Long a vassal state to its much larger neighbors, Belgium only became independent in 1830, at which time it decided that what it really needed was a (constitutional) monarchy! Its first king, Leopold I, earned the gig by virtue of being born a Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld prince who had cultivated his relationships with Europe’s royal houses during a distinguished military career. Like his son, he was not a paragon of family values, which prompted his second wife, Louise of Orleans, to lash out at their children.
When Leopold II succeeded his father in 1865, he was hot to trot in acquiring colonial possessions, something that his father had attempted to achieve but never managed to. This led to a world-changing catastrophe and a crime of truly historic proportions. Leopold II engineered a private scheme by which he became the sole owner of the territory that is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he essentially enslaved the population and forced them to pillage their own land – rubber and ivory were especially valuable at the time – for his enrichment. Failure to meet quotas was punishable by death. Rape, mutilations, destruction of settlements, and taking workers’ families as hostages to force them to work harder were all common.
Leopold was savvy enough to recognize that this state of affairs wouldn’t fly with the public in Belgium, so he invested heavily in a propaganda effort to mask the reality on the ground. For the average person in Belgium, the stories of the Christianization of the people of the Congo and the improving social and economic conditions there supported their king’s enterprise entirely. Meanwhile, writers and journalists around the world began to realize through their own travels what was really going on. But even millions of deaths, a horrifying population-wide immiseration, and the slimy personal enrichment Leopold had attained through those practices didn’t cause the Belgian Parliament to rush to correct the situation. It wasn’t until 1908, a year before Leopold’s death, and decades into his brutal domination of the Congolese people, that Belgium’s elected government took control of what would become the Belgian Congo, and later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
His involvement with the Congo wasn’t the only thing damaging Leopold’s image at home. He was a terrible husband to his wife, Queen Marie Henriette, and at the age of 65, in 1899, very publicly took a 16-year-old mistress who he lavished with money and properties around Europe, including the famous Villa Leopolda.
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