Victor Brants
Victor Leopold Jacques Louis Brants (1856–1917) was a Belgian economic and social historian, professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. Life. Brants was born in Antwerp on 23 November 1856. He taught at the Catholic University of Leuven from 1878, and was appointed professor in 1888. In 1882 he founded the Société Belge d'Économie Sociale. After the public unrest of 1886, the government headed by Auguste Beernaert appointed Brants to a commission on the condition of the labouring classes, giving him considerable influence on social legislation. He was a deeply committed social Catholic. At the university, he taught  on political economy, social economy, credit, exchange and finance, labour legislation, and history. As a historian his work focused on economic and monetary legislation in the Habsburg Netherlands. He was an active member of the Royal Commission for the publication of the old laws of the Low Countries, and a contributor to the "Biographie Nationale de Belgique" and the "Catholic Encyclopaedia". In 1895 he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, and in 1899 a full member. Displaced by the Sack of Leuven in 1914, he lived as a refugee  in Brussels, where he fell into isolation and poverty. He died while undergoing pulmonary surgery without anaesthetic in Leuven on 28 April 1917, offering up his suffering with his eyes fixed on an image of Christ.