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Concept
Walloon Movement
Summary
The Walloon Movement (Mouvement wallon) is an umbrella term for all Belgium political movements that either assert the existence of a Walloon identity and of Wallonia and/or defend French culture and language within Belgium, either within the framework of the 1830 Deal or either defending the linguistic rights of French-speakers. The movement began as a defence of the primacy of French but later gained political and socio-economic objectives. In French, the terms wallingantisme and wallingants are also used to describe, sometimes pejoratively, the movement and its activists. To a lesser extent, the Walloon Movement is also associated with the representation of the small German-speaking population in the East Belgium of the Walloon Region.
History of the Walloon Movement
Historians agree that the Walloon political movement began in 1880 with the foundation of a Walloon and French-speaking defence movement following the first linguistic laws of the 1870s. For historians like Lode Wils, the movement was born as a movement of administrative colonisation of Flanders. It took then the character of a movement asserting the existence of Wallonia and a Walloon identity without giving up the defence of French. Wallonia asserted timidly since 1898 but which becomes the principal claim since 1905 with a climax at the Walloon congress of 1912 and Jules Destrée's Letter to the King.
The First World War and a reviving of Belgian patriotism applied a brake to the movement and its spin offs. Walloon militants banded together in 1930s under the patronage of the Walloon Concentration where the radical ideas of 1912 were born again bringing into existence the linguistic laws of 1932. During the Second World War, several activists distinguished themselves within Resistance by forming various clandestine groupings. This world war radicalised even more the movement which for the first time speaks about independence ideas, and which will lead to its active participation in the Royal Question in 1950.
Official source
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