Wallonia: The Will to Remember

Abstract

14 December 1960. Place Saint-Lambert in Liege, seventy-five thousand people, led by metal workers, demonstrate against austerity and social recession measures concocted by a conservative government. The socialist Federation Generale du Travail of Belgium-a majority in Wallonia, a minority in Flanders-has launched the movement to oppose the single law (la loi unique) but, against the advice of the Walloon branches, it does not want that movement to go too far. On the Place Saint-Lambert, in the heart of a city that, along with its suburbs, is one of the bastions of the old industry, a violent feeling of revolt has seized everyone: the real target, far beyond the current governmental measures, is clearly the Belgian state in its unified form or else that monarchy already opposed by the Walloon working class ten years earlier, an opposition it had paid for with its own blood. That was in 1950, during the Royal Question that forced King Leopold III to abdicate in favor of his son Baudouin, under the pressure of leftist opinion. Andre Renard, a charismatic leader of the metal workers of Liege and a respected orator, is galvanizing the crowd this day, but he also tempers it. For the shout of Let's March on Brussels has risen from the masses. The marriage of the young king is to take place in the capital the next day. A republican wind is blowing through the gathering.