Book Description

Excerpt from Belgium, the Making of a Nation To say the truth, it is by no means easy to free oneself from the tyrannous obsession of the present, to escape from the atmosphere of fever or exaltation in which we live, and which impels us to regard Belgium as the pivot of European evolution. No land, it is true, possesses a more international history a fact which has been brought out with wonderful skill by Henri Pirenne - and it is not paradoxical to assert that one of the characteristics of Belgian nationality is internationalism.' While bearing these results in mind as scientifically true, I have devoted myself to the task of finding out the ruling factors of our internal history, and selecting by preference as the landmarks of different periods, not the changes which, resulting in general from European conflicts, have affected the reigning houses, but the distinctive phenomena of social life. In common with the other States of the West, Belgium only achieved political consistency in the fifteenth century, but her national character was formed during the course of the Middle Ages, and if I have not laid more stress upon that period it is because its history is still enveloped in the mists of legends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.