But the king was aware that this undeniable progress also represented threats to the independence and the neutrality of the young Belgian state. ‘Will our capital one day see  French soldiers flooding in via the Paris-Brussels line?’ he wrote in a letter of February 18, 1852, to his brother in law Emmanuel, Count of Mensdorff-Pouilly. The king doubtless had in his mind the Risquons-Tout incident.

On March 29, 1848, right in the midst of the Springtime of the Peoples, irregular forces of apprentice-revolutionaries crossed the French-Belgian border from the Menin side. These men – around 1,500 in number – were Belgian and French. They came by the Paris train and from the north of France. The railway to Brussels had only existed for hardly two years! They were staunchly determined to stir up trouble by winning over to their cause the workers of the Sambre and Meuse fissure. Their objective: to overthrow Leopold I’s monarchic regime and establish the Republic in the young Belgian state. But the escapade quickly floundered. Hardly had they disembarked when they were routed by a detachment of the Belgian army at the hamlet of Risquons-Tout. In Belgium the 1848 revolution was over before it had begun…

That year was for Belgium, eighteen years after its independence, the time of its consecration. Our country crossed this agitated period in European history without a hitch and was no longer in the eyes of its neighbours ‘the rotten fruit of an accident of history.’ Even if it lost privileged dynastic links with France in compensation acquired the esteem of other powers and the precious diplomatic rapprochement with Russia, which would soon officially recognise Belgium as a state. In addition the Belgians and the Dutch finally became reconciled. In the case of war with France, always to be feared, ‘Belgium would be the wall and the Netherlands the buttress,’ proclaimed Guillaume II.

Belgium, the supposed barrier between France and the Germanic Confederation, was in the midst of industrialisation. It was more preoccupied with becoming a ‘commercial intersection’ than worrying over its national defence. It appeared as an ‘economic breach’ in the former military borders. Belgian military engineering would moreover have to constantly revise downwards its defensive concepts, under the pressure of the ongoing rail developments. The first railway junctions with Germany (1843) and with France (1846) were widely supported as much by the political and the economic communities as by the Crown. And with the slightest concern – or hardly – for the strategic risk these investments represented over time. Can we speak of a ‘Belgian barrier’ in the sense which the powers of the Holy Alliance wanted to give it in 1831?

The ‘Belgian question’

Half way into the nineteenth century European diplomacy was in ferment and the ‘Belgian question’ was on everybody’s lips. England, Prussia, Austria and Russia, very concerned at seeing the old expansionist demons of France resurfacing, agreed to a plan aiming at guaranteeing and reinforcing the neutrality of our country. Antwerp, whose fortification was undertaken at great cost, became the heart of Belgian’s defence policy, to the great displeasure of Napolean III.

But it was the extraordinary development of the Belgian rail network and its connections with Germany and France which would little by little provoke the ‘loud protests’ of our powerful neighbours. This is what Christophe Bechet sets out to demonstrate in analysing the development of the French and German ‘war plans’ from 1839 up until 1905, the date from which armies passing through Belgian would be considered unavoidable by both sides.