The Siege of Jadotville (2016): A Review

It has been some time since the last article was published. Today, though, Pangloss presents a review of the film The Siege of Jadotville (2016). In keeping with the theme of this blog, our focus will be on the film’s historical content rather than its cinematographic value. This is particularly important, given that most of its audience will be approaching it without any knowledge about Congolese history and the subtleties of the event it portrays. The relationship between historical drama and genuine history is always a tenuous one but Siege of Jadotville fails to achieve any kind of balance – as we shall see below.

First, let’s look at what the film sets out to achieve. To understand the film, the most important thing to remember is that Siege of Jadotville sees itself as a war film to the exclusion of all else. As the title might indicate, what the director is interested in is the actual fighting at Jadotville rather than what that fighting was actually intended to achieve. And, like any war film, it needs its plucky heroes and scheming baddies. The goodies the film chooses are, unambiguously, the Irish company sent to defend the town against the Katangese hoards. This, together with the combined heroism, pluckiness, and good-humour of the Irish troops, gives the entire film an uncanny resemblance to the classic 1964 film Zulu.

What the director apparently fails to understand is that the siege of Jadotville uniquely fails to lend itself to this kind of format. The Congo Crisis, of which it was a part, was not a ‘war’ but a period of political instability punctuated by occasional outbursts of violence. The real siege of Jadotville was not, as the drama depicts it, a kind of African Stalingrad but little more than a skirmish whose only real significance lay in its humiliating outcome for the UN. By exaggerating this minor and ignominious engagement into an epic military confrontation, the entire history of the event is entirely distorted and its real importance lost.

 

Siege of Jadotville: the “Zulus, thousands of ’em” school of historical thought.

There is also a lack of context. It does not help that the ‘enemy’ – the Katangese – are so poorly characterised. The Katangese president, Moïse Tshombe, is depicted as a cliché’d African despot in the Idi Amin style. For their part, the Katangese troops as a faceless black hoard led by cowardly white mercenaries.  Indeed, the viewer does not need to be Malcolm X to be struck by the fact that Tshombe is the only black character in the film. The film is wrong to show the UN attempting to destroy the Katangese state (at least officially) and this creates confusion. What the UN actually wanted to achieve in Operation Morthor was the arrest of white mercenaries, not the deposition of Tshombe outright. Likewise, the entire chronology of the Congo Crisis – including the death of Dag Hammarskjöld! – is reshuffled to make the Jadotville battle more epic.

By far the most worrying part of the film, however, is its Irish nationalist agenda. This is perhaps understandable: history (military history in particular) is not written by the victors but by the country that has the most historians to study it. There is a sizeable amateur literature on which, like the film, focuses on the small military exploits of the Irish company without seeing the bigger picture – naturally this also plays well with the tabloid press too. The film’s biggest failing is therefore not its depiction of cheerful and plucky Irish troops – which is certainly irritating but also a well-established war film cliché – but its failure to unpack these stereotypes. This could easily be done by being aware of why the battle was considered so shameful in the first place.  To do this, it is necessary to think about what the world looked like in 1960. Memories of World War II were still very much alive in 1960 and most Europeans (correctly or incorrectly) considered the Irish to have collaborated with the Nazis by remaining neutral during the conflict. When the United Nations was being formed, therefore, the country was barred from joining – a particular humiliation for any new country attempting to establish itself on the international stage. Indeed, Ireland was continuously blocked for an entire decade. The Congo mission was therefore a chance for it to assert its right to belong – a right which the humiliating surrender at Jadotville cast into doubt. By ignoring this and attempting to recast it into a kind of Irish Rorke’s Drift, the film attempts to sanitise the nation’s history by turning a disaster into a celebration of national resilience.

To summarise: the film presented an excellent opportunity to raise some difficult historical questions and failed conspicuously. Rather than attempting to tackle big questions, the film decided to concentrate on explosions and killing to the exclusion of all else – including the basic historical context that the viewer needed to understand the events’ significance and to evaluate their contemporary meaning.

