Dictionary:

Belgium

  (bĕl'jəm)

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Belgium

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A country of northwest Europe on the North Sea. Inhabited in ancient times by the Belgae, the region was part of the Roman and Carolingian empires before breaking up into a number of feudal states during the Middle Ages. The area occupied by present-day Belgium passed to the Hapsburgs in the 15th century and to the French in the 18th century. Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Belgium was given to the kingdom of the Netherlands, from which it gained independence as a separate kingdom in 1830. Brussels is the capital and the largest city. Population: 10,400,000.

Country, northwestern Europe. Area: 11,787 sq mi (30,528 sq km). Population (2006 est.): 10,517,000. Capital: Brussels. The population consists mostly of Flemings and Walloons. The Flemings, more than half of the population, speak Flemish (Dutch) and live in the northern half of the country; the Walloons, about one-third of the population, speak French and inhabit the southern half. Languages: Dutch, French, German (all official). Religions: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic); also Islam. Currency: euro. Belgium can be divided into several geographic regions. The southeast consists of the forested Ardennes highland, which extends south of the Meuse River valley and includes Belgium's highest point, Mount Botrange (2,277 ft [694 m]). Middle Belgium is a fertile region crossed by tributaries of the Schelde River. Lower Belgium comprises the flat plains of Flanders in the northwest with their many canals. Maritime Flanders borders the North Sea and is agriculturally prosperous; the chief North Sea port is Ostend, but Antwerp, near the mouth of the Schelde, handles more trade. Belgium has minimal natural resources, so the manufacture of goods from imported raw materials plays a major role in the economy, and the country is highly industrialized. It is a monarchy with a parliament composed of two legislative houses; the chief of state is the monarch, and the head of government is the prime minister. Inhabited in ancient times by the Belgae, a Celtic people, the area was conquered by Julius Caesar in 57 BC; under Augustus it became the Roman province of Belgica. Conquered by the Franks, it later broke up into semi-independent territories, including Brabant and Luxembourg. By the late 15th century, the territories of the Netherlands, of which the future Belgium was a part, gradually united and passed to the Habsburgs. In the 16th century it was a centre for European commerce. The basis of modern Belgium was laid in the southern Catholic provinces that split from the northern provinces after the Union of Utrecht in 1579 (see The Netherlands). Annexed by France in 1795, the area was reunited with Holland and with it became the independent Kingdom of The Netherlands in 1815. After the revolt of its citizens in 1830, it became the independent Kingdom of Belgium. Under Leopold II it acquired vast lands in Africa. Overrun by the Germans in World Wars I and II, it was the scene of the Battle of the Bulge (1944 – 45). Internal discord led to legislation in the 1970s and '80s that created three nearly autonomous regions in accordance with language distribution: Flemish Flanders, French Wallonia, and bilingual Brussels. In 1993 Belgium became a federation comprising the three regions, which gained greater autonomy at the outset of the 21st century. It is a member of the European Union.

Belgium made its Olympic debut at the 1896 Summer Games in Athens. The Summer Games were held in Antwerp in 1920.

For more information on Belgium, visit Britannica.com.

‘Perhaps the Brussels sun is a less enthusiastic draughtsman than the Paris sun, but at least he draws.’ One viewer's reaction to the earliest daguerreotypes taken on Belgian soil in 1839 alludes directly to the international nature of photography and the cultural dependency of local production. In fact, the nascent Belgian state, created as an afterthought in the post-Napoleonic political settlement a mere nine years previously, could only thrive on the basis of open borders and free movement of goods and ideas. Belgium's position at the crossroads of Protestant north and Catholic south, the meeting point of Germanic and Latin cultures, informed the development of photography as of other art forms.

