“To be Flemish in order to become European” – August Vermeylen and

Flemish Literature. Theo D’haen – University of Leuven (KU Leuven)

Published as “To be Flemish in order to become European: August Vermeylen and Flemish

Literature,” in Rifondare la letteratura nazionale per un pubblico europeo, Alexandra Vranceanu

and Angelo Pagliardini, ed., Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 131-45. When citing please refer to

the published version.

“Vlamingen zijn, om Europeërs te worden” - “To be Flemish in order to become European” is the

most famous slogan from the most famous article by the Flemish writer, academic and politician

August Vermeylen (1872 – 1945). Vermeylen wrote the article in question, “Vlaamsche en

Europeesche Beweging” [Flemish and European Movement], in 1900, in a Dutch-language journal he

himself had co-founded in 1893, Van Nu en Straks (Present and Future, or, literally, Of Now and

Later), and in response to an article by Cyriel Buysse (1859-1932), another leading Flemish writer at

the time and likewise co-founder of Van Nu en Straks. In his article, Buysse, although Flemish himself,

and writing in Dutch, the majority language spoken in the northern half of Belgium, but by 1900,

after his marriage to a Dutch woman, living in The Hague, in The Netherlands, turned against what he

saw as the wrongheaded ambition of Flemish intellectuals and politicians in Belgium to counter the

further dissemination of the French language in Flanders. Some years earlier, in 1897, the same

Buysse had already written another article, in the Dutch journal De Amsterdammer, in which he

pronounced Flemish to be

A poor, little language, and a talented writer can only deeply lament that he does not have at

his disposal a better vehicle to disseminate his ideas. Therefore, rather than condemn him

for it, one cannot but applaud when he succeeds in mastering a greater language.

[]een arme, kleine taal, en een schrijver van talent kan het maar diep betreuren dat hij over

geen beter voertuig van gedachten-verspreiding beschikt. Daarom, verre van ‘t hem euvel te

duiden, kan men niet anders, dan hem toejuichen, waneer hij erin slaagt eene grotere taal

machtig te worden. (VN&S, 70-71]

This 1897 article by Buysse was read out loud in the Belgian Senate during the discussions on a

proposal of law concerning the equality of the Dutch and French languages in public usage, and

particularly in matters of law, in Belgium. Specifically, it was invoked as a plea against any such

equality. In his reply Vermeylen accused Buysse of confusing the issue of the Flemish language and

that of the “Flamingants” (Buysse’s article had been entitled “Flamingantisme en Flaminganten”),

that is to say those Flemings that clamored in favor of the revival of a Flemish identity, in Flemish.

Buysse had reacted to the attacks he had suffered in the Flemish press because of his Amsterdammer

article, and specifically because of the use that had been made of it in the Belgian parliamentary

debates, with an open letter, in French, to the French-language newspaper L’ Etoile Belge, in which

he reiterated his earlier allegations: “On conçoit que le dialecte flamand (sic), en sa fruste saveur,

puisse tenter la plume d’un curieux littéraire ou l’étude d’un philologue fureteur, mais quelle arme

triste pour la conquête des idées et la conquête du pain, en un pays comme la Belgique!” (VN&S, p.

247). As Vermeylen underlines with his “(sic) ,” Buysse’s use of the term “Flemish dialect” indicates

that the latter did not conceive of the Dutch spoken in Flanders as equal to the Dutch spoken in The

Netherlands, his own new country of residence, nor to French, which he implicitly also clearly

recognized as the dominant language in Belgium. Vermeylen reacted to the failure of the proposal of

law to effectively make it into law (it did make it a little later) with an article in Van Nu en Straks, in

which he referred to the article by Buysse mentioned, and countered the latter’s view of the Flemish

language with an attack ad hominem, arguing that Buysse himself would never be a great artist

because he wanted to write for the greatest number possible, instead of listening to what from his

inner depths called forth true beauty, and that his opinions on the Flemish language only proved that

he had never really felt any organic link to the latter. In fact, the disagreement between Buysse and

Vermeylen had all to do with their belonging to different generations, and to having different ideas

with regard to the link between the Flemish language and the Flemish Movement, a movement

aiming at emancipation of the Flemings within the constitutional framework of the Belgian state.