A Vision of the Future? The Brussels Exhibition of 1897

This post is inspired by a particular object which recently came into Pangloss’ collection. At its most basic, the object is a medal or medallion, about 4 cm in diameter and made of aluminium. One side depicts the Parc de Cinquantenaire in a slightly cartoon-ish style; the other is an elaborate calendar design for the year 1897. To avoid any confusion, the design is clearly labelled “Bruxelles Exposition 1897”.

A world in Brussels

The Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles of 1897 was Belgium’s first serious international exhibition and a particular success. It ran between May and November and attracted six million visitors – a particularly impressive figure roughly equivalent to the entire population of Belgium at the time.

To understand the meaning of the 1897 exhibition, it is important to first appreciate just how important exhibitions were during the period in question. Originating as (rather dry) trade fairs of a purely commercial nature, international exhibitions soon caught the public imagination and became a kind of mass obsession. According to one historian,

nineteenth-century world’s fairs did not exhibit only machines and the products they manufactured. They attempted to summarize, categorize, and evaluate the whole of human experience. Displays of natural products, handmade goods, the fine arts, models, and ethnographic artifacts were also an important part of the exhibitions. […] The world’s fairs celebrated international cooperation and peaceful competition among nations, but they were also sites of national rivalry, where countries celebrated their national identities and strove for prestige by exhibiting their manufactures, cultural achievements, and imperial possessions.

The 1897 exhibition at Brussels was a perfect example of this. As a nation, Belgium was still less than 70 years old – there would still have been people alive who remembered life under Dutch rule. Despite its industrial dynamism, it still had a lingering inferiority complex which a celebratory, deeply patriotic, exhibition could do much to help. As well as exhibits for different cities and regions of Belgium, a celebration of the recently established Congo Free State could be found in nearby Tervuren.

Modernity was obviously a huge part of this. The exhibition theme in 1897 was ‘modern life’ and a conscious attempt was made to bring historical Belgian folklore together with modern, international innovations. Among the exhibits were a cinema and a gigantic ‘electric sun’. Linked by modern tram lines, the exhibition actually laid the foundation for much of modern Brussels’ public transport infrastructure. It is also notable for introducing the world to the new artistic styles, especially Art Nouveau, which were emerging in Belgian art at the time. Like the machines showcased, the style was new, bold, and futuristic – it epitomized the ethos of the exhibition perfectly.

Medal

The medal fits into this narrative very nicely. The depiction of the Cinquantenaire is obviously a celebration of the exhibition’s most visible symbol. The arch, made of wood, was specially built for the event and its modern replacement – much bigger than the original – was only completed in 1905. The medal was obviously a mass produced object and a relatively cheap souvenir. Owning one would allow the owner to commemorate the experience and, perhaps, prove that they had personally attended.

What is most interesting, though, is metal used. In the 21^st century, we are very used to aluminium in everything from drink cans to aircraft. In the 19^th century though, it was a hugely exciting novelty. Although first known as early as 1825, its difficult extraction process meant that it was difficult to produce and prohibitively expensive. Then, in 1886, a new, efficient way of producing aluminium was discovered in America, known as the Hall-Héroult process. Production soared and cost plummeted. Aluminium became available and affordable for the first time in human history.

At the time the medal was struck, it was an exciting object in its own right. The average Belgian peasant or urban labourer visiting the exhibition one day in 1897 would probably never have seen anything like it before and would have found its curiously light weight a genuine novelty. It was this novelty – combined with the exciting sensation of seeing the world of the future – that made exhibitions the events that they were.

Bois du Luc coal mine, Houdeng-Aimeries

Having visited the Bois du Cazier a few months back (see our review here), the next stop on Pangloss’ impromptu tour of Belgian coal mines was the Bois du Luc, located in Houdeng-Aimeries (La Louvière). Together with the Bois du Cazier, Blegny-mine and Grand-Hornu, the Bois du Luc is one of the preserved sites which form a UNESCO world heritage site.  The Bois du Luc is probably the largest and most historically interesting of these sites, covering the technical, management and social history aspects of mining in Belgium during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The pit head of the Fosse St-Emmanuel at Bois du Luc

The Bois du Luc site is quite self-contained and located some distance from the rest of the little suburb of Houdeng-Aimeries. For most of its history, the site was the headquarters of the Société des Charbonnages de Bois-du-Luc et d’Havré, as well as the site of one of its actual mines known as the Fosse (“Pit”) St-Emmanuel. Surrounding this, the company built a kind of housing estate (known as Bosquetville) for its workers, including all the social amenities necessary as well as the actual housing itself.

