The Belgian parliament's decision to annex the Congo Free State was the resolution of a political crisis the Belgian political class had been trying to avoid for two decades. Belgian opinion through the 1890s had been substantially anti-colonial; the parliament had repeatedly refused to authorise Belgian state involvement in Leopold's African venture; the Belgian Socialists in particular were vehemently opposed to acquiring a colony. The annexation in 1908 was not driven by any positive Belgian desire for empire but by the absence of any alternative. The reform campaign had made the Free State's continued existence as Leopold's personal sovereignty politically impossible. The available alternatives — international trusteeship, transfer to another European power, abandonment to chaos — were all worse from the Belgian political standpoint than reluctant annexation. The annexation was approved by a parliamentary vote on the 20th of August 1908; the formal transfer took effect on the 15th of November.
The transfer arrangements
The financial settlement was substantial. Leopold demanded, and received, the following from the Belgian state in exchange for the transfer of sovereignty:
Personal compensation of 50 million Belgian gold francs — a substantial private fortune, paid as a personal grant to Leopold rather than as an inheritance to the future Belgian state. The compensation included specific royal estates in Belgium (the Royal Greenhouses at Laeken, the Hippodrome at Ostend, the Cinquantenaire arch grounds) that had been built using Free State revenues and that Leopold transferred to the royal household as personal property.
The continuance of the Crown Domain (Domaine de la Couronne) for a transition period — about ten percent of the Free State's territory continued under Leopold's personal exploitation rights through 1909 (the year of his death). The revenues from this transitional Crown Domain period were also substantial.
The Belgian assumption of the Free State's external debts — about 110 million Belgian francs in outstanding bonds, which the Belgian state agreed to service. The substantive effect was that the Free State's accumulated commercial obligations became Belgian state debts.
The total transfer of Free State resources to Leopold personally in the closing months of his life, plus the inheritance to his successor (Albert I, his nephew, who became king of Belgium in 1909), amounted to perhaps 200 million gold francs (perhaps 3 billion 2026 dollars). The arithmetic was, by any reasonable assessment, generous to the king.
The burned archives
In the months before the transfer, Leopold ordered the systematic destruction of the Free State archives. Most of the central administrative correspondence between Brussels and the Free State officials in the Congo, most of the records of the Force Publique punitive expeditions, most of the financial records of the Crown Domain, and most of the personal correspondence between Leopold and his senior agents — Stanley, Janssens, Henry Shelton Sanford, and others — were burned at Brussels in 1908. The destruction was substantial and was carried out by Leopold's personal order. He reportedly told his chamberlain Baron Goffinet, "I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I have done there."
The destruction of the archives was substantially successful in its evidentiary purpose. The principal contemporary documentary record of the Free State's administrative operations was lost. The historiographical reconstruction of the period that has been possible since — particularly Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998), the standard modern English-language account, and the work of the Belgian historians Daniel Vangroenweghe, Jules Marchal, and Jean Stengers — has relied on the surviving missionary archives, the British Foreign Office records (where Casement's correspondence and other diplomatic material is preserved), the records of the concession companies (which were less thoroughly destroyed), and the recently re-examined Free State financial records (which were partly preserved at the National Archives of Belgium and partly at the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren). The reconstruction has been substantial but the principal historical record of the regime, as it documented itself, is gone.
The early Belgian Congo
The transition from Free State to Belgian Congo was, at the level of personnel, substantially continuous. The Belgian Ministry of Colonies (newly established in 1908) was staffed in large part with former Free State officials. The Force Publique continued in operation with its existing officer corps and African enlisted men. The concession companies continued in modified form (some were nationalised, others continued under reformed contracts with the Belgian state). The administrative structure — districts, posts, station chiefs — continued substantially as it had under the Free State.
The substantive reforms were, however, real. The quota system was formally abolished in the rubber-producing regions over the period 1908-1913. The hostage practice was formally prohibited and the documented use of hostage-taking by Belgian officials declined sharply (though not to zero). The amputation practice was formally prohibited from late 1908 and was substantially eliminated within a few years. The forced-labour system that replaced the quota system — based on a system of imposed "tax labour" (corvée or portage) requiring African men to work a fixed number of days per year for the state — was substantially less brutal than the Free State quotas, although it remained, in international human-rights terms, a forced-labour system that the 1930 ILO Forced Labour Convention would identify as illegal under international law. The Belgian Congo had abolished it in name by 1955 and in practice by the 1960 independence.
Leopold's death
Leopold II died at the Pavilion des Palmiers at Laeken on the 17th of December 1909, fourteen months after the transfer of the Congo. He was seventy-four. He had been in declining health for several years. The immediate cause was an intestinal obstruction (he had refused surgery, on what his physicians described as paranoid grounds). The Belgian state funeral, on the 22nd of December, was attended by the diplomatic representatives of every major European power and the United States; the official tributes praised his "extraordinary services to civilisation in Africa." The Belgian Socialist Party deputies boycotted the funeral. The Belgian Catholic press described him as "the founder of Belgian colonial greatness." The British press obituaries were considerably less generous; the Times obituary referred to his "long campaign of cruelty in the African interior." The American press, which had been substantially mobilised against the regime, was similarly negative.
His personal estate at death — including the post-Free State compensation, his Belgian properties, his French Riviera properties at Villa Léopolda (which would later be owned by the Onassis family), his cash holdings, and various investments — was approximately 100 million Belgian gold francs (perhaps 1.5 to 2 billion 2026 dollars). The estate went, by his will, partly to his three legitimate daughters, partly to his secret second wife the prostitute Caroline Lacroix (whom he had married, in a personal religious ceremony without civil registration, five days before his death), and partly to various charitable and personal beneficiaries. The Belgian state contested the will substantially; most of the cash holdings were eventually reclaimed by the state after a protracted legal struggle.
The Free State, formally, had ended on the 15th of November 1908. The substantive accounting of its toll — the subject of the next chapter — was, however, only beginning to be undertaken.
End of Chapter VI