Leopold, King

Leopold II (French: Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor, Dutch: Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor; 9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I andLouise of Orléans, he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865, reigning for 44 years until his death, the longest of any Belgian monarch.

Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe committed the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions and ran the Congo using a mercenary force for his personal gain. Some of the money from this exploitation was used for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period.

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forcing the population to collect sap from rubber plants. Villages were required to meet quotas on rubber collections, and individuals' hands were cut off if they did not meet the requirements. His regime was responsible for the death of an estimated 2 to 15 million Congolese. This became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the Belgian government.

Contents

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• 1 Personal life
• 2 Early political career
• 3 Domestic reign
  • 3.1 Builder King
  • 3.2 Attempted assassination

• 4 Congo Free State
  • 4.1 Obtaining the Congo Free State
  • 4.2 Exploitation and atrocities
  • 4.3 Criticism of his rule
  • 4.4 Relinquishment of the Congo

• 5 Death and legacy
• 6 Family
• 7 Styles, arms and honours
• 8 Ancestry
• 9 Gallery
• 10 See also
• 11 References
• 12 Bibliography
• 13 External links

Personal life

...

Congo Free State

Obtaining the Congo Free State

Further information: Congo Free State

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monument_%C3%A0_L%C3%A9opold_II_.jpg)

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monument_%C3%A0_L%C3%A9opold_II_.jpg "Enlarge")

Monument in Arlon (Belgium)."I have undertaken the work in Congo in the interest of civilisation and for the good of Belgium."

Leopold fervently believed that overseas colonies were the key to a country's greatness, and he worked tirelessly to acquire colonial territory for Belgium. Leopold eventually began to acquire a colony in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. The Belgian government lent him money for this venture.

In 1866, Leopold instructed the Belgian ambassador in Madrid to speak to Queen Isabella II of Spain about ceding the Philippines to Belgium. However, knowing the situation fully, the ambassador did nothing. Leopold quickly replaced the ambassador with a more sympathetic individual to carry out his plan.^[6]

In 1868, when Isabella II was deposed as Queen of Spain, Leopold attempted to take advantage of his original plan to acquire the Philippines. But without funds, he was unsuccessful. Leopold then devised another unsuccessful plan to establish the Philippines as an independent state, which could then be ruled by a Belgian. When both of these plans failed, Leopold shifted his aspirations of colonization to Africa.^[6]

After numerous unsuccessful schemes to acquire colonies in Africa and Asia, in 1876 Leopold organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society, or the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of the Congo. In 1878, under the auspices of the holding company, he hired the famous explorer Henry Stanley to explore and establish a colony in the Congo region.^[7] Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 regarding African affairs, at which representatives of fourteen European countries and the United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of most of the area to which he and Stanley had laid claim. On 5 February 1885, the Congo Free State, an area 76 times larger than Belgium, was established under Leopold II's personal rule and private army, the Force Publique.

Exploitation and atrocities

Map of the Belgian Congo (1884)

Leopold then amassed a huge personal fortune by exploiting the Congo. The first economic focus of the colony was ivory, but this did not yield the expected levels of revenue. When the global demand for rubber exploded, attention shifted to the labor-intensive collection of sap from rubber plants. Abandoning the promises of the Berlin Conference in the late 1890s, the Free State government restricted foreign access and extorted forced labor from the natives. Abuses, especially in the rubber industry, included the effectiveenslavement of the native population, beatings, widespread killing, and frequent mutilation when the production quotas were not met. Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he wrote to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo saying: "I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."^[8]

Estimates of the death toll range from two million to fifteen million,^[9][10][11] since accurate records were not kept. Historians Louis and Stengers state that population figures at the start of Leopold's control are only "wild guesses", and that attempts by E. D. Morel and others to determine a figure for the loss of population were "but figments of the imagination".^[12]

Mutilated people from Congo Free State

Adam Hochschild, however, devotes a chapter of his book King Leopold's Ghost to the problem of estimating the death toll. He cites several recent lines of investigation, by anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, that examine local sources (police records, religious records, oral traditions, genealogies, personal diaries, and "many others"), which generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State period. Since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in 1924 put the population at about 10 million, that implies a rough estimate of 10 million dead.^[13]

Smallpox and sleeping sickness also devastated the disrupted population.^[14] By 1896 the sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela on theCongo River. The mortality statistics were collected through the efforts of Roger Casement, who found, for example, only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903.^[15]

Criticism of his rule

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led in the early 1900s to international outcry and a widespread war of words. The campaign to examine Leopold's regime, led by British diplomat Roger Casement and former shipping clerk E. D. Morel under the auspices of the Congo Reform Association, became the first masshuman rights movement.^[8] Supporters included American writer Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging political satire entitled King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation, using many of Leopold's own quotes against him. Rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the start of the 20th century, when the Western world forced the Belgian government to intervene.^[16]

Arthur Conan Doyle also criticised the 'rubber regime' in his 1908 work The Crime of the Congo, written to aid the work of the Congo Reform Association. Doyle contrasted Leopold's rule to the British rule of Nigeria, arguing that decency required those who ruled primitive peoples to be concerned first with their uplift, not how much could be extracted from them. It should be noted that, as Hochschild describes in King Leopold's Ghost, many of Leopold's policies were adopted from Dutch practices in the East Indies, and similar methods were employed to some degree by Germany, France and Portugal where natural rubber occurred in their colonies.

Relinquishment of the Congo

Criticism from both the Catholic Party and the Labor Party caused the Belgian parliament to compel the King to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium in 1908.^{[citation needed]} The Congo Free State was transformed into a Belgian colony known as the Belgian Congo under parliamentary control. It later became, successively, the Republic of the Congo, Zaire (under Mobutu Sese Seko), and currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC, not to be confused with Republic of the Congo, a former colony of France.