Cyriel Buysse had been born in 1859, the son of a well-to-do factory owner near Ghent. He was

raised in French, as were all scions of the bourgeoisie at the time, even if they lived in Flanders, like

Buysse. There were multiple reasons for this. To begin with, until 1883 it was impossible to attend

secondary school in Dutch in Belgium, even in the northern part of the country which was, is, and

always had been Flemish, that is to say Dutch-speaking, and which harbored then, and continues to

do so today, 60 percent of the Belgian population. In Brussels, the center and capital of the country,

and the birthplace of Vermeylen, the majority of ordinary people until the beginning of the twentieth

century also spoke Flemish. This language, however, was regarded as merely a peasant patois, rather

than as a language of culture, by the Belgian establishment, which largely consisted of an alliance

between the Catholic Church, the ruling elite, and the masters of finance and industry who all,

because of the particular conditions under which the Belgian state in 1830 had come into existence,

favored French over Dutch, and for whom the very existence of the state rested upon the use of the

French language in all matters official and cultural. Simply put, the unification after the final defeat

of Napoleon in 1815 of what before the French revolution had been the Austrian (Southern)

Netherlands (and before 1713 the Spanish Netherlands, and even earlier the heartland of the

Burgundian empire) with the old United Provinces (or Northern Netherlands) into one Kingdom of

the United Netherlands under the (Northern) Dutch King Willem I (William I) had met with significant

resentment from the ruling classes in the Southern Netherlands, a feeling crystallized around the

French language. During the Napoleonic era the Southern Netherlands had industrialized rapidly and

a whole new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen had come into being. The sources of wealth of

this class were mainly situated in the southern parts of the Southern Netherlands, which is to say

present-day Wallonia, with the exploitation of iron and coal mines. Wallonia had always been

French-speaking. But also the budding bourgeoisie in the Flemish cities, which during the French

occupation had been administered in French, and which had profited from the economic upswing

during the extended period of French rule from 1794 to 1815, had largely adopted French as its

working language as well as its language of culture. Moreover, since the time of the Burgundians,

originating from France, but who ruled their extensive possessions in the Low Countries first from

Bruges and later from Brussels, the language at court had been French. This continued to be the case

also after the later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had been born in Ghent, and thus in

Flanders, assumed the throne of Spain in 1516. French was the language used by the foreign-born

regents Charles and his successors sent first to administer the Netherlands as a whole, and later,

after the Northern Netherlands had broken away at the turn of the seventeenth century, the

remaining Southern or Spanish, later Austrian, Netherlands. Consequently, the nobility, but also the

political and cultural elite centered upon the court, and located in Brussels, was francophone.

Finally, whereas the Southern Netherlands were practically uniformly Catholic as a result of the

Counter-Reformation which had eradicated all traces of dissent from what during the early days of

the Reformation had actually been one of the hotbeds of Protestantism, the Northern Netherlands

continued, if not in terms of the majority of the population then at least as far as effective power

structures and worldview went, staunchly Protestant. Thus, for the Catholic clergy in the Southern

Netherlands the Dutch language carried with it the odium of Protestant heresy. Small wonder, then,

that when what would become the new Kingdom of the Belgians broke away from the United

Netherlands in 1830, it identified itself as francophone.

At the same time, of course, there was no denying that the new state was composed of two

linguistically heterogeneous parts, even though these had a large history at least partially in

common (with some exceptions, such as the ancient prince-bishopric of Liège, which remained

independent until it was absorbed into revolutionary France in 1795 to become part of the United

Netherlands in 1815 and then of Belgium in 1830). Following Romanticism, the going ideological

tenets of the century put a premium on the linguistic coherence of a nation-state, which should

either have led to each linguistically different part of the new state becoming itself yet another,

smaller new entity, or to their adhering to or absorption into the linguistically dominant “core”

nation states north and south, The Netherlands and France. Of course, the nineteenth century was

an intensely nationalist era, and as all around Europe history and literature, and culture in general,

were marshalled in the service of the nation, so too in the case of such a recent and, in the eyes of

many observers, artificial nation like Belgium. The solution lay in positing Belgium as a francophone

state with a Flemish “soul” divorced of the Flemish or Dutch language. In fact, the idea of a “Flemish”

identity to the Belgian state, harking back to the Medieval and Renaissance splendor of the so-called

Flemish Primitives in painting, of Flemish polyphony in music, and to the characteristic architecture

of Flemish cities such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, was seen as essential to distinguish the French-

language Belgian state from the powerful neighbor to the South, who throughout recent history had

repeatedly tried to “swallow” the territories that eventually, in 1830, had become “Belgium,” just as

the use of the French language as the language of state was essential to distinguish Belgium from the

neighbor to the North. Moreover, it was argued, recent history had incapacitated the Flemish part of

the new Belgian state of expressing Belgium’s Flemish identity in its own language, and therefore it

had of necessity to be expressed in French. Indeed, the Northern half of the country had remained

largely rural during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the closing by

the United Provinces of the river Scheldt and hence of Antwerp, which had been the major port and

