Masculinity and Nationhood, 1830-1910

Constructions of Identity and Citizenship in Belgium

J. Hoegaerts

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137391995
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137392015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A history of what it meant to be a man, and a citizen of an emerging nation throughout the nineteenth century. This book not only relates how Belgians were taught how to move and fight, but also how they spoke and sang to express masculinity and patriotism.

Part I

Spaces

The story of the composition of the Brabançonne, the glorification of the revolution and its heroes, and the creation of the nation that played the lead role in these heroic stories, were largely the doings of a number of nineteenth-century artists. Gustave Wappers’ famous tableau of the Belgian revolution, for example, did much of the rhetorical work that was needed to implant the story of a spontaneous revolutionary outburst and legitimized the authority of future Minister of War Félix Emmanuel Chazal by depicting him as a fierce patriot on horseback.¹ Likewise, romantic novelist Hendrik Conscience, ‘the man who taught his people how to read’, crafted not only a colourful prehistory to the modern Belgian nation, identifying a host of pre-national Belgian heroes, but also provided an autobiographical account of the Belgian revolution.²

His Revolution of 1830, published in 1858, has the middle-aged author casting an almost fatherly glance over to his younger self.³ Although the work is a novel, directed at a large audience, it shares much of its stylistic characteristics with the bourgeois memoir, the author aiming to educate his readers as much as to amuse them.⁴ The work is hardly of value as a nineteenth-century history lesson though. Rather than teaching his readers about the course of the revolution, its grand heroes or the political and military tactics underlying the movements of the revolutionary army, Conscience tells the tale of a young, dreamy and somewhat weak boy going through the painful process of becoming a man. The old Conscience, through the young first-person narrator of the story, ties his own rite of passage to a critical moment in his nation’s conception.⁵ He thereby not only presents his own identity as one bound to the nation, and defined by patriotism and citizenship, but also projects an image of the Belgian revolution as the story of a country ‘coming of age’ and acquiring attributes of masculinity.⁶

Conscience’s description of his road to manhood begins at his father’s house: the young narrator, ‘still having a child-like complexion’, witnesses an encounter between the Dutch troops and Belgian revolutionaries and when later two young men from Brussels are billeted upon his home, their ‘manly speech’ brings tears of admiration to his eyes.⁷ Two days later, after having suffered the ridicule of the revolutionaries for his inability to wield a weapon, young Conscience pulls a stern face in front of the mirror and volunteers for the revolutionary army. ‘I could become a soldier’, the autobiography recounts, ‘and thereby gain the indisputable right to wield a weapon for the sake of freedom, like a man.’ His father agrees that ‘the military life’ might do his son some good, as it would ‘chase the dreams from your head that prevent you from becoming a man’. And thus the formal preconditions for the young patriot’s coming of age are fulfilled: the queasy boy leaves the known world of domesticity and motherly care behind and – as the author ironically remarks – ‘disguised’ as a soldier, joins the ranks of the revolutionaries in order to ‘do men’s deeds’.

Throughout the next chapters, the revolutionary army turns out to be a school of masculinity indeed: Conscience describes not only how he physically hardens and grows by means of the long marches and fierce battles, he also recounts a romantic episode, meeting the beautiful ‘Bethken’, as part of his maturing process and depicts one particularly fatherly general as his mentor. When, after approximately a year, he changes regiment, 19-year-old Henry believes that ‘a powerful manly heart throbs in his bosom’. The true rite of passage, however, is yet to come: with the change of regiments, the narrator leaves another father and is confronted with a brutal new wing-commander who harshly promises to ‘turn him into a man’. His therapy proves to be a sequence of ruffian activities: at the commander’s insistence, young Conscience is forced to get drunk for the first time, is derided for his ‘effeminate’ and ‘childlike’ behaviour and is beaten to a pulp until he agrees to a duel with his opponent. ‘Truly’, the author later concludes ‘the captain had cured my childish stupidity and abruptly made me a man.’

