Private life

As has been said, the Journal is not teeming with intimist notes. Here and there the reader catches family tensions, disapproval concerning the behaviour of one or another. But no more than that. On the other hand, Michel Edmond de Selys allows his concerns for the education and health of his children to come through more. Should one of them happen to fall ill, he worries, consults the great names of the faculty of medicine, and scrupulously notes down the treatment. He is also very preoccupied with death, the presence of which escalates following the death of his youngest daughter in 1852. He finds an outlet for his grief in scientific and political work but certainly not in religion. A Liberal, Michel Edmond rejects neither the Catholic faith nor practicing religion, but he does not accord a central place to either religion or faith. One senses that it concerns propriety more than real attachment. Rather anti-clerical, he does not allow religion to come into account for social relationships, even for matrimonial relationships. ‘His notes,’ stresses Nicole Caulier-Mathy, ‘clearly allow the decline of religion throughout the whole of the 19th century to be perceived; secularism was gaining ground in society.’

Provincial Gentleman

It is perhaps the aspect of the Journal which will delight non professional readers the most: the numerous pieces of information he provides about the daily life of ‘polite society’ all along the 19th century. The reader is thus no longer left without knowledge, of the concerts, theatre plays, balls and receptions which follow one after another the whole year long. Places to meet up, it is there where marriage plans and networks are engaged in. In Winter, it is Liège which is the epicentre. From the Spring, the festivities spread to more rural retreats, above all as progress in laying down railway lines goes along. For the Journal also serves that purpose; it provides us with information about the progress in communications, always scrupulously noted by the author. In the Summer, the countryside chateaus host the meetings (the Season often began with a crow hunt!), before they find themselves taking place in the fashionable spa resorts in France or in Germany. Next comes the hunting season. Michel Edmond notes the habits, the customs, but also the names. The reader can thus follow the members of the family on their travels (very numerous: we think we are very mobile today but these ancestors could teach us a thing or two on the subject!), discover their close friends and their more occasional acquaintances. And discover the greater and greater importance of the fact of ‘Belgium’ in their minds. For whilst the bulk of Michel Edmond’s activities and acquaintances are Province based, the Journal shows very well that, little by little, Brussels was supplanting Liège as the capital.