European History PDF EPUB

Belgium

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First published: 1921
Pages: 296

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About this book

Published in 1921, this single-volume survey set out to put the findings of modern Belgian historians, Henri Pirenne above all, in front of British readers. Cammaerts opens with the Roman conquest and the belt of forest known as the Silva Carbonaria, which he treats as the origin of the country's Flemish and Walloon divide. He then moves through the cloth towns and their belfries, the Burgundian dukes and Philip the Good, the brothers Van Eyck and later Rubens, the long Spanish and Austrian centuries, the revolution of 1830, and the guaranteed neutrality broken in 1914. His running argument is that Belgium was no artificial creation of European diplomacy: the language line never matched the political borders, and the two peoples had been welded into one nation well before independence.

About the author

Emile Cammaerts

Emile Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian poet and essayist who moved to England in 1908 and did much of his later writing in English. During the First World War he became one of the best known voices of occupied Belgium, and Edward Elgar set three of his wartime poems for reciter and orchestra, among them Carillon (1914).

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