Jean Jobard (1792-1861), lithographer, inventor, and tireless campaigner for intellectual property rights, was a Frenchman resident in Brussels when he purchased a prototype camera from Isidore Niépce, with which he realized the first photograph in Belgium on 16 September 1839. Many of the first generation of daguerreotypists who followed in his wake learned their profession abroad. Billing, an Englishman who had obtained a daguerreotype patent from Richard Beard, opened the first portrait studio in Brussels in March 1842. Alphonse Plumier (1819-77), son of a Liège distiller, opened a studio in his home town in 1843, following apprenticeship in Paris. Outside the cities (Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Liège) which supported permanent daguerreotype studios by the mid-1840s, itinerants from neighbouring countries criss-crossed Belgium, typically setting up makeshift studios in hotel courtyards.

The pattern of technology transfer continued into the era of paper photography. Guillaume Claine (1811-69) was initiated into the wet-plate process by Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, using it to produce the first significant body of architectural photographs in Belgium in 1851-2, sponsored by the Interior Ministry and the Brussels municipality. Diffusion of knowledge and technique was promoted by the researcher Désiré van Monckhoven (1834-82) from Ghent, whose Traité général de photographie (1856), regularly updated, became the most successful handbook in the French-speaking world and reached eight editions by 1889.

Political upheaval in France enriched the photographic life of the Belgian capital. The jovial French judge Chevalier L. P. T. Dubois de Nehaut (1799-1872), unwilling participant in the 1848 Revolution, preferred the life of rentier and amateur photographer in Brussels, pioneering photojournalism with subjects like King Leopold I's silver jubilee celebrations in 1856. Gilbert Radoux (1820-?), ȧrchitect and political refugee, founded Belgium's first photographic printing establishment. Their work was shown at the earliest major photography exhibition in Brussels in 1856, alongside prints by their colleagues in the Société Française de Photographie, a group which remained a natural focus for Belgian aspirations until the Association Belge de Photographie (ABP) was founded in 1874.

Photography's economic breakthrough derived here as elsewhere in Europe from the huge and instantaneous popularity of the carte de visite in 1860. The caricaturist and showman Louis Ghémar (1819-73), who had learned photography in Edinburgh, exploited this marketing phenomenon with portrait series of royalty and local worthies. As Belgium industrialized, studios proliferated. The local market for architectural photography, on the other hand, remained stubbornly small, as Edmond Fierlants discovered to his cost.

One leading-edge industrial application, relating to the printing press, adapted foreign technology. William Toovey (1821-?), an English lithographer working in Brussels, refined the Dutchman E. I. Asser's photolithographic process in 1863, of strategic use for military cartography; while the versatile Joseph Maes (1838-1908) ‘reinvented’ Joseph Albert's collotype process, which he exploited widely throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Towards the century's end, colonization of the Congo was documented in optimistic reports illustrated with relief half-tones in news weeklies such as Le Patriote illustré.

With its presiding spirit of internationalism, pictorialism quickly gained ground in Belgium, influenced both by the proselytizing of the Linked Ring, which counted Alexandre Drains (1855-1925) amongst its members, and by adherents of the Photo-Club de Paris, where Édouard Hannon (1853-1931) regularly exhibited. The ABP remained a broad church, organizing pictorialist salons from 1896 onwards and countering the threat posed by the small secessionist movement L'Effort, active 1901-5 around the interior designer Léon Sneyers (1877-1949). Also typical of pictorialism was the work of Gustave Marissiaux (1872-1929), whose evocative images of mine workers and their families in the Liège region, first exhibited in 1905, express a social concern previously absent from Belgian photography.

Following the cultural caesura of the First World War, a conservative tendency represented by Léonard Misonne was offset by the bold modernist work of Pierre Dubreuil, originally influenced by Cubist and Futurist models. The irruption of Surrealism constituted Belgian photography's most distinctive contribution in the inter-war years. Experimenters of cosmopolitan background, notably the sculptors and graphic artists Raoul Ubac and Sasha Stone (1895-1940), vied with home-grown practitioners of several art forms such as E. L. T. Mesens (1903-71) and Marcel Lefrancq (1916-74).

