Javier Albisu |
Brussels, Jul 21 (EFE).- Every July 21, Belgium celebrates its National Holiday, which commemorates the coronation speech in 1831 of the German prince Leopold Saxe-Cobourg in which the new king of the Belgians swore allegiance to the Constitution.
The preaching of that new monarch, a foreign aristocrat linked to several royal houses that guaranteed a balanced solution for the European powers, is considered the birth of the Kingdom of Belgium as a new independent State, in the form of a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.
The celebration currently consists of a peaceful summer day in which the royal family and high authorities attend a solemn parade in Brussels, while a good part of the population takes advantage of the day off to have barbecues, drink beer and lavish concerts in parks and gardens, rain permitting.
A festivity that concludes when a blanket of fireworks covers Brussels and closes the day on which Belgium celebrates that it is Belgium, which is also one of only twenty dates of the year in which public buildings are obliged to hoist the national flag.
This proliferation of national banners makes July 21 a propitious occasion to highlight a historical anomaly: Belgium has been hanging its flag upside down for 192 years.
A Night at the Opera
Belgium began to be born on August 25, 1830, after an opera that lit the fuse that would end up lighting its separation from the Netherlands.
After Napoleon was defeated in 1815 at Waterloo, Europe was boiling in that 1830. At the beginning of August, Louis-Philippe of Orleans had ascended the throne of France after the July Revolution that overthrew Charles X, in days when liberal protests also spread to Italy, Poland and Germany.
On that night at the end of August, La Monnaie in Brussels performed “La muta de Portici”, a script by the French Daniel Auber inspired by the 1647 revolution in Naples led by a Neapolitan fisherman, Masaniello, who rebelled against the taxes imposed by the Spanish crown.
Masaniello did not end well; they murdered him on the tenth day of the riot. But his revolt paved the way for the Neapolitan Republic to be born a few months later, and art history has turned him into a charismatic martyr.
That summer night in Brussels, the lyrical exploits of the fisherman exalted the audience at La Monnaie and triggered a revolution against the sovereignty of the King of the Netherlands, William of Orange, who drank from popular discontent over the lack of political and cultural autonomy of what would end up being the Kingdom of Belgium.
choose flag
Belgian Francophiles wrapped their insurrection in the flag of France, the epicenter of liberal revolutions, and after a night of street riots, arson and looting, the French tricolor (blue, white, red) flew at dawn over Brussels City Hall.
But the insurgents soon discovered that in order to found a new state they needed, among other things, their own iconography.
So they adopted as their first flag the colors of the “Brabanzon revolution” of 1787-1790, a revolt that also emerged in Brussels that gave rise to the ephemeral United States of Belgium.
In the months in which the new Belgian State was being configured, that first “Brabanzon” flag evolved to become the official flag, with horizontal stripes of “red, yellow and black”, in that order, according to article 193 of the Constitution of Belgium, which was proclaimed in February 1831.
But someone thought that this composition was too close to the flag of the Netherlands, the kingdom from which Belgium was separated: red, white and dark blue, also in horizontal bands.
So the Belgian provisional government specified in a decree, on January 23, 1831, and with the magna carta already on its way to the printer, that the colors of the flag should not be arranged horizontally, but vertically and with red on the mast.
The ships of the Belgian Navy, however, began to reserve the mast for the darkest color, black, in a practice that spread throughout the country until it became dominant, which prompted the Government to publish a new decree, on September 15, 1831, in which that tricolor order was established: black, yellow and red.
But article 193 of the Constitution was never modified and even today, 192 years later, the magna carta continues to stipulate that the colors of the flag are “red, yellow and black”, in that order.
According to the constitutional law expert at the Catholic University of Leuven Jogchum Vrielink, Belgium is the only country in the world whose flag does not literally follow the order of the Constitution.