Sometimes the capitalist aspect of conservatives can lead them to empowering their socialist rivals. A new class of industrial workers is fertile ground for socialists. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
If you knew nothing of Belgium but a little about stamps you could make some good guesses by examining todays stamp. A royal, conservative country is implied by the formality of todays stamp. The use of emblems is a sure sign of a new country trying to stake out a separate identity. What the stamp doesn’t show is how quickly the country was changing from how it still presented itself. The cities were growing and the new class of industrial worker would not have seen Belgium the same way.
Todays stamp is issue PP3, a 1 Franc parcel post stamp issued by the Kingdom of Belgium in 1902. It was a 20 stamp issue in various denominations over a 10 year period. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether it is mint or used. Given the high denomination, I am surprised at the stamps low value. A similar parcel post issue from 7 years before is today worth $175 in the 1 Franc denomination. Later than this issue share the low value so I must conclude that sending parcels through the mail got much more common at the time.
After a series of long wars, Belgium achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1830. The majority of the people were Walloon who are Catholic and speak a dialect of French. At the time the area was mostly rural and agricultural. The government was democratic but conservative and heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. The task at hand though was to build a separate country and so a big priority was building infrastructure such as railroads that connected the country including the small outlet to the North Sea at Antwerp. This new infrastructure and advances in agriculture that freed up workers and the Catholic tendency at the time for large families allowed for rapid industrialization in the growing cities. Coal mines, iron works, and textile factories quickly grew up and added a great deal of wealth to the new country.
Such a change brought huge and perhaps unintended effects. New factories tend to start out with low wages. The workers came to the city for a better life and the low wages became a source of dissatisfaction. Cities always being a hotbed of liberal thoughts, it is no surprise that a socialist trade union movement got going. The electoral system favored property owners so the socialist were not able to get in to the government. Even the Catholic based school system that served the elites far better than the working class was protected by the government.
The socialist showed themselves most in the cities. With King and government building in the neoclassic style, socialist architects such as the influential Victor Horta offered a very different art nouveau style. His house of the people was built directly for the socialist party. It was torn down in the 1960s to make way for a characterless high rise. By then both political sides had given up their style and so the least common denominator prevailed. This architectural trend was actually called Brusselsization.
Strikes quickly became the preferred method to enact liberal change. Strikes were called not only over wages but to demand specific reforms from the government. The industrial output of the time was less about consumer goods so there was no blowback from the labor strife on the countries reputation as with, for example, 1970s Great Britain. If World War had not come in 1914, Belgium might have been the site of a communist revolution before to long. Oddly enough the German occupation might have saved the conservative government.
Well my drink is empty and so I will open the discussion in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.