banking center of Europe until the Dutch revolt, had effectively squelched the economic

development of the region. As relations with the Northern Netherlands, with whom the Flemish part

of the Southern Netherlands after all shared one language, with Flanders in fact until the Dutch

revolt the leading region when it came to culture and literature in Dutch in general, during this same

period were difficult because of political and religious impediments, culture and literature in Dutch in

the Southern Netherlands, with some rare exceptions, had for the better part of two centuries lain

largely dormant. In the eyes of the French-speaking ruling caste of the newly independent Belgian

state, then, nineteenth-century Flanders was a backward region, largely inhabited by peasants, who

spoke nothing resembling “une langue de culture.” In fact, is was not unusual to insist that the

language spoken in Flanders was not Dutch at all but rather some local babble, an attitude we also

encountered with Buysse in his 1897 articles, and until quite recently still fairly common with a

certain kind of Belgian francophone politicians who steadfastly preferred “Flemish” over “Dutch”

when referring to the language spoken in Flanders, something equivalent to maintaining that what is

spoken in the United States is not “English” but something else altogether. If the true and deep

identity of Belgium was Flemish, then, this identity had nothing to do any more with present-day

Flanders but was uniquely rooted in a Flanders of long ago, and a Flanders moreover that was not

primarily defined by its literature, which was in practice unknown at the time anyway, or only

beginning to be known through the work mainly of German philologists such as Jacob Grimm

(Leerssen), who did pioneering work on unearthing the medieval Dutch (Flemish) Reinaert de Vos

(Reynard the Fox), but rather by its painting and architecture, which by definition were divorced of

any specific language. In fact, then-contemporary (that is to say nineteenth-century) speakers of

“Flemish,” in this view at least, had lost all meaningful links to their past, and it was the French-

speaking intellectuals of Belgium that were the true carriers of any memory of Flanders’s glorious

past. Proof of this was to be found in works such as the Contes brabançonnes (1861), Légendes

flamandes (1861), and especially La Légende et les Aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses

d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandres et ailleurs (1867) of Charles de Coster (1827-

1879), a work that widely, first abroad but quickly also in Belgium itself, came to be seen as

embodying the soul of Flanders in the struggle of the Flemish Tyl Ulenspiegel (Uilenspiegel) against

Spanish oppression. The same applied to such contemporaries of Buysse as the internationally

renowned Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), but also less known

but still important authors such as Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927) and Max Elskamp (1862-1931), who

all of them were Flemish by origin, whose home language was Flemish, but who all wrote in French

because of the specific political, economic, cultural, and educational conditions in nineteenth-

century Belgium. Even some authors of Vermeylen’s own generation, and in fact of some generations

later than his, continued in this tradition: Franz Hellens (1881-1972), Marie Gevers (1883-1973),

Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992) and the latter’s daughter Françoise Mallet-Joris (1930). In historiography,

it is Henri Pirenne (1862-1635) that would give this version of Belgium’s past, at the same time

positing the country as seminal in the history of Europe, its most brilliant embodiment in his

magisterial seven-volume Histoire de Belgique (1900-1935), and in shorter works such as La nation

belge (1899) and Les origines de l’état belge (1906). Not coincidentally, Pirenne’s works defended the

unity of the Belgian state against the rising tide of Flemish emancipation, that is to say amongst other

things against the claims of Vermeylen.

Meanwhile Belgium during the nineteenth century had become one of the leading industrial,

commercial and financial nations in the world, largely thanks to a very liberal economic and political

regime. Consequently, the country, and its capital, Brussels, which underwent a major overhaul

during this period, with major construction and reconstruction radically transforming some of the

oldest medieval and Renaissance parts of the city, became a favorite place of exile for all kinds of

political and other refugees from around Europe. Not only Karl Marx lived in Brussels from 1845 to

1848, but also Victor Hugo on and off between 1851 and 1871, while Baudelaire, Verlaine and

Rimbaud spent briefer periods in the city, although for Baudelaire this still amounted to the two

years from 1864 to 1866. Auguste Rodin lived and worked for six years in Brussels, from 1871 to

1877. In fact, because of its proximity to France, the easy rail links between the two cities, and the

fact that French was ubiquitous there, Brussels became a frequent destination of especially French

artists during the second half of the nineteenth century. But the city also attracted Dutch artists such

as Multatuli, with his real name Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1877), who on the run for debtors in

