When Belgium was part of France...

It's history class today and you're going to learn a bit on what Belgian territories used to be. I will only talk about the period between 1790 and 1814, with the creation of the United Belgian States and the subsequent annexation to France... with the creation of Belgian departments with strange names, though shaping the current Belgian provinces. You will also get hints on how Walloons are not "that" French and... actually not that Walloon either!

When some people claim that Wallonia should be a French region simply because it was once part of France, they're referring to a short period from 1792 to 1814, in which the current territory of Belgium was included in the French Republic and, subsequently, the French Empire. As a counter-argument to this, let's say Wallonia is as French as... Flanders! And even sections of the Netherlands and Germany were also French at that time for the same duration... So is this argument really valid?

Map of the former French departments on the Belgian territory

During the French period, it is interesting to see how the regional limits were formed and how similar they look to the current ones. As France was (and is still) divided into smaller departments for each region, Belgium was constituted with nine departments: Lys (Western Flanders), Escaut (Eastern Flanders), Deux-Nèthes (Antwerp), Meuse Inférieure (Limburg), Dyle (Flemish/Walloon Brabants and Brussels), Jemappes (Hainaut), Sambre-et-Meuse (Namur), Ourthe (Liège) and Forêts (Luxembourg). Those were called after rivers and streams, except the current Luxembourg, which was then called after its... forests (Forêts), original huh?... (And today, some call it Wallabama...)

United Belgian States before French annexation

Before this period, Belgium consisted mostly of the so-called "United Belgian States" in 1790, which did not actually include Liège, a principality on its own... Therefore, during the French period, there was not really an distinction between Flemish and Walloons, but there was one between Belgians and Liégeois! And it is only when the territories were given to the Dutch that Liégeois considered themselves as Belgians (and Catholics), by opposition to the Dutch who ruled the big Netherlands and were Protestants. Still today, Liégeois are known to use a different accent to the rest of Wallonia...

As you can see on the map, Flanders used to only be the name of a smaller territory that included Ghent and Bruges (Western and Eastern Flanders provinces), and not Brabant and Limburg... For some reason, the name Flanders was also used for the whole Dutch-speaking region, while the French-speaking region was called after a local language (Walloon). Before this separation existed, French was the only official language of the country. This shows that Wallonia and Flanders have not always been homogeneous entities but are a recent way to separate the country linguistically invented during the last century.

Miles away from the "States" (of America), these Belgian States did not last more than 5 years and played more the go-between for the former Austrian Netherlands and the future French departments, which became Dutch later on... A complicated story, which cannot be summed up as "Wallonia is French" and "Flanders is Dutch".