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Leopold II
King of the Belgians
Reign	17 December 1865-17 December 1909
Born	9 April 1835(1835-04-09)
	Brussels, Belgium
Died	17 December 1909 (aged 74)
	Laeken/Laken, Belgium
Predecessor	Leopold I
Successor	Albert I
Consort	Marie Henriette of Austria Caroline Lacroix {morgantic relationship}
Issue	Princess Louise-Marie Prince Léopold Princess Stephanie Princess Clementine
Royal House	Wettin (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line)
Father	Leopold I
Mother	Louise-Marie of France

Leopold II (Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor (French) or Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor (Dutch) (April 9, 1835 – December 17, 1909) was King of the Belgians. Born the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I, he succeeded his father to the throne in 1865 and remained king until his death. He was the brother of Empress Carlota of Mexico and first cousin to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. His sister suffered from mental illness, possibly brought on by the execution of her husband - Maxillian of Mexico. She refused to believe her husband had been executed and continued to drum up support for him in Europe. In later years, she become an obsessive spender whose excesses manifested themselves in clothing, thus resulting in bankruptcy.

Outside Belgium, he is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. The state included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The extraction of rubber and ivory in the Congo relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese. He ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom; for him it was a business venture. A friend of Henry Morton Stanley, he used Stanley to help him lay claim to the territory he called Congo. Leopold was an astute businessman, who once spent a week in Seville, studying Spanish records of their trade with their Latin American colonies.

The regime of the Congo Free State became one of the more infamous international scandals of the turn of the century. The famous 1904 report by the British Consul, Roger Casement, led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese people). Leopold had decreed that all property and vacant land was to be the owned by the state. In reality, this meant that all land, property, and crops were now the property of the state, the state being Leopold. He, after all, elected the top and middle ranking beauraucratic who governed Congo. Everything was run on profit lines.

Punishment was harsh and was administered by the use of a whip made from dried rhino skin. Up to 20 lashes could render a man unconscious, 100 lashes would be fatal. In order to distance themselves from this type of treatment, the local white officials got the native supervisors to administer this punishment. Such was the contempt for African life that local officials were rarely punished for their brutality.

As the first census did not take place until 1924, it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Casement's report set it at three million, ascribing the depopulation to four main causes: indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births, and tropical diseases. Of those deaths, 40% are believed to have occurred after 1900.^[1] Other estimates are significantly higher, clustering around a reduction by half of the previous population.^[2] Given the 1924 census data, this indicates a population loss of about ten million. ^[3] For example, by 1896 the sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela on the Congo River. The mortality figures were gained through the efforts of Roger Casement who found only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903.^[4]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Private colonialism 3 Leopold and the Belgians 4 Ancestry 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 External links

Leopold II married Marie Henriette Anne von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduchess of Austria on August 22, 1853.

Their children were:

• Louise-Marie Amélie, born in Brussels February 18, 1858, and died at Wiesbaden March 1, 1924. She married Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

• Léopold Ferdinand Elie Victor Albert Marie, Count of Hainaut (as eldest son of the heir apparent), Duke of Brabant (as heir apparent), born at Laeken/Laken on June 12, 1859, and died at Laken on January 22, 1869, from pneumonia, after falling into a pond.

• Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte, born at Laken on May 21, 1864, and died at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma in Győr-Moson-Sopron, Hungary, on August 23, 1945. She married (1) Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and then (2) Elemér Edmund Graf Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény (created, in 1917, Prince Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény).

• Princess Clémentine of Belgium, born at Laken on July 30, 1872, and died at Nice on March 8, 1955. She married Prince Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte (1862 - 1926), head of the Bonaparte family.

Leopold II was also the father of two sons, Lucien Philippe Marie Antoine (1906-1984) and Philippe Henri Marie François (1907-1914), born out of wedlock. Their mother was Blanche Zélia Joséphine Delacroix (1883-1948), aka Caroline Lacroix, a prostitute who married the king on December 12, 1909, in a religious ceremony with no validity under Belgian law, at the Pavilion of Palms, Royal Palace of Laken, five days before his death^{[citation needed]}. These sons were adopted in 1910 by Lacroix's second husband, Antoine Durrieux. Though Lacroix is said to have been created Baroness de Vaughan, Lucien the Duke of Tervuren, and Philippe the Count of Ravenstein, no such royal decrees were ever issued^{[citation needed]}.

The "Belgian King" is reported as being a client of Mary Jeffries's "Rose Cottage" flagellation house and brothel in Hampstead, a suburb of London^[5]

On November 15, 1902, Italian anarchist Gennaro Rubino attempted to assassinate Leopold, who was riding in a royal cortege from a ceremony in memory of his recently-deceased wife, Marie Henriette. After Leopold's carriage passed, Rubino fired three shots at the King; the shots missed Leopold and Rubino was immediately arrested.

In Belgian domestic politics, Leopold emphasized military defense as the basis of neutrality, but he was unable to obtain a universal conscription law until on his death bed. He died on December 17, 1909, and was interred in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady, Laeken Cemetery, Brussels.

