From pragmatic conservatism to formal continuity. Nineteenth-century views on the Old Regime origins of the Belgian Constitution

Abstract

Even though they were formally abolished during the French Revolution, the constitutions of the Old Regime continued to be politically relevant in nineteenth-century Belgium. The suggestion that there was continuity between the defunct charters and privileges of the former Southern Netherlands and the modern Belgian state proved useful for legitimising Belgian independence and for historically grounding the institutions of the young state. This article draws attention, first, to a specific line of argumentation, developed by patriotic Belgian historians and legal scholars in the nineteenth century, who made a case for formal continuity between the Belgian Constitution of 1831 and the old fundamental laws. After analysing this continuity thesis and its political and ideological backgrounds, the article then turns to the actual genesis of the Belgian Constitution. As the debates in the Belgian National Congress and in the press make clear, the Belgian revolutionaries of 1830 were much less concerned with national constitutional history than has later been supposed. The views on constitutional monarchy enshrined by the Constitution of 1831 were fundamentally liberal, and thus invocations of the ancient constitutions were usually limited to preserving the spirit of ancestral liberty. A notable and little known exception was the re-edition of the medieval Joyous Entry charter by Toussaint, a radical Belgian revolutionary who turned to the medieval charters as an alternative for the elitist and socially conservative Constitution produced by the Constitutional Committee and the National Congress.