To order to make the situation a bit clearer, Pangloss has drawn up a quick (and pretty basic) map. In red and green are the buildings of the company: the offices, workshops and, of course, the mine itself; in orange is the director’s house; in blue, the workers’ housing (dating from 1838) radiating out from a central street; in yellow are the community buildings: the school, theatre, church and hospital. Some of the industrial buildings have been destroyed (since the Foss St-Emmanuel closed in 1959, this is hardly surprising) but the whole site is still pretty near complete.

What is so interesting about all of this is that it provides a fantastic glimpse into the idea of industrial paternalism in 19^th century Belgium. Paternalism was, of course, an ideology shared by both Catholic and Liberal industrialists, both of whom felt that the rich had a moral duty to improve the conditions of their workers. In the Bois du Luc, this meant that pretty far reaching attempts were made to improve the lot of the company’s employees – or, at least, the virtuous, married and Catholic, employees. In exchange for genuine improvements in quality of life, the workers were expected to give the patron – the boss – even more respect and unquestioning obedience. From the balcony of his house facing down the main road, the patron could survey his workers while the workers were left in no doubt as to where power lay.

Workers’ housing

House of the “Patron”

Office of the “Patron”

Behind the monumental steel doors (installed after the general strike of 1893), the mining offices – a monumental building decorated with a neoclassical interior – are perhaps the most interesting bit. Everything relates to the social hierarchy, from the mirrors in the patron’s office to allow him to screen visitors without their knowledge to the toilet (one of three on the whole site!) that was reserved for his personal use.  The employees (one rung up from the miners themselves on the social hierarchy) had their toilet breaks timed so that they could be made to make up for them after work.

The “guillotine” steel doors to the office and workshops

The Bois du Luc museum has, to its great credit, done a lot to make this complex story clear to visitors. There are basically four elements to the tour which the museum runs. Starting at the company offices, the tour then moves to one of the workers’ houses which you can visit (the rest are inhabited) and finally to the mine itself. There is also a small museum of the history of coal-mining in the old workshops which the visitor is invited to visit at their leisure. It must be said that the tour is very good. Our guide was knowledgeable and it was pretty definitive. The whole visit lasted a bit over three hours (which is pretty impressive) and was genuinely instructive. There is obviously also the opportunity to wander out and see the workers’ housing in more detail on your own.

Pangloss thoroughly recommends a visit.  However, it is definitely worth checking the museum’s (awful) website before you visit – the museum is closed for most of the year. The miners’ church, St Barbara, is only open on a handful of weekends throughout the year and Pangloss did not get a chance to see it. A final thing for visitors to note is that, because the only way to visit the site is on a guided tour, there is a potential difficulty for non-French speakers.

The museum’s website can be found here.

The BELvue Museum and the malaise of Belgian history

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.

56 Years Today: Congolese independence

‘Belgian Army in United Kingdom’

I was fortunate to recently add this badge to my growing collection of Belgian ephemera. It’s an interesting object in its own right and worth considering in a little bit of detail.

The object itself is quite straightforward. It is a small pin-badge which depicts a Belgian rampant lion, capped by the royal crown and surrounded by a scroll on which is written the ungrammatical motto: ‘Belgian Army in United Kingdom’.

Contrary to the mythologizing of the period, actually getting Belgians to fight in the British army was pretty difficult. The few demoralised and disorganised troops who made it to Britain in 1940 were certainly not the ideal basis on which to build an army. At the time this badge was designed in 1942, Belgian soldiers were chaffing at the bit, frustrated on the one hand by being stuck in Britain without seeing action and angry at the perceived incompetence of their leadership in the government in exile on the other. This disquiet culminated in a small mutiny in November the same year. What the troops needed reminding of was their distinct, Belgian identity and their ultimate duty to the legal Belgian government. This was not unique to the Belgians  of course, but it was certainly a problem.

