Abstract

Literary commemorations of Waterloo in Willem I's United Kingdom offer an interesting topic for future research. Author highlights the literary debut of Prudens van Duyse. Around the time of the Waterloo Lion construction, in 1824, he obtained a prize for a historical tableau on a battle which evidently was considered to prefigure 1815: the Heroic Courage of the Flemings under Guy of Dampierre. This is one of the earliest 'national' commemorations of a battle now better known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs. Author also offers some observations on memories and memory cultures in the making and breaking of the Low Countries. In the fragmentation of the Low Countries, first into Dutch and Belgian halves and subsequently into a Flemish-Walloon antagonism within Belgium, the role of the historical imagination as channeled through literature stands out as being important and influential, albeit in complex and unpredictable ways. Keywords:Belgium; Dutch; Golden Spurs; Literary Historicism; Prudens van Duyse; Waterloo; Willem I

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