Conscience’s tale shows to what extent the nineteenth-century image of growth into manhood was not one of a natural or self-evident evolution, but rather one of conscious activity, dotted by abrupt revolutions. In his story, masculinity is imagined as a good that can be acquired, and various practices can be put to use to increase one’s amount of masculinity. Interestingly, Conscience does not mention the possibility of a ‘loss’ of masculinity: the story ends with the author’s transformation into a man, after which he apparently lives happily ever after. Moreover, the acquisition of masculinity appears as a located practice and as a public performance. Firstly, the coming of age of a young Belgian had necessitated a removal from the feminized setting of home and school and his transportation to a homo-social environment.⁸ Women were by no means absent from the locus of Conscience’s transformation, yet their role as agents in both revolutions was defined by their activities as an audience.⁹ Secondly, the move away from home not only transported the young soldier into a homo-social environment, but also to specific places: when the revolutionary army marched off, it literally displaced its recruits, granting them the opportunity to discover new places: different sights and regions of their brand new nation, but also enclosed spaces such as the pub. Henry’s final transformation, at the hands of a violent sergeant, takes place in a particularly small and defined place: behind the closed doors of a prison-cell at a police station.

Conscience’s story not only underscores the army’s explicit function as a school of masculinity, it also points to the instrumentality of specific spaces for the production of a common language of masculinity. The following two chapters focus specifically on, firstly, the extent to which purposefully built spaces of homo-sociability have suggested specific, often hierarchic notions, of gendered identity to its inhabitants and visitors. Secondly, they will examine how movements within and between specific spaces were staged and read as performances of masculinity.

The first chapter ‘Men in Space: The Construction of All-Male Spaces’ is concerned with the material history of, consecutively, the Belgian Palace of the Nation, the Antwerp municipal schools and the Beverloo camp. Focusing mainly on the practice of building, rebuilding and adapting three specific architectural constructions, I aim to show how buildings were – at least on the drawing table- constructed to discipline their inhabitants and translate social differences such as age, ideology, rank, class and, most importantly here, gender into spatial arrangements.¹⁰ Moreover, by pursuing the buildings’ construction histories beyond the initial models and plans, I will also lay bare the conflicts that arose between the disciplinary grid suggested by the built structure and the changing ideologies attached to the buildings throughout the nineteenth century, which often resulted in an extensive practice of bricolage with the built structures. Because of the interdependence of the constructions of space and gender, the changing spatial arrangements of politics, school and army can be read as testimonies to changes in the language of masculinity as well.

The construction and maintenance of the spaces’ borders, and the discourses surrounding them, show the changes in the spatial layout of the buildings and their possible consequence for gender practices. Although the three cases present themselves as ‘closed’ spaces, they all show various degrees of permeability, and the different ways in which inhabitants and visitors to parliament, school and barracks were allowed to enter or move through the building were constitutive of their degree of insider-hood.¹¹ The incomplete exclusion of women, children and certain men from these spaces of homo-sociability is particularly interesting, as discourses and practices of exclusion made the limits of what is acceptable within the circle of insiders explicit. Whereas model-plans, architects’ reports and newly built structures suggest the movements of and relations between ideal inhabitants of parliament, school and barracks, ongoing and changing practices of exclusion and border-control give an indication of expected or even feared acts of rebellion, and can therefore offer a corrective (albeit a very incomplete one) to an otherwise too normative image of the men created within and through these spaces.

Instead of only looking at exclusion as a means of fragmentation, then, in which some men are deemed acceptable and others are rejected, the chapter shows how a common language was created by virtue of the variable permeability of borders. Rather than a comparison of the three cases, it examines moments of cross-over between parliament and school, school and army, and army and parliament. Conflicts and communication between these three spaces, materially or metaphorically, show to what extent the vocabulary of masculinity could be carried from one space to another.