Further information: Congo Free State

Leopold fervently believed that overseas colonies were the key to a country's greatness, and he worked tirelessly to acquire colonial territory for Belgium. Neither the Belgian people nor the Belgian government were interested, however, and Leopold eventually began trying to acquire a colony in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. The Belgian government loaned him money for this venture.

After a number of unsuccessful schemes for colonies in Africa or Asia, in 1876 he organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society.

In 1876, under the auspices of the holding company, he hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the Congo region. Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which representatives of fourteen European countries and the United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to. On February 5, 1885, the result was the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC again, not to be confused with Republic of the Congo), an area 76 times larger than Belgium, which Leopold was free to rule as a personal domain through his private army, the Force Publique.

Forced labor was extorted from the natives. The abuses were particularly bad in the rubber industry, including enslavement and mutilation of the native population. Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo: "I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."

Estimates of the death toll range from two to fifteen million^[6] By 1896 the sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela on the Congo River. The mortality figures were gained through the efforts of Roger Casement, who found only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903.[2]

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led to an international protest movement in the early 1900s. The campaign to report on Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by British diplomat Roger Casement, and former shipping clerk E. D. Morel, became the first mass human rights movement ([3]). Supporters included American humorist Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging political satire entitled King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.[4]

Finally, in 1908, the Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium. Historians of the period tend to take a very dim view of Leopold, due to the mass killings and human rights abuses that took place in the Congo: one British historian has said that he "was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have been better for the world if he had never been born" [5]. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary once described his fellow ruler as a "thoroughly bad man".

Leopold II is still a controversial figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo; in 2005 his statue was taken down just hours after it was re-erected in the capital, Kinshasa. The Congolese culture minister, Christoph Muzungu, decided to reinstate the statue, arguing people should see the positive aspects of the king as well as the negative. But just hours after the six-metre (20 foot) statue was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again, without explanation.

Though extremely disliked by his subjects at end of his reign - he was booed during his burial parade - Leopold II is remembered today by many Belgians as the "Builder King" (Koning-Bouwer in Dutch, le Roi-Bâtisseur in French) because he commissioned a great number of buildings and urban projects, mainly in Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp.

These buildings include the Royal Glasshouses in the grounds of the Palace at Laken, the Japanese Tower, the Chinese Pavilion, the Musée du Congo (now called the Royal Museum for Central Africa), and their surrounding park in Tervuren, the Cinquantenaire in Brussels, and the Antwerp train station hall. He also built an important country estate in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, including the Villa des Cèdres, which is now a botanical garden. These were all built using the profits from the Congo. In 1900, he created the Royal Trust, by which means he donated most of his property to the Belgian nation.

There was a "Great Forgetting", as Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold's Ghost, after the King transferred his private colony to Belgium. Hochschild records that, on his visit to the colonial Royal Museum for Central Africa in the 1990s, it did not mention anything at all regarding the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State. It holds a large collection of colonial objects but of the largest injustice in Congo, "there is no sign whatsoever". Another example is to be found on the sea walk of Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, where a monument shows a colonialist supposedly bringing "civilisation" to the black child at his feet, further illustrating this "Great Forgetting".

Leopold's ancestors in three generations

									Paternal Great-grandfather: Ernest Frederick, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
						Paternal Grandfather: Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
									Paternal Great-grandmother: Sophia Antonia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
			Father: Leopold I of Belgium
									Paternal Great-grandfather: Heinrich XXIV, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf
						Paternal Grandmother: Augusta Reuss-Ebersdorf
									Paternal Great-grandmother: Karoline Ernestine of Erbach-Schönberg
Individual: Leopold II of Belgium
									Maternal Great-grandfather: Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans
						Maternal Grandfather: Louis-Philippe of France
									Maternal Great-grandmother: Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre
			Mother: Louise-Marie of France
									Maternal Great-grandfather: Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies
						Maternal Grandmother: Maria Amalia of the Two Sicilies
									Maternal Great-grandmother: Marie Caroline of Austria

• Neal Ascherson: The King Incorporated, Allen & Unwin, 1963. ISBN 1-86207-290-6 (1999 Granta edition).
• Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Mariner Books, 1998. ISBN 0-330-49233-0.
• Maria Petringa: Brazza, A Life for Africa, AuthorHouse, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4259-1198-0

• "The Political Economy of Power" Interview with political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, with an extended discussion of Leopold II halfway through
• "Reforming The Heart of Darkness" The Congo under Leopold II
• Interview with King Leopold II Publishers' Press, 1906
• Mass crimes against humanity in the Congo Free State
• Congo: White king, red rubber, black death A 2003 documentary by Peter Bate on Leopold II and the Congo

Leopold II of Belgium House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Cadet branch of the House of Wettin Born: 9 April 1835 Died: 17 December 1909
Regnal titles
Preceded by Leopold I	King of the Belgians 1865-1909	Succeeded by Albert I
Regnal titles
Vacant Title last held by Philip II	Duke of Brabant 1840-1865	Succeeded by Prince Léopold, Duke of Brabant

Persondata
NAME	Leopold II
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	King of the Belgians
DATE OF BIRTH	April 9, 1835
PLACE OF BIRTH	Brussels, Belgium
DATE OF DEATH	December 17, 1909
PLACE OF DEATH	Laken, Belgium