Blackwell Reference Online

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As in surrounding countries, the anarchist movement in Belgium had its beginnings around the mid-nineteenth century. Belgium, created in 1830 by what started as partly a proletarian revolution which quickly turned into a bourgeois one directed by the superpowers of that time, adopted a rather liberal constitution, mainly regarding freedom of speech and publishing. Belgium was one of the first industrialized countries, and over the following decades it became attractive to fleeing revolutionaries from all over Europe. Until 1848, paternalistic bourgeois led the workers' organizations. In the 1850s there were the influences of Utopian socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and Victor Considérant (1808–93), later followed by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's sojourn as a political refugee from 1858 to 1862, and the publishing of many of his works in Brussels. Of special interest, too, was the rationalist socialism of Hippolyte Colins (1783–1859). Free-thinkers and socialists shared a common “enemy” – clergy and capital – and founded together L'Affranchissement (1854) where strong figures like Nicolas Coulon (1816–90), Jan Pellering (1817–77), and Désiré Brismée (1822–88) played an important role. Although differing in ideas, the main understanding was that education, organization, and material liberation were needed for intellectual liberation. Brismée, ... log in or subscribe to read full text