Het verhaal van Vlaanderen

The Brabant Revolution was a 1789-90 popular revolt against the Austrian Habsburg rule, which succeeded by surprise as local recruits massively deserted. The conservative Brussels lawyer Hendrik Vandernoot became prime minister of the independent 'United Belgian States', a federation of nine provinces (roughly Belgium), but repressed his progressive partner Jan Frans Vonck's party, only to be smashed by Habsburg troops back to before. After the French Revolution managed to annex the Southern Low Countries, their impose modernization, abandoning Catholicism and press-ganging farmer sons for their endless wars, an amateur peasant revolt 'for altar and heard' called Boerenkrijg in 1798 failed utterly to achieve any military result, but set the mood for later after centuries of relative obedience to feudal masters. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands established by the victors over Napoleon was unpopular, a 1830 revolt against king William II starting at the opera resulted in the unplanned independence under the name Belgium.

In the reign of Leopold I, the young Belgium was leading the Industrial Revolution second only to Britain, with such novelties as the continent's first railroad, making it the world's fifth-wealthiest economy. Yet for the working class, life as factory laborer was even worse, especially into 'continental Manchester' Ghent, often packed into unsanitary pauper housing, cesspits for diseases. The rich 2% who paid enough taxes to qualify for the vote opposed social reform, until a as trike wave allowed the socialist movement winning its main demand: the general vote, albeit it multiple for the rich and excluding women. .The exploitation of the Congo as king Leopold II's private colony was particularly harsh, yet for long the ordinary Belgians barely knew about the excesses, flocking to stereotypical world exhibition 'nicker village' reconstructions known as 'people gardens'.

Despite king Albert I's desperate efforts to keep out of the looming Great War, neutral Belgium was run-over by the Germans on the way to France, except the Yser corner at sea, which was flooded, created the least comfortable trenches for four years, but at least the Belgian troops were spared senseless mass wave attacks on enemy lines. The 'king-knight' achieve popularity, and after the German capitulation spear-headed some social reforms, especially the general single vote for men, while the scarcity of labor finally allowed better conditions from the reconstruction, even paid holidays and restricting working hours. Hobbies became popular, and u-youth movements, part of the fertile ground for the rise the 1930s of right-wing movements ready to side with Fascism in World War II, spurred by the Great Depression after the 1929 stock crash caused world economy to go in a downward spiral with mass unemployment.