Wallonia

Before today if you would have asked me about Wallonia I would have thought you might have been referring to something the woman who wrote the Moomintroll series did in parodying the Oxford fantasists C.S. Lewis and Tolkein. But this morning we took the #53 bus into Liège to visit the Musée de la Vie wallonne and I discovered Wallonia is the predominantly French-speaking southern region of Belgium. It’s known for its forests and valleys and rural beauty. So the mind conjures the wooded hills of the Ardennes and the river valleys of the Meuse with small medieval towns and castles. Although compared to Flanders only a small part of Wallonia was a WWI battlefield, if you camp out in the Ardennes ghosts have been known to interrupt peoples’ sleep.

As portrayed In the Museum of Walloon Life, before the 18th century Walloons were peasants. Not exactly happy as Hobbits, but pretty darn close. They lived off the land and enjoyed crafts like woodworking and bonnet-making.

Then came the 19th century. Population growth reduced the amount of land available to families and many peasants inherited plots too small to support themselves. Wealthy landowners took advantage and consolidated farmland. Industrialization expanded and coal mines and steelworks offered regular wages. Wallonia’s coal basin created an enormous demand for labor. 

Wallonia became like West Virginia. When we arrived in the neighborhood where we’re staying in Liége yesterday the way the narrow brick houses lined up like books on a bookshelf reminded me of D.H. Lawerence’s description of growing up in an English mining town.

As in Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”, the countryside was a shout away, but workers got closely stacked together in their brick dwellings and trooped off to the mines.

The coal industry declined. The workers formed unions. Agitated. Strikes proliferated.

The houses crowding the hills, the narrow streets winding into the gritty downtown by the river, it all feels like the city grew quickly, and then got left behind.

Walloon labor activism argued that national economic policy favored Flanders, so in the 1970s Walonia gained its own regional institutions and powers.

Now Wallonia’s focus has shifted to new technologies and the tourist industry. That’s right, us old troopers looking for a decent cup of coffee and a peek inside a cathedral of Romanesque architecture in the Rhine-Meuse style, we’re part of the new Wallonian frontier. 

Wait—were those droplets rain, or the ghostly spit of a redundant miner?