Belgium has seen protests and riots in recent days, but the country's version of unrest tends to be gentler and stranger than what happens across the border in France, according to a column by Sigrid Melchior in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Melchior argues that Belgium lacks the revolutionary fervor that she says is always smoldering in France, and that this difference is tied to national character: Belgians are known for their self-deprecating humor, the columnist writes, while the French are known for lacking it.
The column, published Saturday, uses the memory of a long-running Belgian stunt to make its point about how political passion plays out differently in the two countries.
Why it matters
Melchior's observation lands as television news fills with images of demonstrations and disturbances in both France and Belgium. Her argument is that events in France — whether new trends or political turmoil — arrive in Belgium immediately, as if the two were one country. Yet the Belgian version of whatever the French come up with usually turns out milder and a little more offbeat, she writes. The contrast offers a lens for readers trying to make sense of why similar grievances produce different public reactions on either side of the border.
The anarchist who kept trying to topple the monarchy
For several years, Melchior recounts, Belgium's monarchy faced an annual coup attempt. The provocateur behind it was Jan Bucquoy, an artist, anarchist and post-surrealist. His best-known works include the cult film "The Sexual Life of the Belgians 1950–1978" and pornographic pastiches of Tintin that amuse tourists, according to the column.
Each year, Bucquoy and his cheerful band of men marched toward the royal palace after a few monastery beers, Melchior writes. The instigator himself, described as middle-aged plus-plus, made a clumsy attempt to break through a wall of police officers who had been called out, for appearances' sake, to defend the state order. He was arrested, offered coffee at the police station and released a few hours later, according to the account.
Melchior notes that she repeatedly told herself she would film the coup attempt the following year, but Bucquoy stopped before she got around to it. She lists it among a handful of assignments she never completed and still regrets.
The columnist says Bucquoy came to mind as television news filled with protests and riots in France and Belgium. His annual ritual — a would-be revolution resolved with coffee and a release — captures something about how dissent is expressed in Belgium, she suggests.
Self-distance as a national trait
Melchior's explanation for the gap between the two countries is cultural rather than institutional. Belgians, she writes, are known for their ability to laugh at themselves; the French are known for their shortage of that quality. She suspects the two traits are connected, and that they help explain why revolutionary heat builds differently in each place.
The column also touches on smaller observations. Melchior mentions a current exhibition in Brussels devoted to M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist who turned mathematical principles and Islamic patterns into art. She notes that panettone, the Christmas cake and rival to the croissant, has appeared in grocery stores at the same time as the season's first Christmas decorations — to the delight of Belgium's large Italian diaspora.
She also remarks that Belgian government crises make for better television than Swedish ones. In Belgium, party leaders slam car doors and hurry into the palace with grim expressions, she writes, because it is the king — not the parliamentary speaker — who hands out the mandate to form a government.
Taken together, the details sketch a country where political drama is real but rarely reaches a boil. The palace coup that never quite happened, the police who serve coffee to their detainees, the king who summons party leaders to his residence: each is a small illustration of a political culture that Melchior describes as less combustible than its neighbor's.
What happens next is less a single event than a continuing contrast. As protests continue in France and Belgium, watch whether the Belgian response stays, as Melchior predicts, the milder and more eccentric cousin of the French original.
