World Wars & Flemish Awakening

1815 - 1914

Belgian independence in 1830 created a French-speaking state that governed a largely Dutch-speaking population. The Flemish Movement began as a cultural revival demanding Dutch-language recognition in law, education, and government—a struggle that would span from the 1830s through the 1970 state reform. Industrially, Ghent became the Manchester of the Continent; its textile mills drove the first wave of continental industrialization. The 1843 Gemeentefeesten in Ghent consolidated multiple parish kermises (kerk + mis) into a single civic festival to reduce worker absenteeism—a direct instance of industrial discipline reshaping liturgical-calendar tradition. Women and children worked barefoot in the factories; the first migrant workers arrived in the 1950s. The kermis calendar's structural continuity from parish feast to civic celebration persisted even as the religious content was diluted by municipal regulation and commercial pressure.

From 1970

The first Belgian state reform in 1970 created cultural communities with cultural competency, giving Flanders institutional control over heritage and cultural policy. Subsequent reforms (1980, 1988–89, 1993, 2001, 2011–12) progressively transferred power, enabling deliberate re-framing of traditions as Flemish rather than Belgian. Today you can experience a festival landscape shaped by multiple, sometimes conflicting, logics: the Confraternity of the Holy Blood maintaining its Ascension Day procession in Bruges; the Pijnders guild of Dendermonde carrying the 800 kg Ros Beiaard every ten years (next 2032); the Virga Jesse septennial procession in Hasselt (next 2031); the Gentse Feesten, revived in 1969 by Walter De Buck as an anarchistic happening and now Europe's largest civic festival with 2 million visitors; the Carnival of Aalst, whose practitioners hold that total irreverence is sacred, a position that led UNESCO to remove it from the intangible heritage list in December 2019—the first-ever removal—after floats depicting Orthodox Jews with stereotypical features. Antwerp's Haredi Jewish community (est. 15,000–20,000) follows its own publicly visible religious calendar (Simchat Torah, Purim, Hanukkah) in the same streets as Flemish civic processions. Limburg's C-mine Genk and Be-Mine Beringen now preserve industrial-migrant heritage from the coal mines that drew Italian, Turkish, and Moroccan workers—communities whose festival traditions remain under-documented in Flemish heritage narratives.

1795 - 1815

French annexation in 1795 imposed anti-clerical laws and conscription on a profoundly Catholic rural population. The Boerenkrijg of 1798—a rural uprising rallied under the cry Voor Outer en Heerd (For Altar and Hearth)—combined opposition to anti-clerical laws with resistance to conscription. The event has been claimed by different political traditions: Belgian nationalists as a proto-Belgian revolt, the Flemish Movement as a proto-Flemish struggle, Catholic conservatives as a defense of faith. The Dutch term Boerenkrijg, the French Guerre des Paysans, and the German Klöppelkrieg each encode a different interpretive frame. The uprising was brutally suppressed, but its memory—preserved in monuments, annual torchlight commemorations, and the Depot Boerenkrijg in Overmere—became a site of contested political pilgrimage. The French occupation also suppressed Counter-Reformation procession traditions, setting up a 19th-century restoration cycle.

1556 - 1795

The Beeldenstorm of 1566—wave of iconoclasm that destroyed religious art across Flanders, most dramatically in Antwerp's Church of Our Lady—was not a purely Protestant action: the Stille Beeldenstorm of 1581 shows institutional Catholic participation in image removal. Catholic sources frame it as desecration, Protestant sources as liberation, and modern historians emphasize its carnivalesque social dynamics and local Catholic complicity. The Counter-Reformation response restocked churches with Baroque art (Rubens' Antwerp commissions are the most visible legacy) and instituted new or amplified processions: the Virga Jesse septennial procession in Hasselt from 1682 (re-established after Protestant troops left in 1675), the amplified Hanswijk procession in Mechelen, and the continued Holy Blood procession in Bruges on Ascension Day (attested since at least 1303). Many 'traditional' processions are thus Counter-Reformation reinventions, not unbroken medieval continuities—but they have now been performed for 340+ years and have accumulated their own deep continuity. The Ros Beiaard in Dendermonde, carried by the Pijnders guild every ten years, shows guild custodianship as a fragile continuity mechanism dependent on trained bodies.