Leopold II of Belgium

Leopold II (French: Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor, Dutch: Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor; 9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second King of the Belgians. He reigned for 44 years, the longest reign of a Belgian monarch to date. Estimates for the Congolese population decline during Leopold's rule range from 1 million to 15 million. Causes included epidemic disease, a reduced birth rate, and violence and famine caused by the regime. The Congo Free State was reconstituted as a new territory, the Belgian Congo, in 1908.

Belgium's King Leopold was heir to the throne from his father's death in 1865. In 1899, in his 65th year, he took as a mistress Caroline Lacroix, a 16-year-old French prostitute. Couple married secretly in a religious ceremony five days before his death. His reign was marked by a number of major political developments, including the adoption of universal male suffrage and the abolition of child labour. Leopold strove to make Belgium less vulnerable militarily.

During the Franco-Prussian War, he managed to preserve Belgium's neutrality. He pushed for a reform in military service, but was unable to obtain one until his deathbed. Leopold commissioned a great number of buildings, urban projects and public works. In 1900, King Leopold I of Belgium donated most of his private estates to the Belgian nation in perpetuity. He did not want them scattered among his daughters, each of whom was married to a foreign prince.

Italian anarchist Gennaro Rubino attempted to assassinate him on 15 November 1902. Millions of Congolese were killed, mutilated or died from disease and famine under his rule. Estimates for the total population decline range from one million to fifteen million. Leopold saw the empires of the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain as being in a state of decline and expressed interest in buying their territories. In 1866, Leopold instructed the Belgian ambassador in Madrid to speak to Queen Isabella II of Spain about ceding the Philippines to Belgium.

In 1894, King Leopold signed a treaty with Great Britain which conceded a strip of land on the Congo Free State's eastern border in exchange for access to the Lado Enclave. After rubber profits soared in 1895, he ordered an expedition into the area, which was overrun by Mahdist rebels. Estimates of the death toll range from one million to fifteen million, since accurate records were not kept. Smallpox epidemics and sleeping sickness also devastated the population. By 1896, African trypanosomiasis had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela.

Criticism of King Leopold II's rule in the Congo began with satirical cartoons depicting him as a rubber snake entangling Congolese rubber collectors. Critics were inspired by works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), originally published as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. King Leopold II was forced to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium in 1908 after international pressure and criticism of his rule. The Belgian Congo became a Belgian colony under parliamentary control known as the Belgian Congo. It was given independence in 1960 and is still a part of Belgium.

In 2010, a Belgian member of the European Parliament called Leopold II a "visionary hero". In June 2020, a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brussels protested the murder of George Floyd. MPs agreed to set up a parliamentary commission to examine Belgium's colonial past. Most of the statues date from the interwar period, the peak of colonial-patriotic propaganda. They were intended to help get rid of the scandal after international commotion about his atrocities in the Congo Free State.

Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, born at Laeken on 21 May 1864, died at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma in Győr-Moson-Sopron, Hungary, on 23 August 1945. She married Prince Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte (1862–1926).

## Criticism

However, Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State is well known for its cruelty. To personally enrich Leopold, the Congolese were made to toil for valuable resources like rubber and ivory. Various estimates indicate that punishment and malnutrition killed roughly half of the Congolese people. Other European colonial rulers swiftly imitated Leopold II's forced labor regime in the Congo.

The devastating effects of this practice on the Congolese populace ultimately forced Leopold to relinquish control of the colony.

The death toll estimates vary wildly (and the true number will never be known for sure), but low figures are still around 5 million while high figures sit near 20 million. Leopold's Force Publique, a private army that terrorized natives to work as forced labour for resource extraction, disrupted local societies, and killed and abused natives indiscriminately.

Leopold wanted to take rubber and ivory out of the Congo.

Inside the opulent walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand statues of Leopold II - each one a monument to the king whose rule killed as many as 10 million Africans, often with their hands and limbs severed. Leopold devised a system of terror in which entire Congolese villages were forced to harvest rubber or face death by their Belgian overseers.

Leopold II ruled the DRC for 23 years, during which time the Belgians murdered an average of 652,000 Congolese per year, or 54,347 per month or 1,811 per day!

There is little doubt that the European colonialists committed horrible atrocities in Africa. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, arbitrary arrests and illegal detentions were common (DRC).

Rallies and protests staged by opposition parties or civil society that were thought to be critical of the government were frequently banned or forcibly suppressed, and prison conditions remained atrocious.

Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State, however, has become notorious for its cruelty. On June 8, 2022, Belgian King Philippe expressed his condolences for the exploitation, bloodshed, and racism during the colonization of the Congo Free State, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Estimates vary, but almost half the Congolese population perished from punishment and famine. The people of the Congo were compelled to labor for valuable resources, such rubber and ivory, in order to personally enrich Leopold.