1859 spent some time in the Belgian capital, writing what remains his best-known work, the

stridently anti-colonial novel Max Havelaar (1860). First and foremost, though, Brussels served as a

sort of extension of Paris, with many of the more avant-garde French painters and sculptors regularly

exhibiting their work at the annual exhibitions, between 1883 and 1893, of the artistic circle “Les XX,”

with as prime mover the Brussels lawyer Octave Maus (1856-1919). Belgian members of Les XX were

the likes of James Ensor, Félicien Rops, Theo van Rysselberghe, and Ferdinand Khnopff. Auguste

Rodin and Paul Signac were French members, and Jan Toorop was Dutch. After the demise of Les XX

its work would be continued by La Libre Esthétique, from 1894 to 1914, with a shift in attention to

the decorative arts, partially in the tracks of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and as a vehicle

for the Art Nouveau which found some its most prominent initiators and proponents in Belgium with

architects and decorative arts artists Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), who would

soon gain fame as the driving force of the German Kunstgewerbeschule, the Weimarer Akademie,

and the Bauhaus. This artistic ferment was fostered by an multitude of magazines of which the most

important ones were L’Art Moderne, as of 1881 (until 1914) and narrowly linked to Les XX, and La

Jeune Belgique, also as of 1881 (until 1897). The best-known contributor to the latter was Georges

Rodenbach (1855-1898), the Belgian symbolist author of Bruges-la-morte (1892). Another important

journal was La Société Nouvelle (1884-1896) which, as its title already suggests, focused on social

issues next to literary-intellectual ones, and which defended something close to anarchism. All of

these journals were, of course, in French, and looked primarily to France for inspiration and example.

They also posited Belgian art and literature as francophone, even if, as I mentioned before, they

defined the root-identity of Belgium as Flemish, from De Coster’s Tyl Ulenspiegel to Rodenbach’s

Bruges-la-morte. In essence, these writers and intellectuals pictured the Flemish identity of Belgium

as a Romantic ideal, devoid of any linguistic content, and unrelated to any true emancipation of

contemporary Flemings. However, the Flemish Movement as it existed until then in the opinion of

Vermeylen had not helped things very much either because it insisted on presenting the

emancipation of the Flemings as a purely linguistic struggle.

August Vermeylen grew up in a liberal-intellectual milieu in Brussels, the son of Flemish immigrants

to the capital. While still in secondary school he actively outed himself as Flemish, participating in

Flemish literary meetings, and promoting the Flemish language and Flemish culture and literature. At

the same time he also attended the exhibitions of Les XX, and freely mixed in French-language avant-

garde circles. It is from the latter, and particularly from periodicals such as L’Art Moderne and La

Jeune Belgique that he took his cue for the first Dutch-language literary periodical he himself

founded, the short-lived Jong Vlaanderen (1889). He enrolled as a student of history at the Université

Libre de Bruxelles, in French, of course, as to attend university in Dutch would remain impossible in

Belgium (with the exception of a brief interlude at the University of Ghent, during the First World

War, under German occupation) until the 1930s. In 1894 he obtained a PhD in History. By then,

however, he had also already co-founded Van Nu en Straks (1893-1901), which quickly became the

leading avant-garde Dutch-language periodical in Belgium, and which also attracted major Dutch

authors as contributors. Van Nu en Straks, however, no longer inspired itself upon L’Art Moderne or

La Jeune Belgique, but rather upon La Sociéte Nouvelle. This shift in Vermeylen’s interests also

marked a major shift in the Flemish Movement, a shift Vermeylen himself elaborated upon in his

essay “Kritiek der Vlaamsche Beweging” [Critique of the Flemish Movement], published in Van Nu en

Straks in 1896. Succinctly put, Vermeylen reproached the Flemish Movement a Romantic obsession

with the past, as perhaps best embodied in the 1838 best-seller De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion

of Flanders) by Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883), a book that celebrates the 1302 victory of a

coalition of Flemish commoners, originating from an array of Flemish cities, with the Count of

Flanders and a party of Flemish noblemen over the army of the French king, whom the Count of

Flanders was a vassal to, in the so-called “Battle of the Golden Spurs,” because of the number of

guilded spurs the French mounted troops, largely consisting of noblemen, left behind on the

battlefield, situated close to Kortrijk or Courtrai, almost on the present-day border between France

and Belgium. Although historically quite inaccurate, Conscience’s book caught the popular

imagination – in fact, its success led to the mythification of the Battle of the Golden Spurs and

eventually to the anniversary of that battle, 11 July, being adopted as the official day of celebration

of the Flemish community as of 1973. The book was also quite successful abroad, with translations

into numerous foreign languages. However, such a Romantic view led to too exclusive a focus upon

matters of language and of “race,” Vermeylen thought. The Flemish Movement, Vermeylen argues,

had interpreted this term too narrowly, that is to say in terms of a common “stem” or origin,

whereas for Vermeylen himself “race” stands for “individuals, in as far as they feel united by

language and customs” [“individus, in zoover zij zich door taal en zeden vereenigd voelen” (VN&S, p.