The badge therefore did something very functional: it clearly marked out an ordinary soldier dressed in a nondescript uniform on the streets of London as a Belgian, with all the loyalties that this entailed. By making the soldier a member of the mythical ‘Belgian Army in United Kingdom’, it served as a reminder that the army in exile remained a national army, at least on paper, and reasserted the government in exile’s ultimate authority over it.

In a small way, therefore, this humble badge can tell us about the construction of national identity abroad and the challenge the government in exile faced in remaining ‘legitimate’.

Keramis museum, La Louvière

Pangloss recently happened to visit the new Keramis museum in the sunny Belgian city of La Louvière, and these are his thoughts on it.

Boch plate commemorating the Brussels International Exhibition of 1897

Boch plate commemorating the marriage of Leopold II and Marie-Henriette (1853). Note that the crown is sitting on the Constitution at the top!

As a city, La Louvière nowadays has an unenviable reputation within Belgium as a bit of a dump. Formerly one of Belgium’s foremost industrial centres, like the rest of the surrounding Pays Noir few of its factories and mines are still in business today. The city’s industrial decline is very visible, but one of the benefits has been that a fair bit of government money has been poured into interesting new cultural projects in the area and Keramis is one of them.

The site we are interested in here is the former pottery (faïencerie) of Boch Frères (later Royal Boch). The factory itself was known as ‘Keramis’, hence the name of the current museum.

At its height, Boch Frères was probably Belgium’s biggest manufacturer of any kind of ceramics. It was founded by Eugène and Victor Boch in 1841, and grew rapidly. It became a public company in 1848 and its recognisable earthenware ceramics took the national market by storm.

“Le Feu” (1948) by Raymond-Henri Chevallier, part of a series of tiled depictions of the “elements” of ceramics created for the Keramis factory offices.

“La Terre” (1948) by Raymond-Henri Chevallier

Like the rest of the ceramics industry in Europe, the period after the Second World War was a difficult one for Boch. After some increasingly desperate manoeuvres (including its move into toilet production), the firm went bust in 1985. After an attempt to resuscitate it (under the unenviable brand name ‘Novoboch’), the Keramis factory was closed in 2009 for the last time. Two years later, it was almost totally demolished, leaving a large hole in the centre of La Louvière which, at time of writing in 2016, has yet to be completely filled.

La Louvière la belle. I believe the plant in the background is a Glaverbel factory, producing industrial glass.

One of the large brick bottle-kilns, used for firing clay during the nineteenth century.

Now, there are a number of reasons why Boch should be interesting to people who generally wouldn’t care about this kind of thing. For a start, Boch’s dominance in the Belgian market means that its wares provide an interesting way to trace the course of Belgian history, all the way from basic changes in aesthetics to the obligatory commemorative royal plates.  Second, the popularity of Boch products – among all social classes, even the fairly poor – provides an interesting way of cutting through Belgian society as a whole to give us a cross section of it.

The current museum is a new and fairly attractive building which surrounds the only surviving part of the old factory: the nineteenth century bottle kilns used for firing the factory’s wares. These form the centre-piece of the current museum and are surrounded by a number of small galleries which display some of the factory’s products, mostly produced during its pre-1960s heyday. Some of the pieces are very interesting and the displays are very attractive and modern.

Some of the company’s more interesting designs from its experiments with Art Deco styles in the mid-1930s.

Sadly, none of this is gone into in much depth in the museum which dedicates itself to its primary material rather than using it as a gateway to explore wider issues. There is a decent film on offer, giving a narrative account of the company, but that is about it. In fact, the museum’s enthusiasm for the aesthetics has led to an irritating tendency not to label the material on display. There is an online visitors’ guide which provides these captions but, alas, we did not know about this at the time. This aside, though, it is a bit of a shame thought that more couldn’t have been made of the objects themselves.

Regardless, the museum makes for an interesting visit of 40 minutes or so, and there are plenty of other interesting things to see in the region anyway to complement it.

