Souvenirs Pieux (Dear Departed)

"People don’t know how many famous Belgians there are because they don’t remember that people actually were Belgian. That’s to some extent true of Hergé and Simenon, but it’s also true of Marguerite Yourcenar, who is one of the leading female writers in France in the 20th century. But, if you want to look at her place of birth, she absolutely was Belgian. She was brought up in one of the upper-bourgeois areas of Brussels in the late 19th century. This set of memories about her childhood is a very evocative and powerful book. People often refer to it as their favourite book from their youth. It’s very influential when people read it as teenagers, especially women, perhaps. It has something of a coming-of-age book, about female identity, but at the same time—and especially for historians—it’s a marvellous evocation of this very privileged world that she lived in, in the Avenue Louise, one of the posher areas of Brussels. It’s a book that very much brings home the richness of that Belgian society. Perhaps it should be my first book rather than the last, because it’s a time of a certain innocence: a time before World War I, a time when Belgium seemed to be the epitome of modernisation, of progress, of new forms of sophisticated living, and of a rich cultural life that would be, to some extent, blown apart by the arrival of the German occupiers in 1914. Yes. We’re going back here now to the Belgian preoccupation with family, where people often think about their identity and where they came from in terms of their family and their locality. That’s very similar, in a strange sort of way, to the very different approach of Hugo Claus. Where he’s trying to come to terms with the Catholic provincial past he came from in Flanders, Marguerite Yourcenar is trying to understand the particular, very different, upper bourgeois—even aristocratic—world that her family came from in Brussels. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. The French are quite good at claiming Belgians as their own. One could produce a whole series of 20th-century writers who were in fact Belgian and not French. They rather enjoy the game of being Belgian while saying to themselves and to each other that perhaps we shouldn’t take this terribly seriously and that, in the end, national identity is not something that is central to who you are. I think that all the books that I’ve been talking about are ones that focus around this tension between a national identity and more personal, local and familial dimensions of identity. I think those local, familial senses of identity are, on the whole, the sorts of identity that people in Belgium have taken more seriously than the trappings of tricolour flags and great national moments, apart of course from football."