89)]. As such, for him “the rights of a ‘race’ are none other than the sum of the rights of the separate

individuals that make up this race” [“de rechten van het ‘ras’ zijn niets anders dan de som der

rechten van de afzonderlijke wezens die dat ras uitmaken” (VN&S, p. 7)]. If one interprets “race” in

any other way, Vermeylen maintains, one runs the risk of fostering “racial hatred” [“rassenhaat”

(VN&S, p. 7)]. The European nations promoted such hatreds because they served the interests of

capital, which itself was international, but which feared a unified proletariat, and used nationalism to

keep the workers of the world divided. From this perspective, to reject anything French is silly, and

wrongheaded. Indeed, Vermeylen argues:

from an intellectual perspective we owe much to France, and we want to continue to this

exchange of ideas as we want also to do with England or with any other people. Let us open

up our house on all sides, that is the best way to remain our-selves. By instilling hate against

a great people we will not make greater our own.

[Verstandelijk hebben we oneindig veel te danken aan Frankrijk, en wij willen er in geestelijke

aanraking meê zijn zoowel als met Engeland of welk ander volk ook. Laten we ons huis

openstellen naar álle zijden dat is nog het beste middle om ons-zelf te blijven. Door haat in te

boezemen tegen een groot volk zullen we ‘t onze niet groter maken (VN&S, p. 9)].

Instead of focusing exclusively upon improving the status of the Flemish language in a Belgian

political and parliamentary context, as the “flaminganten” are doing, Vermeylen calls for a general

social revolution, in the spirit of the socialist and even anarchist ideals of La Société Nouvelle. As he

puts it in one of the most forceful passages from “Kritiek der Vlaamsche Beweging”:

The Flemish Movement wants to enable the Flemish people to develop itself completely and

to realize all its possibilities. One of the most important demands certainly is that of

development in one’s own language, mirror of one’s own nature. Hence the great

importance of the language question. But the use of the Flemish language is a means and not

an end; the resolution of the linguistic question is not the end of the Flemish Movement. To

realize all the potential hidden in him, the Fleming is in need of much else. To stay for the

time being with material things: what can he realize as long as in order to make other people

rich he has to toil twelve hours a day doing mechanical work in spoiled air, when he is

suffering from poverty, with all this word implies when it comes to disease and moral

decadence? Who dares mention natural growth and complete development when thousands

of women have to sell themselves on the streets, or wither away with their anemic offspring

in a factory so as to have a crust of bread? … The Flemish Movement may not restrict itself

to being a language movement, but must be a social movement in the largest sense of the

word.

[De Vlaamsche Beweging wil het vlaamsche volk in staat stellen, zich volledig te ontwikkelen

en al zijne mogelijkheden te verwezenlijken. Eén der gewichtigste vereischten is zeker de

ontwikkeling door zijn eigen taal, beeld van zijn eigen aard. Vandaar het groot gewicht der

taalvraag. Doch ‘t gebruik van ‘t Vlaamsch is een middel en geen doel; de oplossing der

taalvraag is niet het einde der Vlaamsche Beweging. Om alles uit te voeren wat aan

verborgen kracht in hem zit, heeft de Vlaming nog heel wat anders noodig. On nu slechts op

het stoffelijk gebied te blijven: wat kan hij, zoolang hij zich, om anderen rijk te maken, twaalf

uren daags moet afsloven aan mechanisch werk in een verpeste lucht, zoolang hij armoê lijdt,

met al wat dat woord aan ziekte en zedeljk verval in zich sluit? Wie durft er van natuurlijken

opgroei en volledige ontwikkeling praten, als duizenden vrouwen zich op straat moeten

verkoopen, of om een korst brood met haar bloedlooze kroost in een fabriek verleppen? …

De Vlaamsche Beweging mag niet slechts een taalbeweging zijn, maar een maatschappelijke

streven in den breedsten zin van ‘t woord. (VN&S, p. 17)]

Vermeylen would rather quickly abandon these revolutionary and anti-parliamentary ideals, and for

most of the rest of his life he would be active in the socialist movement, eventually serving as a

senator for the Socialist Party from 1921 to 1940. The thrust of his critique of the Flemish Movement

in 1895 however is very clear: it has narrowed the struggle for Flemish emancipation to a linguistic

one, whereas in reality it is a social struggle. And this social struggle cannot be seen in isolation from

that going on in all of Europe, all of the world perhaps, for the social emancipation of everyone, and

first and foremost the working classes.

