French Revolutionary Occupation & Dutch Kingdom

1713 - 1794

Under Austrian Habsburg rule, Brussels acquired a neoclassical layer. Place Royale/Koningsplein was laid out atop the ruins of the Coudenberg Palace, which had burned in 1731 — burying the Habsburg imperial seat beneath a deliberately ordered square. La Monnaie/De Munt, the opera house, became the French-language cultural institution par excellence: by the mid-18th century, 95% of its plays were in French, even as the city's working class still spoke Brusselian dialect. The Ommegang held its last annual lustral procession in 1785; only two sporadic 19th-century performances followed. The religious procession that had structured the civic calendar since 1348 was quietly dying. The French Revolution would finish what Enlightenment secularization had started — suppressing the guilds in 1795 and auctioning their archives on the Grand-Place in August 1796.

1830 - 1914

The Belgian nation-state made French its sole official language, and Brussels — historically Dutch-speaking — underwent rapid francization. Proficiency in French among Dutch-speakers increased spectacularly after 1880; French became the language of social advancement, and speaking Dutch carried a stigma. The covering of the Senne (1867-1871) under Mayor Jules Anspach addressed genuine sanitation crises but also displaced working-class neighborhoods, buried the river that gave Brussels its name, and replaced organic medieval topography with imposed Haussmann-esque boulevards. Leopold II drove monumental projects that reshaped Brussels — the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark (built for the 1880 National Exhibition celebrating 50 years of independence, which included colonial displays), the Royal Palace expansions, the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert — funded substantially by revenues from the Congo Free State, his personal colonial domain. The 1897 Colonial Exhibition in Tervuren displayed Congolese people in a 'human zoo'; seven died. Art Nouveau, Brussels' architectural signature, also flowered in this era — but the working-class Brusselian and Marollien culture that had its roots in the guild era was being steadily erased by francization and urban modernization.

1555 - 1713

Brussels was a Calvinist republic from 1577 to 1585 before reconquest by Spain; this eight-year period of Protestant governance was followed by centuries of Counter-Reformation dominance that left little visible trace in the city's festival calendar or public memory. The French bombardment of 1695 destroyed most of the Grand-Place, and the guilds rebuilt it in the ornate Baroque style you see today — each guildhall a statement of corporate identity. The Manneken Pis statue was installed in 1619 by Jerome Duquesnoy, though the dressing tradition is documented from 1616 — three years earlier. The Friends of the Order of Manneken-Pis now maintain a wardrobe of over 1,200 costumes. The Ommegang continued as a religious lustral procession, but the Counter-Reformation recast it in a militant Catholic key. The original guild archives that might document this era in detail were destroyed when the guilds were suppressed in 1795 and their archives sold at public auction on the Grand-Place in August 1796 — a documentary gap that still haunts Brussels' ability to narrate its own festival history.

1914 - 1958

Both World Wars subjected Brussels to German occupation, and both times the city's festival traditions proved remarkably resilient. The Meyboom was planted under occupation in both wars — a quiet act of civic continuity. The Ommegang was revived in 1930 for the Belgian centenary, but the revival deliberately chose to reenact the 1549 Joyous Entry of Charles V rather than restore the original religious circumambulation — a fundamentally different event that chose imperial pageantry over religious lustral procession. The modern Ommegang (Ommegang de Bruxelles/Ommegang van Brussel) starts at the Sablon and concludes at the Grand-Place in July, not on the Sunday before Pentecost. UNESCO inscribed it in 2019, acknowledging both the medieval and modern layers, but the living practice is the reenactment, not the original rite. Expo 58 and the Atomium announced Brussels' postwar modernity — but the same era saw the first stirrings of linguistic conflict that would reshape the city's governance.