Musee

Balle and the Old Market (198); The Palais de Justice (200); Brussels Dialects (202); Rue Blaes and Rue des Tanneurs (206); Plague and

des Beaux Arts (123); Dada and Surrealism (124); Marcel Broodthaers

Medicine (208)

(127); COBRA and the Rue de la Paille (128); Sablan (130); Notre Dame des Victoires (130); Palais des Beaux Arts (133); Musee du Cinema de Bruxelles (136)

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vii

CHAPTER TWELVE AN EMP IRE OF ONE'S OWN: VICTOR HORTA AND ART NOUVEAU Art Nouveau in the City (212); Architectural Conservation (214) ; Leopold II : Lust for Empire (215); The Curse of the Rubber King (218); Avenue Louise and the Bois de la Cambre (221); Three Brussels Poets (222)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN CAPI TAL OF EUROP E Two German Occupations (226); The Atom ium an d the Heysel (2 29); The European Community (230); VDB and CDP: the "Crocodile" (234); Antoine Wiertz: Euromegalomaniac (236)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN A NEW KIND OF VISITOR: IMM IG RAN T BRUSSELS Alexandra David-Neel (242) ; Migrants and Literature (242); Jewish Life in Brussels (244); Gare du Midi (245) ; Gare du Nord (246); The Monarch in Question (248); The Future of Brussels (248) FURTHER READING (251) INDEX OF LITERARY & HISTORICAL NAM ES (256) INDEX OF PLACES & LANDMARKS (261)

Vilt

Foreword Brussels is increasingly visible on the world map, its profile growing ever higher. But its familiarity conceals a distinct literary deficit. The city is not associated, to say the very least, with an evocative sense of the imaginary. If someone strolling on the banks of the Seine or the T hames is constantly reminded of books they have read, if one cannot cross the Pont Mirabeau without Apollinaire's verses coming to mind, if the streets of London inevitably evoke pages from Dickens just as St. Petersburg's solstice nights recall Dostoevsky, nothing comparable, at first sight, happens in Brussels. Here is a city, it seems, untouched by Ii terature. It is all the more regrettable that while so much is written about Brussels, none of this is to celebrate its poetic wealth, the legends that fi ll its streets, the myths that have taken form here. Manneken Pis was born from a fragment of history but is the hero of no tale, not even of :i farce. The Atomium was not inspired by a science fiction novel. The prestige of a city is mirrored in the fictional characters with which it is a sociated. Sherlock Holmes is not only the most celebrated of detectives, but is also the Londoner par excellence. Can one walk in the ardens of the Tuileries without Marius, the turbulent hero of Les Miserables, springing to life? And, in the Marais district, how can one not hear the clashing swords of Dumas' musketeers? Oddly enough, 13russels has none of this aura. This is all the more strange since wellI nown authors such as Victor Hugo or Dumas himself have stayed here without using the city as a backdrop for their novels. During the time of his exile in Brussels, which lasted about a thousand days, Hugo was :i ble to store away a great many choses vues that he sometimes consigned 1o his notebooks, even illustrating them with drawings, but his imagination did not build on these observations to endow them with 1he magic that fiction alone can confer. Classical literature only pr vides Brussels with two important appearances as the background I'< r d ramatic or fictional events. One is Charlotte Bronte's Villette, where it would be difficult to exaggerate how much the author bears wit ness to the ambivalent status of a city both modest and already d ·stined to an international vocation. The other is Egmont by Goethe, ix

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a play that dramatizes an immensely significant episode from the sixteenth-century Reformation in the Low Countries. Here the fundamental question is whether nations can remain autonomous within a greater entity. In an age of gradual European integration, this theme is as pertinent as it ever was. And the fact that this tragedy was set in the context of Brussels testifies to the extraordinary and visionary intuition of its author. There is a reason for this apparent literary neglect. Writers in Belgium do not define themselves in terms of any geographical belonging, but feel themselves to be part of wider cultural contexts. Those who write in French cake France as their point of reference, while those who write in Dutch or its Flemish variant situate themselves in an even more complex psychological space, of which Brussels is in any case not the center. It was decreed not long ago that Brussels was to be the capital of Flanders. The measure is no doubt a strategic one, with understandable objectives but it has little meaning in the real world. This lack of focus on Brussels means that those who use the French of Moliere or the Dutch of Vondel are hardly motivated to use the city as a setting. Or rather, they were not in the past. The French speakers among them sometimes went as far as to move the action of novels written with Brussels in mind to some Parisian arrondissement. The pressure exerted by their Left Bank publishers probably had something to do with it... In this connection, one cannot fail to notice the remarkable indifference shown by Georges Simenon toward the Belgian capital: in the course of hundreds of novels he practically never refers to the place. A typical Liegeois reflex? In Liege people tend not to make too much of the Brabantine capital, whose dominance of Belgian life is considered an usurpation. But it is unlikely that this form of Liegeois chauvinism actually influenced the creator of Maigret. Quite simply, Brussels never fired his imagination. Paris was the pole of attraction from his adolescence, and at the age of twenty-five he was already a king there. For a long time only those poets and storytellers who were profoundly smitten with the city would speak of Brussels. Whether Flemish in origin, Walloon or homegrown, these were the real Brusseleers, chose who loved its distinctive language and wanted to give X