Buysse’s mistake, according to Vermeylen in the 1897 article “Onze Taal voor den Senaat en voor

Buysse” that he wrote in reaction to Buysse’s Amsterdammer article and his open letter to L’Etoile

Belge, is to conflate the struggle for the recognition of the Flemish language with the narrow kind of

“flamingantisme” that Vermeylen too condemns, while ignoring the link with the struggle for Flemish

social emancipation which Vermeylen, as we just saw, sees as part of a more universal struggle for

the emancipation of all that suffer oppression in the world, and in first instance in Europe. It is not

that Buysse ignored the plight of the Flemish poor. On the contrary, Buysse is primarily known as a

naturalist in the vein of Zola, and in his many novellas, such as De biezenstekker (The culler of wicker,

1890), and novels, such as Het recht van de sterkste (The right of the strongest, 1893), and plays ,

such as Het gezin Van Paemel (The Family Van Paemel, 1903), he showed himself to be acutely

aware of this plight. However, and even though he himself wrote in Dutch, he seems not to have

linked the emancipation of the language to that of the people, at least at the time of his polemic with

the “flamingants,” and of Vermeylen’s critique of him.

The 1900 article by Buysse which was the immediate occasion for Vermeylen’s own article of the

same year appeared in the Bulletin de l’Association flamande pour la vulgarization de la langue

française. Entitled “Flamands et Hollandais devant les langues étrangères,” it raged against the

“flamingants irréductibles, dans leur bataille outrancière et dérisoire contre l’influence de la langue

française” (VN&S, pp. 389-90). In his own “Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging” Vermeylen starts

off by referring to Buysse’s article, but immediately grants that unlike the previous time, in 1897, this

time around Buysse does not attack the Flemish language as such but rather the “flaminganten.” As

we already saw from his “Kritiek der Vlaamsche Beweging,” this is a view Vermeylen is not

unsympathetic to. In fact, he says, if Buysse with “flaminganten” means those reactionary elements

that hold back the Flemish people by their fixation on only the Flemish language struggle, he,

Vermeylen, is quite willing to side with Buysse in this. And further, if Buysse should be aiming at

those that militate for a Flemish revival while ignoring that in the present day (that is to say at the

turn of the twentieth century) there “cannot be any higher national culture that is not at the same

time European [“dat er thans geen hooge nationale kultuur meer bestaan kan, die niet tevens

Europeesch is” (VN&S, p. 310)], then Vermeylen is ready to also try and help convert them!

Instead of continuing to be obsessed with the past, Vermeylen argues, we should be concerned with

the present. To begin with, we should recognize that the struggles and battles of the fourteenth

century were not – pace De Leeuw van Vlaanderen, in which during an uprising in Bruges the

Flemings recognize one another, or more accurately their opponents, by having anyone whose

allegiance they doubt say the words “Schild en Vriend” (Shield and Friend), which for a native

speaker of French are impossible to pronounce correctly , which then led to the cry “Wat Walsch is,

Vals is, slaat dood!” (what is “Walloon,” i.e. French speaking, is false, kill!) – linguistically motivated,

but that they were part of a class struggle, with the commoners, and especially the skilled laborers

and small businessmen, of the rising Flemish cities wanting to wrest away power from the rich

merchants and patricians, with the King of France, the Count of Flanders, and all other vested powers

taking sides according to strategic considerations. Moreover, many French speakers, for the same

reasons, fought on the side of the “Flemings” in the Battle of the Golden Spurs.

A more important argument against an undue focus upon a narrow interpretation of what it means

to be Flemish, though, Vermeylen contends, is that in the present

There more and more grows a conviction among the people that there are more important

relations than the “national” ones. The speed of connections, the easy dissemination of the

printed word, the constant relations between the different countries, all contribute to make

it ever clearer to us that there is a general European civilization.

[Thans groeit hoe langer meer het besef onder de menschen van gewichtiger verhoudingen

dan de “nationale.” Door de snelheid der verbindingen, de ruime verspreiding van ‘t gedrukte

woord, de gedurige betrekkingen tussen de verscheiden landen, wordt het ons altijd

duidelijker, dat er een algemeen Europeesche beschaving bestaat. (VN&S, p. 314)]

In order to play a part in this European concert of nations, though, it is first and foremost necessary

to “be” oneself:

Just as “particularism” may never form an impediment to the higher unity of a general Dutch-

language civilization, so too this civilization will only be a specific living manifestation, on its

own territory, of the world culture of the European races.