For the museum’s official website, with opening hours and other details, see here.

Terrorism, Belgium and the World: A Response to Belgium-bashing.

Now that sufficient time has passed since the recent bombings in Brussels on 22^nd March, it is worth considering what they mean for Belgium and its future. To recap the details, three bombs were detonated by a small number of Islamic State terrorists in Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station. 32 people were killed, and several hundred injured. It is without doubt the biggest single terrorist attack in Belgian history.

Flemish weekly newspaper, Brussel Deze Week, on the bombings of March 2016

British satirical magazine, Private Eye. The caption reads: “Cameron to bomb ISIS heartland… Belgium here we come!” (November 2015).

As after the Paris attacks, the international press has suddenly discovered Belgium and, predictably, ill-informed punditry is now available by the bucket-load. Unfortunately, the focus is very much on allocating blame – unproductively – rather than trying to understand how and why the attack happened. There is more than a healthy dose of Schadenfreude there too. Most tragically of all, much of the press attention has been devoted to a minutely-detailed, poorly-contextualised analysis of perceived failings in Belgium’s response to immigration, terrorism and administrative decentralisation which – shockingly – were not all totally perfect. The francophone press have already created a moniker for this kind of pulp journalism – ‘le Belgium bashing’.

The most egregious example of the phenomenon recently was pushed on the usually reasonable Politico.eu website. In a comment article, the journalist Tim King denounces Belgium as a ‘failed state’. At this stage, it might be useful to remind ourselves of what a failed state actually is. According to the Global Policy Forum:

Failed states can no longer perform basic functions such as education, security, or governance, usually due to fractious violence or extreme poverty. Within this power vacuum, people fall victim to competing factions and crime, and sometimes the United Nations or neighboring states intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Whether this applies to Belgium, we’ll leave the reader to judge. But let us hear more of the argument. Mr. King blames the entire Belgian state for the fact that Molenbeek ‘has been allowed’ to become a ‘breeding ground’ for Islamist extremism. He builds his argument by linking every failing in Belgian political history – from the Dutroux affair to the alleged failure of Belgian drivers to obey speed limits – to argue that Belgium is a liability which Europe as a whole can ill afford. Exactly what he implies is, worryingly, left open. Amazingly, this article has been ‘shared’ 22,000 times.

Mr King is wrong, and wrong for a number of reasons. By focusing so narrowly on a single, he misses a key problem: that there is very little that is ‘Belgian’ about Belgian terrorism. Legally and morally, blame for the terrorist attack falls on the attackers themselves and not on the society in which they grew up. They acted on their own free will and were not predetermined by their milieu: ‘Belgium’ cannot be blamed for radicalising them. The ideology which inspired the attackers was neither made in Belgium, nor restricted to Belgian Muslims. The problem of Islamist terrorism, more than perhaps any other political issue today, is international in both inspiration and scope. Mr. King’s argument is made all the more absurd by the fact that he announces himself unable to think of any other town or city (in the world!) which has a similar record to Molenbeek in fostering radical Islam. His comparison with London’s Afro-Caribbean population in Brixton is especially trite; he could have picked from a dozen or more ‘jihadist’ towns in Britain alone. Blaming the victim is never pretty, but in this case it is positively myopic. By making a global problem into a Belgian problem, the whole issue is distorted and parochialised.

Criticism can legitimately be levelled at the Belgian government’s response to the terrorism and this is where Mr King’s argument becomes most worrying. Because while a government has a duty to protect its citizens, this duty is not its only duty. Nor it is absolute; a police force ultimately serves its people and thus must accept the constraints of the rule of law and the population’s democratic priorities. Otherwise, of course, it would be statistically safest for the police to pre-emptively arrest the entire national population and hold them all in solitary confinement – they’d all be perfectly safe then.

