‘Walloon Literature’: Some Questions of Regionalism in a Bi-lingual Culture

Abstract

‘There aren’t any Belgians, only Flemings and Walloons’: so reads the key statement of Jules Destrée’s ‘Letter to the King’ (1912), the celebrated reaction of a defiant Walloon to the continuing growth of Flemish power and influence in the country. Yet the name ‘Belgium’ has enjoyed longer currency than ‘Wallonia’ in the sense of a distinct geographical and political entity. Wallonia does not figure as a designated area until 1844, whereas modern Belgium came into being in 1830 as a direct result of strategic negotiations between the great European powers. However, ‘Walloon’ as an identity can be traced back to fifteenth-century chronicles and even to the fifth century as a spoken dialect of French. ‘Belgian’ may describe the Belgic tribes which inhabited the whole of the Low Countries in Roman times but usually refers, as a late eighteenth-century coinage, to the people of the area soon thereafter to be that of the new nation.