[Zoals het particularisme nooit een hinderpaal mag worden voor de hoogere eenheid ener

algemeen Nederlandsche beschaving, zo zal die beschaving slechts een stuk leven zijn, op

eigen grond, van de wereldkultuur der Europeesche rassen. (VN&S, p. 315)]

Such is not the case with the Flemings. Conditions in Belgium condemn them to use French if they

want to gain entry to the intellectual elite of their own country, but with few exceptions they will

only ever be “bad” speakers of French, so second-rate. At the same time the lack of opportunities for

education and development in Dutch, again because of conditions specific to Belgium, also prevents

them from becoming fully proficient users of Dutch, so they always remain “bad” speakers of Dutch

too, so again second-rate. For Dutch speakers in Holland, Vermeylen grants, entering into Buysse’s

arguments for the free dissemination and propagation of the French language, the teaching of

French is not a threat, as they are secure in the use of their own language in their own culture and

within their own borders. For them to learn French indeed gives them access to another, larger

culture. In Flanders, however, French usurps the place of Dutch and keeps the Flemings in a position

of linguistic-cultural inferiority. In order to overcome this handicap, it is first and foremost necessary

that education in Flanders be in Dutch. Once this has been firmly established, it becomes possible to

allow French to be taught again, but not French only: “Give us education in Flemish from the bottom

to the top, and then propagate the teaching of French, and of course, also of English and German,

and we will (happily) go along” [“Geef ons een Vlaamsch onderwijs van beneden tot boven, en ijver

dan voor de verspreiding van het Fransch, en natuurlijk, ook van Engelsch en Duitsch: wij zullen

meêwerken.” (VN&S, p. 317)].

Of course, Vermeylen adds, what he advocates is not directed against France, or against the French

language per se. Rather it is directed against those whom, with a neologism fashioned after the

denigratory “flamingants,” he calls “de Franschelaars,” the advocates of a blind and narrow French-

language-only policy in Belgium, all of Belgium, so also in Flanders. And as to the argument, also

invoked by Buysse, that to close oneself off from the French language is to close oneself off from a

larger culture, Vermeylen counters this with:

What do the “Franschelaars” know beyond the French, no the Parisian culture, of which they

are but a weak dilution! Their mental clock is running far behind: they still think that

civilisation is a French monopoly, French the world language, France the head, the leader of

all ideas moving Europe. They continue to be the inhabitants of a province, even if it is a little

bigger [than Belgium, Vermeylen means]; do not speak to them of what happens outside of

their province! I repeat: it is they, with all the rattle of their antiquated ideas, that seal

Flanders off from the civilisation of the world.

[Wat kennen de Franschelaars buiten de Fransche, neen buiten de Parijsche kultuur, waar zij

een flauwe afwatering van zijn! Het uurwerk van hun geest is erg ten achteren: zij verkeeren

nog altijd in den waan, dat de beschaving een Fransch monopolie is, het Fransch de wereld-

taal, Frankrijk het hoofd, de leider der Europeesche gedachte-bewegingen. Zij zijn nog altijd

menschen van een provincie, al is die wat grooter; spreek hun niet van wat er buiten hun

provincie omgaat! Ik herhaal het: zij zijn het, met al het gerammel hunner achterlijke

inzichten, die Vlaanderen van de wereldbeschaving afsluiten. (VN&S, pp. 318-19)]

Don’t they see that Flanders, or better still “Groot-Nederland,” the combined Dutch-speaking

Netherlands and Flanders, situated between France, Germany and England, lie at the confluence, the

fulcrum even, of the three major European cultures? That it is the “mission” of the Flemish, along

with the Dutch, “rooted in our own soil, to absorb and transform the cultures of our neighbors into a

cultural life of our own” [“in eigen grond geworteld, het kultuur-leven onzer buren in ons om te

werken tot eigen leven” (VN&S, p. 319)]. More even, do these “pitiful franschelaars” [“jammerlijke

franschelaars” (VN&S, p. 319)] not see “what role in the growth of a general European civilization can

be played by an ‘in-between-land’ like ours?” [“welke rol in het grootworden der algemene

Europeesche beschaving door een ‘tusschenland’ als het onze kan gespeeld worden?” (VN&S, p.

3019)].

Hence, Vermeylen concludes,

Our future largely depends on the thorough ‘flemishization’ of Flanders.

And therefore, summarizing it all in two lines: to be something we have to be

Flemings. – We want to be Flemings in order to become Europeans.

[Onze toekomst hangt grootendeels af van de grondige vervlaamsching van Vlaanderen.