The second chapter ‘Movements in Space: Choreographies of Masculinity’ literally moves away from the built structures of parliament, school and army in order to examine the performances of masculinity in the larger spatial arrangement of the nation. Although parliament, army and school were homo-social spaces in a very real sense, they were also understood as all-male collectives tied to the nation rather than to their specific location. Politicians, as well as military men, understood themselves as protectors of the nation, soldiers and schoolchildren alike could be addressed as children of the nation and each group of boys or men regularly and publicly assumed the role of representatives of the nation. Movements from each enclosed space into different regions of the country could therefore be read as theatres of nation as well as theatres of masculinity, as schoolboys, military men and parliamentarians carried their institutional ties to the nation with them, individually and as a group.¹² The military uniform, the senator’s medal and schoolboys’ cocardes for excursions made each of them recognisable as part of the all-male space they originated from, and turned every space in which they entered as a group into an extension of the barracks, parliament or school – thus reinforcing the bonds between the group and each part of the nation visited.

Concerned with the interactions between men and the national landscape, the chapter covers marches and walks through the nation as well as efforts to read and map the country. The masculine body, its movements (controlled and often in unison), its formation, its representation and, most pointedly, its locatedness are at the centre of attention.¹³ The army’s exercising manœuvres and school excursions, both gaining popularity from the 1870s onward and extensively reported upon, appear as moments of physical exercise geared towards the creation of a masculine body on the one hand, and the creation of a collective body of men on the other hand. The cross-country travels of soldiers and pupils also doubled as means to teach young men and boys about their country according to the new educational principles introduced by the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: the act of movement was coupled to several, guided, sensory experiences that taught the travellers how to perceive the landscape and how to relate to it emotionally. Reports written by the children participating in these trips echo the educational ideals attached to them by teachers and politicians, but also allow for a more nuanced image of their actual effects: much like soldiers were reluctant to comply with the ‘disciplinary’ grid of their barracks, primary schoolchildren occasionally expressed disagreement with the official narrative on excursions and patriotism.

1

Men in Space: The Construction of All-Male Spaces

With the ‘operatic’ revolution, and the diplomatic, military and political consequences it entailed, a new nation was effectively born in 1830. Not only was a new and independent government (including a king) to be installed, the institutions of a modern nation state had to be built as well. In this chapter, three particular institutions are introduced, viewed through the lens of their architectural construction: parliament, the barracks and the primary school. As all three of them were thought of as material representations of the nation, their construction was connected to the constructions of citizenship performed by their inhabitants. Additionally, because they were all-male institutions, the identities articulated in these buildings participated in the development of a national common language of masculinity.

Although these institutions produced discourses in which they were pictured as exemplary spaces of nationhood, citizenship and masculinity, their material history, and the ways in which their inhabitants moved within their walls also point to practices of bricolage and to the changeable nature of what they were aiming to represent. Throughout the nineteenth century, Belgium and its citizens’ sense of self changed – at least partly in step with the material changes in the institutions that represented them.

Houses of representation

The Palace of the Nation, a monumental building in the political and geographical centre of the country, has a long history of different users and functions, only the last of which is purely representational.¹⁴ The building’s former identity as a high court demanded representational aspects, as it was meant to convey the power of a number of rulers. At its conception in 1778, under the reign of Maria Theresa of Austria, the building replaced the palace of the dukes of Brabant as the home of the Council of Brabant. The neo-classicist building sported a pediment by Gilles-Lambert Godecharle to convey its identity as a seat of judicial power through an allegory of justice.¹⁵ The building continued, despite its continuous renaming in the French period, to be essentially a place of discipline and punishment, its basement going through a short-lived career as prison for petty criminals.¹⁶ It was only in 1816 that the building ceased to be a courtroom, and changed into a space of representation and governmentality.

The transformation of the Council of Brabant into the States-General of the Netherlands initiated the architectural changes that would be determinant factors in the ensuing transformation of the building from Dutch States-General into the Belgian parliament: architect Charles Van der Straeten not only changed the furnishings of the building, but also constructed a new hemicycle for the meetings of the Second Chamber.¹⁷ As the building was fitted to its new representational function, plans were also drafted to add six statues of ‘historically important figures’. The works were commissioned in 1818, but the six niches remained empty until 1845. When the statues were added, they represented not the originally intended Dutch heroes, but great men in the pre-history of Belgium, turning the building not only into a space of representational pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Three Anthems, a Flag and a Tenor: Introduction
• Part I Spaces
• Part II Sounds
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index