Pangloss was inspired to write this article after hearing the sad news from the Musée BELvue. For those readers who did not have the chance to visit, BELvue was a really nice little museum in Brussels which focused on the history of Belgium. On 21 July, the museum announced a redesign of its permanent collection which “will approach Belgium and its history from a thematic point of view, starting with Belgian society today. Visitors can learn more about our parliamentary constitutional monarchy, the economy, social movements and the welfare state, Belgium as a European crossroad, migrations and also ideological, linguistic and religious tensions.”
So, why should anyone be interested in this? For Pangloss, this is important because it epitomises the current problem with Belgian history and the way that Belgians see their past.
In order to understand the problem, it’s important to know exactly what changed. The BELvue museum was originally conceived as a way of educating the public about the history of Belgium and its monarchy. Using documents and the occasional object, it presented an uncontroversial narrative account of the history of Belgium from the Revolution of 1830 onwards. The monarchs played an important part in this, by cutting the chronology up into defined episodes. This certainly had its limitations. The resulting picture was not very nuanced and it struggled with periods of recent history where no consensus narratives exist. In short, it was just like a school textbook made into a museum.
The thematic approach might be more exciting than the previous chronological one, but the change takes something pretty fundamental for granted. Thinking thematically is about re-arranging facts into a particular order. And, in order for this to happen, it is necessary to have those facts. Today it is unfashionable to argue, as Leopold von Ranke did, that history should be told ‘as it really was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Clearly, there is a need for everyone to understand the bare minimum of facts before they can do anything else with them.
As a recent study demonstrated though, the average Belgian – even the average Belgian university student – knows practically nothing about Belgian history. The average tourist or expat probably knows even less. This state of affairs is depressing and has many causes. Partly it is a reaction against the rather unfashionable nationalist rhetoric that has traditionally pervaded the kind of Belgian history shaped by writers such as Henri Pirenne; partly it is a reaction against national history in general and a function of the fact that History is no longer considered a particularly important subject in schools. Regardless, the basic fact is that the very few people who visit the new BELvue will have any idea about the contexts behind the narratives they’re hearing. As a result, they will have no idea about how they fit together. It’s a classic example of too much ambition: if the intention is to teach people about the Belgian past, then they should start from the basics.
The website of the BELvue museum can be found here.
Belgian History 