The protean figure of Willy Kessels (1898-1974) came to prominence at the Exposition Internationale de la Photographie, organized by Mesens in Brussels in 1932, which marked the definitive breakthrough of the avant-garde in Belgian photography. As customs and old structures fractured (including the ABP) during the German occupation, Kessels collaborated while other photographers fell silent. Inevitably pre-war exuberance gave way to the reticence of the 1950s, exemplified by the tellingly composed artists' portraits created by Charles Leirens (1888-1963) for the Education Ministry. Rebelling against the weight of figurative tradition, Kessels's late work veered towards abstract photograms and overprinting, while Pierre Cordier perfected the chemigram technique in 1963, using light-sensitive materials to create patterns evoking the forms of nature, and earning a permanent place in the Brussels metro.

Historical awareness of Belgium's photographic heritage gradually developed hand in hand with the federalization of cultural activity. Two photography museums opened in the 1980s: Antwerp serves the Dutch-speaking north, Charleroi the French-speaking south, and each serves as a forum for contemporary creation.

— Steven F. Joseph

Bibliography

• Vercheval, G. (ed.), Pour une histoire de la photographie en Belgique (1993).
• Joseph, S. F., Schwilden, T., and Claes, M.-C., Directory of Photographers in Belgium 1839-1905 (1997)

Dance came late to Belgium, and was restricted for the most part to Brussels and Ghent. Like elsewhere in Europe, it took the form of a ballet company attached to the local opera house and performances were usually limited to dancing in opera ballets. In 1816 a permanent corps de ballet was established at the Théâtre de la Monnaie opera house in Brussels; in 1819 Jean-Antoine Petipa was hired as premier danseur and ballet master. In 1826 he founded the Conservatory of Dancing, the place where Marius Petipa and his brother Lucien began their dance studies. In 1841 the Royal Opera was founded in Ghent; a dance academy followed seven years later. Dance continued to find itself taking a back seat to opera until well into the 20th century, and most of those working in Belgium were foreigners. After the First World War a resident ballet company was established at the Monnaie, and ballet productions began to proliferate. Outside the world of ballet, expressionist modern dance was developing in the 1930s, thanks to the efforts of artists like Elsa Darciel, Lea Daan, and Isa Voos. In 1947 the first independent ballet company in Belgium, Ballet Belges, was formed, although it was short-lived. In 1960 Béjart founded the Ballet of the 20th Century in Brussels, a company which achieved a huge following both at home and abroad. In 1966 the Charleroi-based Ballet Royal de Wallonie was founded; in 1991 the name of the company was changed to Charleroi/Danses-Centre Chorégraphique de la Communauté Française. In 1970 Antwerp launched its Ballet of Flanders. Dance flourished in the latter half of the 20th century, with Béjart establishing himself as one of the most important choreographers on the international ballet scene, and with dancemakers like de Keersmaeker and Vandekeybus proving key figures in experimental modern European dance. From 1988 to 1991 the US choreographer Mark Morris and his dancers were resident at the Monnaie Opera House in Brussels (successors to Béjart's company) and as such were the national company of Belgium. In 1992 de Keersmaeker and her company Rosas became the resident dance group at the Monnaie.

There were signs of interest in Belgium for Freud and Breuer's research on hysteria as early as 1894. References can be found in Dallemagne's Dégénérés et déséquilibrés (Degeneracy and Mental Imbalance), but this appears to be an isolated case (Berdondini, N., 1987). During the twenties, a few attempts were made to introduce young psychiatrists to psychoanalytic concepts, but there was vehement opposition from the old guard. In literature a special issue of Disque vert appeared in 1924, entirely devoted to Freud. The Belgian authors included Georges Dwelshauwers, André Ombredane, and Henri Michaux. In his later writing, Franz Hellens, director of the publication, was also sympathetic to the work of Carl Gustav Jung. At the University of Louvain, following the initiative of the future cardinal Mercier, several professors took an interest in Freudian theory and established individual critical positions because of the emphasis placed on sexuality. The Jesuit J. Maréchal was also influential in promoting early acceptance of psychoanalysis.

