Language can be political in Belgium and is a point of tension between the French-speaking half of the country in the south and Flemish speakers in the north.
The capital, Brussels, sits between the two, though it is much more common to hear French spoken in a cafe, restaurant or on a bus. Metro station stops usually have separate signs in both languages, meaning a visitor to the city can be staring at one of them, only to later find out that was the stop where they needed to get off.
There is a street in Brussels that has two names – one old and one new – for a different reason.
It was originally named after Edmond Picard, a Belgian lawyer, arts patron and writer who died in 1924. Picard was a prominent theorist of anti-Semitism and in other texts promoted a racist worldview of Belgium’s then-colonial subjects in Congo.
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The street in the suburb of Ixelles falls on the boundary of two of the 19 “communes”, or councils, that govern individual neighbourhoods in Brussels.
Local politicians decided it could do with a name change, due to Picard’s expression of anti-Semitic and racist thinking in his texts.
Some residents raised concerns about the administrative burden of the switch. A spokeswoman for the Ixelles commune said a few observations from residents also touched on the historical context of the decision and “the complex relationship between past and present”.
Paul Aron, an honorary professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles who has written about Picard, described him as a “curious personality” who wore many hats. He was a socialist senator and promoter of cultural life, but also an anti-Semite and a supporter of colonial conquest.
“Picard was more radically anti-Semitic than most of his contemporaries, but his remarks attracted little criticism at the time,” says Aron. “They appeared to be a ‘hobby’, a simple intellectual provocation.
“If you read him carefully, you quickly realise the intellectual weakness of his views and the many contradictions in his thinking,” he says.
The commune decided the street should be renamed after Andrée Geulen, a local woman who helped rescue Jewish schoolchildren from the Nazis during the second World War. The change took effect last November.
Geulen was a young teacher in Brussels when the Nazis occupied Belgium. Working with others in a clandestine network, she personally rescued several hundred Jewish children from persecution. Geulen escorted Jewish children from their homes and placed them with non-Jewish families elsewhere in the country, where their own parents felt they would be safer.
[ Andrée Geulen obituary: Saviour of Jewish children in wartimeOpens in new window ]
For her work during the war she was recognised by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, as a Righteous Among the Nations, a recognition given to people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. She died in 2022 aged 100, in a Brussels nursing home.
There is a lot of poetic justice in Rue Edmond Picard becoming Rue Andrée Geulen. That did not stop some residents from grumbling.
“We understand that changing a street name can be challenging,” a spokeswoman for the local commune said. “In practice, it’s the same process as when you move to a new address.”
The commune agreed to cover the cost of making sure post addressed to the old street name got to residents for the first year after the change. “Additionally, both street name plaques will remain permanently displayed,” the spokeswoman said.
Aron believes Picard should not be the only historical figure whose name be revised from the public sphere.
Universities in the UK and elsewhere have in recent times changed the names of campus buildings, removing reference to figures with links to the slave trade.
Trinity College Dublin removed philosopher George Berkeley’s name from its main library, due to his association with slavery, later renaming the building after the poet Eavan Boland.
Belgium has not had a serious reckoning with its colonial past in Congo and Rwanda, though campaigners have agitated for more of a debate.
[ Belgium still coming to terms with colonial pastOpens in new window ]
King Leopold II oversaw the worst of Belgium’s brutal oppression of the Congolese people, but his presence still features prominently in Brussels. A boulevard to the north of the city centre is named after the 19th-century monarch.
“I’d be quite happy if Boulevard Leopold II was renamed Boulevard Patrice Lumumba,” Aron says.
Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of Congo, was overthrown and assassinated in 1961, in a coup backed by Belgium and the United States, to protect western mining interests in the newly independent mineral-rich African state.
A small square in the Belgian capital was named after the murdered Congolese independence leader a few years ago. Dropping Leopold II from the name of that Brussels boulevard and renaming it after Lumumba, as Geulen replaced Picard, would certainly pack a similar sense of historically poetic justice.
