https://doi.org/10.1177/1611894419835748 Journal of Modern European History 2019, Vol. 17(2) 171–183 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1611894419835748 journals.sagepub.com/home/meh Multiple democracies in one country: Belgian narratives of democracy, 1830–1950 Marnix Beyen University of Antwerp, Belgium Abstract Narratives of democracy have played an important part in Belgium’s self-understanding ever since the country gained its independence in the 1830–1831 revolution. In the more or less official historiography created by the Belgian political and intellectual élites, collective actors of lower and middle strata much rather than monarchs and aristocrats were presented as the forerunners of the Belgian nation. This situation stimulated a proliferation of alternative, and often dissident, democratic narratives among those who saw themselves as the true heirs of these collective actors. Left-wing Republicans and at a later stage Socialists used their narratives to criticize the oligarchic character of the existing political structures, but remained firmly within the Belgian framework. The democratic narratives fostered among Catholics in Flanders, on the contrary, were based on a more fundamental tension with the mainly Francophone and secular Belgian State. Since the First World War, this tension developed into a consistently anti-Belgian and anti-parliamentary narrative of democracy within the emerging Flemish Nationalist subculture and party. By analysing these divergent narratives, this essay thus shows how the initially democratic self-understanding of the Belgian state substantially mortgaged the creation in the long run of stable and unifying national discourses. Keywords Belgium, democracy, historiography, narratives In 1947, a brochure entitled Démocratie appeared as part of the series ‘Nos institutions’ that was published by the educational service of the Belgian Army. Its author was the young Liège historian Fernand Vercauteren (1903–1979) who specialized in the medieval political and social history of the Low Countries. Obviously, the objective of this brochure and of the entire series was to strengthen the Belgians’ attachment to their parliamentary institutions, and to prevent a part of them from being caught once more in the Fascist trap. Nonetheless, Vercauteren refrained from a Whiggish narrative in which parliamentary institutions appeared as the climax of a long democratic development. He explicitly rejected as legendary the story that democracy had originated in the Germanic forests. In the medieval cities of the Low Countries, ‘our forefathers’ love of urban Corresponding author: Marnix Beyen, Department of History, University of Antwerp, Antwerp 2000, Belgium. Email: marnix.beyen@uantwerpen.be 835748MEH 0 0 10.1177/1611894419835748Journal of Modern European HistoryBeyen research-article 2019 Special Issue: Narratives of Democracy