In the midst of these still limited signs of interest, there emerged the figure of an educator from Gand, Julien Varendonck (1879-1924), who had the good fortune to meet Freud and become one of his students. He underwent a training analysis with Theodor Reik and spent 1923 in Vienna to continue his education. Upon his return to Gand, he opened his own office and was made a member of the Dutch Society of Psychoanalysis shortly before his premature death on June 11, 1924. In 1921 he published an important monograph entitled La psychologie des rêves éveillés (The Psychology of Daydreams), with a preface by Freud. Anna Freud translated the first part of the book. Unfortunately, because he was unable to find any students or an analysand with whom he could continue his research, his initiative remained stillborn.

The foundations of psychoanalytic practice were established by two Belgian pioneers, Maurice Dugautiez (1893-1960) and Fernand Lechat (1895-1959). The beginnings of psychoanalysis in Belgium reflect Freud's own solitary struggle during the first decade of the twentieth century. A closed and poorly informed medical establishment—the organic approach dominated psychiatry at the time—and a public opinion that remained hostile because of sectarian prejudices, explain why Freud's work had to wait for the arrival of two idealists who remained far outside the conventional sphere of training before psychoanalysis could take hold in the country. Both men were self-taught, curious and passionate individuals, who first met in 1933. Their encounter was the prelude to years of fruitful collaboration that enabled a psychoanalytic organization to gain a foothold in Belgium.

In spite of the dramatic context in which it occurred, another fortuitous event took place in 1933 or thereabouts. A Viennese Jew, Dr. Ernst Hoffman, a disciple of Freud and a brilliant student of Sándor Ferenczi, settled in Anvers to escape Nazi persecution. Dugautiez and Lechat, together with Mrs. Lechat, who was primarily interested in working with children, took advantage of Hoffman's providential appearance and began a training analysis with him. Unfortunately, Hoffman was arrested in 1942 and sent to a concentration camp. He never returned, and the nascent Belgian psychoanalytic movement suddenly lost its leader.

Beginning in 1936 Dugautiez and Lechat began undergoing supervised analyses under the supervision of Dr. Leuba and Marie Bonaparte. They were authorized to practice on their own in 1939; Mrs. Lechat began working with children at this time. After the war ended, both of them applied for membership in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and were authorized, in 1946, to conduct training analyses and supervise their own students' first analyses.

On December 24, 1946, they founded the Association des Psychanalystes de Belgique (Association of Belgian Psychoanalysts) with Dr. Leuba as honorary president. They were sponsored by the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris. Doctor Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), had encouraged this initiative. In 1947 the association, with the sponsorship of Marie Bonaparte, was accepted for membership in the IPA. The standing of the young organization was made more secure in 1948 with the organization, in Brussels, of the eleventh Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langue Française [(Conference of French-speaking Psychoanalysts). During the twelfth conference, in 1954, Fernand Lechat presented a report on "The Principle of Security." There were three further meetings in Brussels: in 1958, in 1972 (when a report was given by Danièle Flagey, entitled "Intellectual Inhibition"), and in Liege, in 1986, with a report by Andrée Bauduin, "On the Preconscious."

In 1953, Dr. Thérèse Jacobs Van Merlen, who had returned from her training in Paris with Sacha Nacht, Serge Lebovici, and René Diatkine, joined Dugautiez and Lechat. A stream of new members joined the association: Flagey, Bourdon, Vannypelseer, Drappier, Luminet, Pierloot, Labbé, Darmstaedter, Duyckaerts, and later, Watillon and Godfrind. The association has continued to grow since then. In 1960 the name was changed to the Société Belge de Psychanalyse (Belgian Psychoanalytic Society), also known as the Belgische Vereniging voor Psychoanalyse.

The society continued to grow, with the addition of a teaching committee, an enlarged administrative office, and an ethics committee. In addition to bimonthly meetings and working groups, the entire society met every two years for a colloquium. The Revue belge de psychanalyse, with Haber as its first director, was founded in 1982. The review made the society's ideas accessible to a much broader public. There was also a members' Bulletin, created in 1977.

