The origins
Given Brussels' long history, it seems questionable to begin this history of Brussels literature in 1830, the year of Belgium's independence, without at least mentioning some of the writers who lived in the city in previous centuries. We'd like to mention Katherina Boudewyns and Gysbrecht Mercx, both Dutch-language poets of the 16th century. The former's motto was Patientie is zo goeden kruid (Patience is such a good herb), the latter's Spellet wel (Play well), two maxims that still resonate today. The following century saw the birth in Brussels of a future bookseller, Joan de Grieck, who left his mark on souls with his "dishonest comedies" featuring more or less diabolical allegories. Finally, another playwright, Jan Frans Cammaert (1699-1780), used his pen extensively to translate, adapt - notably Molière - and invent rhymes and stage plots. His baroque tone may no longer appeal today, but he remains remarkable for the importance of his work, carefully preserved at the Royal Library of Belgium. Culture had its place in these past centuries, as evidenced by the creation in 1772 of the Académie impériale et royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles, a title given to a literary society created three years earlier by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, hence its nickname of "Theresian".
In 1830, the country declared its autonomy from Holland, to which it had been united following the Battle of Waterloo. Belgium decided to put an end to one of the causes of the disagreement: French was designated as the sole national language, even though it was only used by a minority of Belgians (and barely 15% of the inhabitants of Brussels). The linguistic question will never cease to arise. It was time to define the "Belgian soul", and a whole generation of authors, such as Charles Potvin, author of patriotic poems and a four-act drama, Les Gueux, set about creating a national literature. But the Romantic influence didn't really suit them, a fact mocked by the cheerful young men, most of them graduates of the Université libre de Bruxelles, who in 1856 founded the impertinent Uylenspiegel, a journal of artistic and literary frolics. In the absence of a unifying soul, a certain Belgian spirit was being created, in the image of the much-maligned caricatures by one of the founding members, Félicien Rops. Alexandre Scaron (1835-1923), the magazine's director, published a novel of manners under the pseudonym Paul Reider, featuring Mademoiselle Vallantin, a young bourgeois who breaks with her family to succumb to the charms of her lover... at her peril. His sidekick, Charles de Coster, published La légende d'Ulenspiegel, which was a huge success abroad, but received a frosty reception from Belgian conformists. Using French, the young man nonetheless painted a sensitive portrait of Flanders, without hesitating to invent a language, or to mix great stories and founding myths. In this, he was perhaps the author of the first great national novel that everyone had been waiting for.
Under the impetus of Leopold II, who succeeded his father to the throne in 1865 and remained in power until his death in 1909, Belgium became one of the world's leading economic powers. But behind the pomp and circumstance lurked a resounding misery, which encouraged the emergence of naturalism. For example, Camille Lemonnier, born in Ixelles in 1844, published Un Mâle in serial form. The author was reluctant to draw comparisons with Zola, preferring to emphasize his own stylistic research, but his novel, with its rustic overtones, caused a scandal among traditionalist critics. The magazine La Jeune Belgique, a worthy heir toUylenspiegel, nevertheless gave him its full support. Lemonnier went on to follow in the footsteps of the Decadents, his obsessions bringing him closer to a certain aesthetic dear to Huysmans. As the century drew to a close, a new literary movement was born, Symbolism, under the influence of Verlaine, who did much more than try to take his lover's life on July 10, 1973 in the Rue des Brasseurs. Rhymes became freer, atmosphere took precedence over description, and the whole resonated with the debates of ideas fostered by the appearance of several literary journals. It was a golden age for letters, and Brussels saw the arrival of a number of symbolists, including Charles Van Leberghe (1861-1907), who penned La Chanson d'Ève, Grégoire Le Roy (1862-1941), author - among others - of the play L'Annonciatrice, now sadly lost, and Albert Mockel, a Walloon poet who died in Ixelles in 1945 - all fine names, but rarely their figurehead, Maurice Maeterlinck, winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature, who published here but never settled.