The current (and undoubtedly complex) organisational system for the police is not accidental but the product of decades of careful negotiation. The result may not be the most efficient system at protecting the public from terrorism but it is the system that best corresponds to the political priorities of the Belgian population. Over the last forty years, the Belgian population has voted for the increased decentralisation. The language conflict which Mr King dismisses as a distraction has, for better or worse, been the most important issue in Belgian politics for half-a-century. It is the issue that the Belgian public have cared most about and they have made their demands for decentralisation clear over decades of elections. Maybe this will change in future but, until then, criticism of the inefficiency of Belgium’s federalised police force is a criticism of Belgium’s democracy itself. And, to reiterate, the choice has never been between a total security and anarchy but between exactly how imperfect that security should be. Mr King is therefore demanding that security, rather than democracy, should decide how state institutions are constructed. This is not an attractive argument.

As we have seen, the recent ‘Belgium bashing’ is at best unhelpful and at worst very dangerous. Rather than throwing around glib, ill-chosen phrases like ‘failed state’, we all need a reasoned and contextualised understanding of terrorism in a Belgian, European and global context. Inevitably failures attract more press coverage than successes though. Polemic articles attacking the inefficiency of others may be fun to write but if Mr King seriously cared about the security of Belgium, he might actually do something constructive.

We suggest another article at Politico.eu, ‘Why Belgium is not Europe’s Jihadist Base’, as a more reasoned analysis.

Bois du Cazier coal mine, Marcinelle

Today, as a bit of a trip, Pangloss was able to make the trek all the way to the Pays de Charleroi to visit the Bois du Cazier mine. Astonishingly, this is one of four mining museums in Belgium listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Sites, making it a peer of historical sites such as Pompeii and Venice. Quite how UNESCO justified this to itself, we have no idea. It is presumably a ploy to regenerate a fairly grim bit of Wallonia and, to give it full credit, it hasn’t done a bad job.

View of the mine’s main site from the around the front gate

The Bois du Cazier, despite its name, is a small coal mine fairly typical of the many that once dotted Belgium’s Pays Noir (Black Country) around Charleroi. Serious exploitation of the site began in 1899 but there had been mining on the site as early as 1822. Under the direction of the small Société anonyme du Charbonnage du Bois du Cazier, the mine became one of the most modern in the region, with two shafts of its own stretching up to 1,000 metres below ground. By 1955, the mine produced over 170,000 tonnes of coal each year and employed some 779 locals while work on a new, third shaft was just beginning.

The Bois du Cazier is best known for the mining disaster that occurred in August 1956 when a fire broke out in the shaft, trapping several hundred miners underground. 262 were killed, many of them immigrant workers, and the disaster remains Belgium’s most infamous industrial accident.

The 1956 disaster aside, the mine returned to operation and finally closed its doors in 1967 and had fallen into disrepair when it was chosen for restoration as a museum site.

The mine’s front gate, the border between the community and the mine itself.

It is no great wonder that, in searching for a mine to preserve, it was the Bois du Cazier was chosen. More than anything else, the 1956 accident pervades all aspects of the museum. Despite being comparatively average in magnitude by global standards (compare with, say, China’s Benxihu disaster in which 1,500 were killed in 1942) the disaster has a particular – and surprisingly deep – importance to many in Belgium and even further afield. Part of the explanation for this lies in the particular fascination the general public has always had for mining disasters in general, perhaps a sign of ‘guilt’ for those who took the use of coal for granted. Another is that, within the trade union narrative of history, Marcinelle is a potent reminder of the ‘sacrifice’ of workers. The main explanation, however, must be the international nature of the disaster – the majority of those killed were not Belgian but migrant workers, many of them Italians recruited directly from Sicily and southern Italy. It was a European disaster. In total, 12 countries’ nationals lost their lives. The disaster is thus one of the very few lieux de mémoire for the ‘forgotten’ guest-workers of post-war Belgium and their families, and one of the rare places where nationality does not divide people’s memory of the past.

One of the lieux de mémoire of the 1956 disaster, perhaps inspired by a panel from Constantin Meunier’s ‘Monument du Travail’.