Foreword

it literary status. Such was the case with the revuistes, who wrote atirical sketches for the many cafe-theatres, creating the tradition chat spawned the masterpiece of local dialect theater, Le Mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans. This, too, was the aim of Roger Kervyn de Marcke ten briessche, an aesthetic-looking aristocrat who invented the character of Pitje Schramouille in the 1930s. Pitje, the archetypal Brussels street urchin, is the hero of many spicy tales, written in a subtly stylized Bruxellois dialect, a small marvel of popular poetry that has recently won an enthusiastic new audience. Pitje, cousin to Woltje, the folkloric marionette of the Royal Theatre Toone, is also equally related to those two jokers Quick et Flupke, dreamt up by Herge, the fathe r ofTintin. But the real lovers of Brussels are not only humorists. Just as painters planted their easels in the various quartiers (Rik Wouters or Paul Delvaux, both residents of Boitsfort, are the best-known 'x:amples), certain poets have found inspiration along the city's streets. This has given us the Bruxellois elegies of Odilon-Jean Perier in French, r of Jan van Nijlen in Dutch. They have both succeeded in rendering :i sort of melancholy that suits this collection of villages hidden away in valleys or clinging to hillsides. Assembled together they form a patchwork city whose diverse charms make a tour of Brussels a kind of strange odyssey through an urban archipelago with all its varied temptations. In the last twenty years the climate has changed. Brussels no longer just interests its native writers, more of whom are locating their novels here. They are also happy to find that the city they inhabit is becoming I s and less anonymous, that it attracts growing numbers of curious vi itors, and yet that its streets, squares, lakes, and parks have not yet become cliches worn out by novelists, filmmakers, and singers. Novelists such as Pierre Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Baronian, and Jacqueline Harpman take delight in this virgin territory. Among the y unger generation, such as Jean-Luc Outers, Alain Berenboom, and Xavier Hanotte (the most "British" of Belgian writers) Brussels is no longer taboo. Indeed, there even seems to be a literary movement toward the city; Dutch writers come to settle here and proclaim th emselves more Bruxellois than the locals. The French are not far h hind. Since the high-speed Thalys train has reduced the distance XI

Cities of the Imagination

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between Brussels and Paris to the point where one hardly has time to finish the newspaper, the French have discovered that the maligned capital of Europe has an active and intense cultural life, whose literary importance continues to grow. Andre de Vries has traced the path of this slow but sure process of literary emergence over time. His in-depth exploration has the great merit of returning to the city's origins while keeping in mind the living present. His book takes the wider view, considering a city that for a long time lived only on the margins of literature, but which could in the new century become one of its centers. Jacques De Decker Brussels, 2003

Acknowledgments rc is a

pleasure to thank all those who helped in the writing of this book. Christel Mertens and Jean-Pierre Glibert were instrumental in urging me to undertake this project. My father, Dr. Isidoor de Vries, l ok a keen interest in this book; sadly, he did not live to see the ft nished product. My task would have been a great deal more difficult without the kind hospitality of the Institut d'Etudes Tibetaines in Brussels, who •:ive me a roof over my head while I carried out my researches. My d iscussions with Sophie de Meyrac and Ani Perna helped me better to 1111derstand Bruxellois identity. I am also grateful to Frarn;:ois Braibant :111d Isabelle Bolle for their feedback, and to Shenpen for being helpful. ,arlo Luyckx and Peter Burnett also gave me the benefit of their ·x rensive knowledge of Brussels. I am especially grateful to the staff of the Bibliotheque Royale in 1\ru sels for their patient assistance in helping to locate obscure works on Brussels; also to the Brussels Tourist Office and the Sim-Lukas Ar hi ef for help in finding illustrations. M. Jacques De Decker of the Belgian Academie de Langue et de Litccrature Frarn;:aises kindly agreed to write the foreword to this work on very short notice. Finally, I would like to thank my publisher, James Ferguson, who k ·1 t me to the straight and narrow path, and ensured that a readable t ·x t emerged from the mass of material that I had accumulated. My thanks also go to Nicki Averill for her fine illustrations.

A11 d re de Vries xii rd/Brussels, 2003