The 20th century and beyond
Once again, the linguistic question arose, and although Flemish gained official status with the famous 1898 Law of Equality, in practice tensions were palpable. In 1912, politician Jules Destrée wrote his famous open letter to King Albert I, "Sire, you reign over two peoples...", and in 1920 he obtained the creation of the Royal Academy of Language and Literature of Belgium, the "Destréenne". But the war had come and gone, and the regionalist narrative that had been popular at the start of the millennium, inspired by the work of Thomas Braun from Brussels, a friend of Francis Jammes and a great lover of nature(Fumée d'Ardenne, 1912), no longer resonated in a world that reproached the values of yesteryear with tragedy. In response, two new fields of exploration emerged: engaged literature and modernism. The former is epitomized by Charles Plisnier, born in Ghlin in 1896, who studied law at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1919 and joined the Communist Party at the same time. Faux Passeports, subtitled Mémoires d'un agitateur, made him the first Belgian to win the Prix Goncourt in 1951. As for the avant-garde, the original stirrings took place far from Brussels, in La Hulpe to be precise, where Clément Pansaers (1885-1922) founded the magazine Résurrection in 1917, offering its columns to authors and artists from all horizons, from the United States to Germany. After only six issues, he was searched and monitored by the secret police. Two years later, he discovered the Dada movement, with which he immediately felt in collusion, so much so that he imagined founding a publishing house and, above all, organizing a major Dadaist event in the Belgian capital the following year. These two projects failed to materialize due to internal dissension, a premonition of the severe differences to come. Yet the spark was there, and it ignited other flames. Franz Hellens, author of Mélusine (Éditions Gallimard), launched Signaux de France et de Belgique, which would later become Le Disque vert, a magazine in which Belgian-born Henri Michaux would publish his first writings and serve on the editorial board. Paul Nougé, for his part, created the magazine Correspondance in the form of leaflets, forged ties with the French Surrealists and, even more so, with René Magritte, while Odilon-Jean Périer published a Dadaist-inspired novel, Le passage des anges, in 1926. The inter-war period was therefore a fertile one, as it was in the world of theater with the arrival of the strange and somewhat disturbing Michel de Ghelderode. The Second World War did not halt the intellectual momentum, even though it swept away revolutionary ideas and, by the same token, surrealism. During the Occupation, literature rushed to the margins, fleeing reality, poetry was no longer political, and new interests were born that would endure well beyond these dark years: detective fiction and fantasy. Thomas Owen, a friend of the inimitable Jean Ray, tried his hand at both with some success and a great deal of humor, while Stanislas-André Steeman drew inspiration from his own address, Square du Val de la Cambre in Ixelles, to write his first real success, L'assassin habite au 21.
But the war left the country bereft of publishing houses, and many authors fled to Paris, as did Dominique Rolin, who left Brussels in 1946 to settle in the French capital. There she found love, and a publisher, Denoël, who published her first novel, Moi qui ne suis qu'amour, two years later. In 1952, Le Souffle won the Prix Fémina and launched her long career as a writer. On both sides of the border, there was a real desire to reinvent the art of the novel, and although it's hard to say that the New Novel found an echo in Belgium, it was nonetheless true that certain works, such as those by Pierre Mertens, allowed themselves to free themselves from narrative constraints. This quest has continued to the present day, in various forms, but with perhaps a common taste for the unusual in everyday life, or even a slight strangeness, or at any rate a certain relationship to the world that can be found in Fernand Verhesen's poems, Paul Edmond's plays or Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novels, which made a name for themselves with his first publication, La Salle de bain, which won the Prix de la Vocation in 1986. A new generation is at work today, using a sometimes caustic sense of humor, such as Amélie Nothomb, who has faithfully published one novel a year since Hygiène de l'assassin (1992, Albin Michel) Thomas Gunzig and his remarkable Manuel de survie à l'usage des incapables (Au Diable Vauvert, 2013), and a sharp eye, like the ferocious La Vraie Vie d'Adeline Dieudonné published in 2018 by L'Iconoclaste. Paul Colize's crime thriller Toute la violence des hommes (Hc Eds, 2020) was inspired by the erotic or violent street art frescoes that flourished in Brussels in 2016 and were painted by the same artist, while Geneviève Damas's Jacky is the story of an unlikely friendship between a young radicalized Muslim and an uptown Jew (Gallimard, 2021)
