Conscience 1883

Abstract

A monument was erected in central Antwerp in 1883 to commemorate the author proverbially known as ‘the man who taught his people to read’. Hendrik Conscience (1812–83) may no longer be a widely read author in the 21st century, but for a long time he and his work were highly influential. Even today Hendrik Conscience is an omnipresent figure in Belgium and the Netherlands; dozens of cities and villages have a street or square named after him, and his work also lives on in remediated form, adapted to the medium of film, the television miniseries, and the graphic novel. Conscience is studied today because of his cultural status and the historical value and impact of his work, rather than for the literary appeal of his writing (Verschaffel 2001 and 2002). The ‘man who taught his people to read’ (however overblown that rhetorical flourish may be) was the first mass-appeal literary author in Flanders, and he exploited his literary status on behalf of the linguistic emancipation of the Flemish language in 19th-century Belgium. His historical novels popularized and mythologized the history of Flanders and Belgium. In his rustic tales he sympathetically identified with his readership, the plain people of Flanders. And in both the historical and the rustic genres he stirred his audience’s national enthusiasm — be it in a Belgian or in a Flemish sense. These concepts overlap in complex and contested ways, with Flanders sometimes defined as a synecdoche for Belgium as a whole and sometimes in opposition to it.¹