The Low Countries. Jaargang 5

An Overview and a Remembering
A New History of the Low Countries

Anyone setting out to write a history of the Low Countries immediately finds himself faced with one fundamental problem: how exactly to define the subject of that history? For, after all, in the past the Low Countries have assumed different forms at different times. They have included not just the present states of Belgium and the Netherlands, but also the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg and parts of Germany and France. While on several occasions in their history they have formed a single national or political entity, they have spent far more of their time as a group of autonomous principalities or as regions belonging to several different states. So just what are the Low Countries? That in the past this vague entity has been known by a variety of names (Flanders, the Netherlands, the Seventeen Provinces, Belgium) only adds to the complications.

The compilers of the latest general history of the Low Countries, published under the rather puzzling title The Drama of the Low Countries, were well aware of the problem. In the book's introduction they lament the fact that, sadly, the Low Countries are not among those ‘countries with a simple, straightforward national history, where one language, one race, one state has for centuries formed a self-evident and closed continuum’ (fairy-tale countries, in other words). But they emphasise that the region known as ‘The Low Countries’ has always been a culturally distinct area on the map of Europe, an area with an impressive civilisation and strong economic activity, a lively political life and an admirable adaptability. The book's conclusions even make a virtue of necessity by linking the cultural and economic dynamism of the Low Countries with their very diversity, their polyglot nature and multiethnicity, their amalgam of sometimes contradictory elements. In an ever-changing world, it is suggested, this diversity is not a problem: it is a trump card.

The ten authors invited to contribute - all noted historians from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - thus embark on their task with few qualms. In as many chapters they tell the story of the Low Countries, from Julius Caesar and the Merovingian dynasty to the recent constitutional reforms in Belgium and the turbulent 1960s in the Netherlands. Up to the Revolt of the sixteenth century, which heralded the end of the unity established by Charles v, the Low Countries are discussed as a whole. Thereafter - save for the revolutionary era of 1780-1830 - they are treated as distinct entities, with separate chapters on the North (first the Republic, later the Kingdom of the Netherlands) and the South (first the Southern Netherlands, later Belgium). The entire history is most carefully reconstructed in a balanced style, though the critical reader will undoubtedly get annoyed about the anachronisms that have crept into the book, deplore the prominently political input in certain chapters, and be surprised to find no account of the eighteenth-century Republic.

Such criticisms, however, are out of tune with the lofty sentiments that dominate the book - sentiments of wonder and admiration at the power and beauty of the civilisation here portrayed. It is an idealised portrait: not only Holland's Golden Age in the seventeenth century, but the whole history of the Low Countries is lit with a golden glow. But at the same time the book is permeated with nostalgia. It is written out of an awareness that there is an unbridgeable gulf between late- twentieth-century workaday reality and the civilisation of the past. The Drama of the Low Countries is indeed a Sunday book; here history is stilled to a precious memory.

Even more than in the main body of the book, this is apparent in the fifty or so short articles which are scat-

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tered throughout and supplement the main chapters. Each devoted to one specific aspect of the past - one event, one figure, one oeuvre, one place - together they form an inventary of the patrimony of the Low Countries. They condense history into a series of symbolic highpoints upon which memories of that increasingly alien civilisation have fastened, an index of what is worth remembering from that history. In short, they offer a guided tour of those spots where the people of the Low Countries like to linger in memory.

Within that canon, it seems, cultural history is far and away the most important. Almost half the short articles are on architecture and the visual arts, literature and the sciences. And within that category painting and architecture have the lion's share, with pieces on, for example, gothic architecture, the Flemish Primitives, miniatures, Bosch and Bruegel, Art Nouveau and Functionalism, Van Gogh, Ensor, Magritte and Mondrian. The memory in question is thus above all a visual memory; literature, here represented only by articles on the languages and works of the early Middle Ages, medieval Dutch mysticism, the Plantijn publishing house and - leaping the centuries - the twentieth-century comic strip hero Tintin, has left little mark on it. But cultural history has no monopoly on the historical memories of the Low Countries. They also attach themselves, as other contributions show, to themes from political, social-economic, religious and colonial history such as the monarchy, the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, the crusades and the Congo. Finally, there are many articles devoted to the structure of the landscape of the Netherlands, to urban life and the confrontation with Nature and the elements.

The choice of articles, though, does more than demonstrate the thematic range of collective memory in the Low Countries; it also shows how certain periods of the past have won themselves a privileged place in that memory. Chief among these are the High and the Late Middle Ages, the Burgundian Age, Holland's Golden Age, and in Belgium the nineteenth, in the Netherlands the twentieth century. Even more striking, though, are the differences between North and South. A case in point is the way the region's development is perceived. The South's memory is urban (they recall the rebellious Ghent of medieval times, the baroque metropolis of Antwerp, the prince-bishopric of Liège, Ghent again, this time as a cotton town during the Industrial Revolution, and the rebellious, artistic Brussels of the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle). The memory of the - equally urbanised - North is concerned primarily with the countryside, the polders and the dikes (one of the articles is entitled ‘The Netherlands as a structure of hydraulic engineering’). This is only one of the surprises one comes upon when strolling through the Low Countries' Hall of Memories.

In this way The Drama of the Low Countries offers not only an overview of the history of the Low Countries but also a sample of what elements from that history the people who live there have absorbed into their memory. It is this rare duality that makes the book, which is splendidly produced and lavishly illustrated,

Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love. 1630. Canvas, 198 × 283 cm. Prado, Madrid.

so interesting and so attractive.

jo tollebeek

Translated by Tanis Guest

The Drama of the Low Countries, Twenty Centuries of Civilization between Seine and Rhine. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator - Paribas, 1996; 404 pp. isbn 90-6153-3740.