Belgium's Builder King personally owned a colony he never set foot in
Leopold II gave Brussels grand parks and Antwerp its monumental railway station. He also owned the Congo Free State outright as private property, running it through a mercenary force for his own profit. Estimates of the population decline under his rule range from 1 million to 15 million people.
Born in Brussels on 9 April 1835, Leopold was heir from birth because an older brother had died in infancy. His mother, a daughter of France's King Louis Philippe, died of tuberculosis when he was 15, and Queen Victoria was his first cousin. He sat in the Senate from 1855, travelled widely in Asia and North Africa, and began pressing Belgium to acquire colonies. He became king in 1865 at the age of 30 and reigned for 44 years, still the longest of any Belgian monarch.
Unable to persuade his country to take an empire, he acquired one personally. With the help of Henry Morton Stanley he claimed the Congo basin, and the European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 recognised it as his. He governed the territory, which he never visited, through the Force Publique. Profits came first from ivory and then, after rubber prices rose in the 1890s, from forced labour. The regime used torture, kidnapping, killing and mutilation to enforce rubber quotas. In 1890 George Washington Williams described its conduct as crimes against humanity, one of the earliest uses of the phrase. Disease, falling birth rates, violence and famine all drove the population loss, and precise figures remain hard to establish.
At home his reign coincided with real reform: legal trade unions, a ban on factory work for children under 12, Sundays off, compensation for workplace accidents, and universal male suffrage in 1893, though softened by plural voting. He had fortresses built at Liège, Namur and Antwerp and kept Belgium neutral during the Franco-Prussian War. His building programme, including the Cinquantenaire park and the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, was largely funded by Congo profits according to historians such as Adam Hochschild, though that view is disputed.
His private life cost him more public sympathy in Belgium than his colonial record. His only son died at nine, and in 1899 the elderly king took a 16-year-old mistress, Caroline Lacroix, whom he wed in a religious ceremony days before his death on 17 December 1909.
Source: Leopold II of Belgium