En daarom, in twee regels samengevat: om iets te zijn moeten wij Vlamingen zijn. –

Wij willen Vlamingen zijn, om Europeërs te worden. (VN&S, p. 3019)]

Although couched in terms purely related to the Flemish-Belgian situation, with ideas such as these

Vermeylen was also very much in tune with what was going on in other parts of Europe. The passage

I quoted earlier, in which he elaborates on the importance of relations beyond the national ones, and

on the role played in the emergence of a general European culture by the increasing speed of

connections and the dissemination of printed materials, sounds like a direct echo of some of

Goethe’s sayings on “Weltliteratur” in the 1820s. Vermeylen had become familiar with Goethe’s

ideas in Berlin and Vienna, where he went to study art history and literature on and off between

1894 and 1896. In Berlin he studied with the philologist and literary historian Erich Schmidt, a

proponent of a form of comparative literature transcending the study of singular national literatures

in favor of a European-wide approach. Similarly, in Berlin he may also have come into contact with

the work of the famous Danish critic Georg Brandes, likewise a practitioner of a form of literary study

that went beyond the merely national. Brandes spent much of his time in Berlin, and published

frequently in German periodicals. In any case, the passage I quoted most recently from Vermeylen

chimes pretty closely with some of the ideas expressed by Brandes in the latter’s essay

“Weltliteratur” published in German in 1899, in which he argues that

When Goethe coined the term world literature, humanism and the spirit of world citizenship

were still ideas universally entertained. In the last decades of the 19th century, an ever

stronger and more bellicose nationalism has pushed these ideas backward. The literatures of

our day become ever more national. I by no means, however, mean to suggest that

nationalism and world citizenship are mutually exclusive. The world literature of the future

will become all the more captivating the more the mark of the national appears in it and the

more heterogeneous it becomes, as long as it retains a universally human aspect as art and

science. That which is written directly for the world will hardly do as a work of art. (Brandes,

p. 27)

That final line of Brandes’s would have sounded like music to the ears of Vermeylen when in his 1897

essay he branded Buysse “a candidate world-literator with a very large capacity for adaptation” [“een

kandidaat wereld-literator met een zeer uitgebreid aanpassingsvermogen” (VN&S, p. 70)].

The journal Van Nu en straks ceased publication in 1901, but as of 1903 Vlaanderen, again with

Vermeylen as one of its editors, took the relief. As the title of the new journal indicates, in it the

program of “flemishization” advocated by Vermeylen in his “Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging”

was largely realized. Vlaanderen in its turn would fold in 1907, but by then a whole new generation

of Flemish writers, writing in Dutch, were putting Flemish literature on the European literary map:

Herman Teirlinck, Karel van de Woestijne, Stijn Streuvels. Vermeylen himself devoted much of the

rest of his life to putting into practice his call, “Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging,” but also in

many other writings of his, for a system of education, top to bottom, primary school to university, in

the language of the people, that is to say in Dutch, in Flanders. He became Professor in Art History

and Dutch Literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and later at the University of Ghent. After

WWI he co-chaired a committee on making the University of Ghent into the first Dutch-language

university in Belgium, and he became that university’s first Dutch-language Rector in 1930, a position

he held until 1933. Throughout, he also stayed true to his European ideals, producing, next to a novel

and a fictionalized autobiography in Dutch, and scholarly works on Flemish literature in both Dutch

and French, also a major Geschiedenis der Europeesche Plastiek en Schilderkunst in three volumes

(1921, 1922 en 1925, History of European Sculpture and Painting). His most lasting legacy in a

European context, however, is his claim in ”Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging” that for Flemish

writers to become truly “European” means not to write in French, but rather to write in their native

Dutch, because this not only allows them to get in touch with their most genuine self, but because it

also liberates them from an excessive and unilateral reliance on one major European culture, and

allows them to situate themselves equi-distant from, and between, the three major language and

culture areas of Europe, the French, German and English ones, and thus to function as ideal

intermediaries for a truly European culture. Vermeylen thus calls, at one and the same time, for the

emergence of both a Flemish AND a European literature, and even sees the two as inextricably

linked, whereby one of course has to qualify the “Flemish” in that equation as potentially replaceable

by any other “smaller” European literature.

Works Cited

Brandes, Georg. 2013 [1899, 1902]. “World Literature” [Weltliteratur]. In Theo D’haen, César

Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, ed. World Literature: A Reader. London and New York:

Routledge, pp. 23-27.

Leerssen, Joep. 2011. De bronnen van het vaderland: Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland

1806-1890. Nijmegen: Vantilt.

Van Nu en Straks 1893-1901. 1982. Bloemlezing ingeleid en toegelicht door Anne Marie Musschoot

met een woord vooraf door Prof. dr. A. van Elslander. ‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.