King Leopold II of Belgium founded the Congo Free State, which gained a bad reputation for brutal mistreatment of its people and plundering natural resources. He was condemned for his actions, but also praised for his involvement as king during a time when monarchs had little oversight.
King Leopold II was King of Belgium from 1865 to 1909 and was the founder of the Congo Free State. He was born on April 9, 1835 in Brussels, Belgium and died on December 17, 1909 in Laeken, Belgium. He was heir to the throne of his father, Leopold I, and his mother Louise was the daughter of King Louis-Philippe of France.
Belgium was a relatively new country functioning under a constitutional monarchy, initially under Leopold I. When Leopold II was born, he was a sickly child and thought to have tuberculosis, and had a sciatic nerve defect that caused him to walk with a limp. He didn’t have a particularly good relationship with his father due to his lack of discipline, often needing to make appointments just to meet him. At the age of 9, King Leopold II was given his first title of Duke of Brabant and became a lieutenant in the Belgian army at the age of ten.
In 1853 he married Archduchess Marie-Henriette of Austria-Hungary for diplomatic purposes and succeeded his father as king when Leopold I died in 1865. By this time, King Leopold II had traveled extensively around the world and became a supporter of the Belgium’s expansion, a different opinion of which Leopold was the president, struck a deal with an American named Henry Stanley to bring the Congo Basin under European control through unfair trade and slavery. Eventually this would become King Leopold’s Congo Free State, which existed from 1885 to 1908. This colony gained a bad reputation from the brutal mistreatment of its people, which resulted in millions of deaths, and the relentless plundering of resources natural resources of the region which included ivory and rubber.
King Leopold II was condemned for his actions in the Congo, and eventually control of the region passed completely to Belgium from Leopold II. However, he has been considered an outstanding historical figure due to his involvement as king at a time when such positions were increasingly becoming mere figureheads with little oversight against the government. During his reign, King Leopold II also successfully pushed for military modernization and expansion, and his successor to the throne was his nephew, Albert I.
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