The museum is generously funded and the entire site has clearly been immaculately restored. It is, if anything, too neat and clean. Not much of the mine workings themselves are preserved and so the site’s main offerings are two small museums – an ‘Industry Museum’ and a ‘Glass Museum’. Both are enjoyable enough. The Industry Museum preserves an eclectic mix of old machines and artefacts relating (loosely) to Wallonia’s industrial heritage and (even more loosely) to coal mining; the Glass Museum boasts a fairly small but really rather nice collection of domestic glassware dating back to the Roman period and Renaissance. There are also a whole host of memorials to the 1956 disaster. They are linked by an audio guide which, in its English version, attempts to evoke the mining ethos by dubbing its narrators, ‘Luigi’ and ‘Monica’, into Lancashire-accented English. This aside, the museum is informative and actually rather engaging.

The mine’s two headframes which sit over the two mine shafts. It was a malfunction in the smaller of the two (left) which caused the 1956 disaster.

Our criticism, if we have one, is that the focus on the 1956 disaster is not put into any particular historical context. There is little detail about mining companies, their management, government regulation or, for that matter, the workers’ family lives, trade unions, political engagement – in fact, even what the coal they mined was actually used for. More broadly, the ‘lived experience’ (or social history) of the mine’s employees is not dealt with in particular detail. There is an excellent documentary and attempt to explain why so many Italians came to work in Belgium but this occupies only a very small part of the museum and is clearly only deployed as padding for the main display about the disaster. The museum is also surprisingly silent about the broader history of coal mining in Belgium. This is a real shame but does not detract from what is an interesting and quite enjoyable museum.

One of the slag heaps that dominates the small town of Marcinelle

An interesting piece of social history: a statue of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of mining, above the workers’ changing rooms.

Above all, the museum does resist the temptation of falling into the nostalgic schmaltz which pervades, say, British coal mining history. It is worth finishing with the comments of Jean Van Lierde, a Belgian pacifist who was sent to work in the Bois du Cazier in the early 1950s after refusing to do national service in the army:

…it was hell. It was much worse than a prison. I would not want anyone in the world to have to re-live such an experience.

—J. Van Lierde, La guerre sans armes: douze années de luttes non-violentes en Europe, 1952-1964 (Brussels, 2002), p. 23.

Phrase book from the German occupation

No matter how bad any historical event might be, there are always some that manage to profit from it. Today we will look at just one example of this mundane phenomenon. In May 1940, with the humiliating collapse of the Belgian army and the second German occupation in twenty years, one publishing house saw the opportunity to make a quick buck. It printed a German phrase book.

The book in question (more like a pamphlet) was printed in 1940. Perfekt Französisch/L’Allemand Usuel was the brainchild of the Librarie Roman, a right-leaning Catholic publishing house based in Namur. The same house had been responsible the ominously-titled L’Ami de L’Ordre newspaper until 1918 and obviously knew their audience.

One of the first problems encountered by Belgians under occupation was exactly how to communicate with their new masters. Most German kommandanten, usually junior officers, appear to have had little understanding of Belgian mores and a cursory understanding of French or Dutch. For their part, few Belgians spoke German. Civilians seeking to make personal approaches (démarches) towards German authorities thus found themselves in a delicate position, confronted by a language barrier in addition to an often less-than-sympathetic occupation authority. Most German kommandanturen appear to have demanded that any written and verbal applications to them be made in German so bilingual people became in great demand. This was the demand that the Librarie Roman were satisfying.

There is always something rather satisfying about old phrase books. It is always rather fun to see how archaic once-common phrases have become (“Young man, please stop me a two-horsepower car!”) and to hear about once-pressing concerns that now seem bizarre (“Is there a telephone at this hotel?” or “Do you know a good watchmaker?”). This booklet is unusual because of exactly how historically specific some of its phrases are.

Alongside sections on “Getting dressed” and “At the Hotel”, an entire section is dedicated to “Prisoners” (p. 71) – a pressing concern to the families of the 225,000 Belgian prisoners of war captured in May 1940. Here are some of the handy phrases the book supplies:

My son is a prisoner. I am looking for him.
Is he in Germany?
Is he in Belgium?
In which camp is he being held?
To whom should I write to get him freed? […]
He can be found in the camp at…
You should address yourself to the Kommandantur at…

An interesting historical reminder of a turbulent period.