Louis de Potter

Louis de Potter (26 April 1786 – 22 July 1859), was a Belgian journalist, revolutionary, politician and writer. Out of the more than 100 books and pamphlets, one of the most notable works was his famous Letter to my Fellow Citizens in which he promoted democracy, universal electoral rights and the unity among Belgian liberals and Catholics. As one of the heroes of the Belgian Revolution, he proclaimed the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands (from the terrace of the Brussels City Hall on 28 September 1830), and inaugurated the first Belgian parliamentary assembly (on 10 November 1830), on behalf of the outgoing Belgian provisional government. De Potter belonged to a rich noble family (his father was the Esquire Clément de Potter de Droogenwalle) which sought asylum in Germany after the second French invasion of the Southern Netherlands in 1794 and remained there until the Consulate. This meant that Louis's education in Bruges remained largely incomplete and so he restarted it during the family's time abroad, wanting to learn Latin, ancient Greek and modern languages. He spent 12 years in Italy (in Rome from 1811 to 1821 and in Florence from 1821 to 1823) to study the history of the Roman Catholic church, though he studied it with the prejudices which predominated in Enlightenment thoughts. He then discovered the foundations of the reforms made in the "aristocratic republics of Italy" and those of the revolution for the French republic. While in Rome, he began an affair with the Italian painter, Matilde Malenchini, that lasted until 1826. In 1816 he had already published his Considérations sur l'histoire des principaux conciles depuis les apôtres jusqu'au Grand Schisme d'Occident (Considerations on the history of the main councils from the apostles to the Great Western Schism). In 1821, he completed this first work with another, in six volumes, titled L'Esprit de l'Église ou Considérations sur l'histoire des conciles et des papes, depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à nos jours (The Spirit of the Church, or Considerations on the history of the councils and the popes, from Charlemagne to our own days).