Some twenty years after the creation of the current Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, various activities were established by psychoanalysts who had returned home from abroad and who were, for the most part, associated with the University of Louvain. These individuals either could not, or would not, become a part of the existing society. Most of them had met in Paris between 1955-1960, where they followed the activities of the French Psychoanalytic Society, which was then run by Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan, with the assistance of Juliette Boutonier, Françoise Dolto, and Georges Favez. Following a break in 1953 with the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, in 1964 the French Psychoanalytic Society experienced new upheavals with the departure of Lacan and the creation of theÉcole Freudienne. Although some activities of the new Belgian group began in 1964, the official foundation of theÉcole Belge de Psychanalyse (Belgische School voor Psychoanalyse) did not take place until 1969, under the impetus of Professors Jacques Schotte and Antoine Vergote.

Lacan's influence was decisive within the school, to the extent that its establishment can be considered an implicit extension of the situation in France. This allegiance to Lacanian positions, at least on the part of some, became problematic when the dissolution of the École Freudienne by Lacan led to divisions that subsequently gave rise to numerous offshoots, including Questionnement Psychanalytique (Psychoanalytic Questioning) and the Association Freudienne de Belgique (The Freudian Association of Belgium). These various groups are the result of the differences encountered concerning the importance of Lacanian ideas, in terms of setting and training, and more generally in terms of the theoretical corpus. Unlike the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, these associations were not part of the IPA, some even took pride in their separatist stance. In 1984 theÉcole Belge de Psychanalyse began publishing a bilingual review, Psychoanalyse.

There were also Jungian psychoanalysts working in Belgium. The Société Belge de Psychologie Analytique (Belgian Society of Analytic Psychology), or SBPA, was founded in 1975. The majority of its members had been analyzed by Gilberte Aigrisse (1911-1995), who was trained in Geneva by Charles Baudouin. In 1994 some members of the SBPA left the organization to found a new group known as theÉcole Belge de Psychanalyse Jungienne (Belgian School of Jungian Psychoanalysis), or EBPJ.

Bibliography

Bauduin, Andrée. (1987). Du préconscient. Revue française de psychanalyse, 51, 449-538.

Berdondini, Nadine. (1987). L'introduction de la psychanalyse en Belgique: 1900-1947. Louvain-la-Neuve, reprinted 1995.

Flagey, Danièle. (1973). L'inhibition intellectuelle. Revue française de psychanalyse, 36, 717-798.

Lechat, Fernand. (1955). Du principe de sécurité. (rapport). Revue française de psychanalyse, 19 (1-2), 11-101.

—ANDRÉ ALSTEENS

Monarchy in northwestern Europe, bordered by the North Sea and The Netherlands to the north, Germany and Luxembourg to the east, and France to the south. Its capital and largest city is Brussels.

• Headquarters for the EU and for NATO.

The international dialing code for Belgium is:   32

Local Time: Jul 26, 11:53 AM

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O dierbaar België,
o heilig land der Vadren,
onze ziel en ons hart zijn U gewijd.
Aanvaard ons kracht en bloed van ons adren,
wees ons doel in arbeid en in strijd.
Bloei, o land, in eendracht niet te breken;
wees immer U zelf en ongeknecht.
Het woord getrouw dat ge onbevreesd moogt spreken.
Voor Vorst, voor vrijheid en voor recht.
Het woord getrouw dat ge onbevreesd moogt spreken.
Voor Vorst, voor vrijheid en voor recht.
Voor Vorst, voor vrijheid en voor recht.
Voor Vorst, voor vrijheid en voor recht.

Noble Belgique, à jamais terre chérie,
A toi nos coeurs, à toi nos bras.
Par le sang pur répondu pour toi, patrie,
Nous le jurons d'un seul cri: tu vivras.
Tu vivras, toujours grande et belle,
Et ton invincible unité,
Aura pour devise immortelle:
Le Roi, la Loi, La liberté.
Aura pour devise immortelle:
Le Roi, la Loi, La liberté.
Le Roi, la Loi, La liberté.
Le Roi, la Loi, La liberté.