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The Fire at Louvain

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The ruins of the library at Louvain

In the late-summer of 1914, a city burns and its university library with it. Unusually for this podcast, the story takes us into WWI, but there are medieval connections to the story of Louvain (Leuven) and what happened when the German army came to town.

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Sources:

Script:

Quote:

“Ten days ago I was in Louvain … . The city dates from the eleventh century, and the population was 42,000. The citizens were brewers, lacemakers, and manufacturers of ornaments for churches. The university was the most celebrated in European cities, and still is, or was, headquarters of the Jesuits.

... I found the city clean, sleepy, and pretty, with narrow twisting streets and smart shops and cafes. Set in flower gardens were the houses, with red roofs, green shutters, and white walls.

Over those that faced south had been trained pear trees; their branches heavy with fruit spread out against the walls like branches of candelabra. The Town Hall was very old and very beautiful, an example of Gothic architecture, in detail and design more celebrated even than the Town Hall of Bruges or Brussels. It was five hundred years old, and lately had been repaired with great taste and at great cost.

Opposite was the Church of St. Pierre, dating from the fifteenth century, a very noble building, with many chapels filled with carvings of the time of the Renaissance in wood, stone, and iron. In the university were 150,000 volumes.

Near it was the bronze statue of Father Damien, priest of the leper colony in the South Pacific, of which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. All these buildings are now empty… . Statues, pictures, carvings, parchments, archives—all are gone.

… Money can never restore Louvain. Great architects, dead these six hundred years, made it beautiful, and their handiwork belonged to the world. With torch and dynamite the Germans have turned these masterpieces into ashes, and all the Kaiser's horses and all his men cannot bring them back again.”

End quote.

Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World. This is the podcast that covers all things medieval through the stories of its travellers, and it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, where the listening is pleasingly early, ad-free, and with extra mini-episodes, where the cost is as little as a dollar a month, or as much as makes sense for you, and where you can find the podcast at patreon.com/humancircus. 

That said, let’s get to the story, that of the events of August 25th, 1914. It’s something a little different on the podcast today, but there is, as you’ll see, a medieval connection there, connections even. It is, rather unusually for the podcast, a story of WWI, a story of its opening summer months. But it’s also the story of a medieval building, of medieval books, and of efforts to connect modern actions to medieval events and ones even older. 

What I want to talk about today is the destruction of Louvain (or Leuven), the burning of much of that Belgian city around 25 kilometers east of Brussels, and the loss of its library in that opening phase of World War One, the loss of that library’s contents. 

But first let’s start by going back to a Richard Harding Davis story that appeared in the New York Tribune on August 31st, 1914, and brought the news to an American audience. It was the words of Davis, a novelist, playwright, and journalist, that opened this episode, and I’m including them here because I think they give a real taste for how this story was told at the time.

Quote:

“London, August 30 — I left Brussels on Thursday afternoon and have just arrived in London. For two hours on Thursday night I was in what for six hundred years has been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it, and to hide their work kept us locked in the railway carriages. But the story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot. 

The Germans sentenced Louvain on Wednesday to become a wilderness and with the German system and love of thoroughness they left Louvain an empty and blackened shell. The reason for this appeal to the torch and the execution of noncombatants, as given to me on Thursday morning by General von Lutwitz, military governor of Brussels, was this: on Wednesday, while the German military commander of the troops of Louvain was at the Hotel de Ville talking to the Burgomaster, a son of the Burgomaster with an automatic pistol shot the chief of staff and German staff surgeons.

Lutwitz claims this was the signal for the civil guard, in civilian clothes on roofs, to fire upon the German soldiers in the open square below. He said also the Belgians had quick-firing guns, brought from Antwerp. As for a week the Germans had occupied Louvain and closely guarded all approaches, the story that there was any gunrunning is absurd.

Fifty Germans were killed and wounded. For that, said Lutwitz, Louvain must be wiped out. So in pantomime with his fist he swept the papers across his table.

"The Hotel de Ville," he added, "was a beautiful building; it is a pity it must be destroyed." 

But destroyed it was, along with many other buildings.

The justification, as that general informed Davis, was guerilla resistance on the part of Belgians not in uniform, but much as Davis rejected the possibility of gunrunning, others ever since have rejected the entire explanation, blaming instead a friendly fire incident among the occupying Germans that got out of control. 

“When by troop train we reached Louvain,” wrote Davis, “the entire heart of the city was destroyed and fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station. The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang. In their work the soldiers were moving from the heart of the city to the outskirts, street by street, from house to house... .

In other wars I have watched men on one hilltop, without haste, without heat, fire at men on another hill, and in consequence on both sides good men were wasted. But in those fights there were no women and children, and the shells struck only vacant stretches of veldt or uninhabited mountainsides.

At Louvain it was war upon the defenseless, war upon churches, colleges, shops of milliners and lacemakers; war brought to the bedside and fireside; against women harvesting in the fields, against children in wooden shoes at play in the streets.”

Davis wrote of seeing English prisoners, that he was glad that they were there to “bear witness as to how the enemy makes a wilderness and calls it war.” He wrote of “the broken spires of the Church of St. Pierre,” of the rows of houses, some “already cold, but others sen[ding] up steady, straight columns of flame,” of the lines of men, marched off to be shot.

“It was all like a scene upon the stage,” he wrote, “so unreal, so inhuman, you felt that it could not be true, that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark rooms came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children. You felt it was only a nightmare, cruel and uncivilized. And then you remembered that the German Emperor has told us what it is. It is his Holy War.”

To this medieval city had come destruction which Davis framed as medieval in nature, not that of a modern war, though there was much that was entirely modern about it, but of a holy one. And Davis was not alone in looking to earlier historical eras in framing what he was seeing. 

Two days after Davis’s story appeared in print, The Times of London published a poem by Rudyard Kipling, he of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories on the childrens’ end of things, of the novel Kim and its depiction of the Great Game in Central Asia on the more adult end. 

Kipling’s WWI output was, one would have to say, vigorously propagandic in nature. This was not a time of literary giants standing up to their governments, or, I should say, this was not such a case. Kipling was one of 53 British authors to sign his name that September to a declaration of support for the correctness of the British cause in restoring Belgian integrity, authors that also included GK Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and HG Wells. 

By the next year he would be in Southport giving a speech in aid of recruitment and informing his audience that there was, quote, “no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of men can conceive of which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.” “However the world pretends to divide itself,” he would tell his audience, “there are only two divisions in the world to-day—human beings and Germans.” Elsewhere, he would speak of defenses as “the rampart put by Man against the Beast,” or Germans as microbes that must be sterilized by “measures of international hygiene,” an altogether alarming piece of dehumanization.

In that poem published in The Times, he would use a slightly different way to frame it, one that would stick. 

As poetry goes, it’s really not to my taste, early 20th-century patriotic verses not necessarily being my thing. 

“No easy hope or lies [it concludes]

Shall bring us to our goal, 

But iron sacrifice 

Of body, will, and soul. 

There is but one task for all— 

One life for each to give. 

What stands if Freedom fall? 

Who dies if England live?”

Like I said, not for me, but then not written for me, and besides, my interest is more with the opening lines. There, Kipling would write that, quote:

“For all we have and are,

For all our children’s fate,

Stand up and take the war.

The Hun is at the gate!”

In Kipling’s response to the events in Louvain and Belgium more generally, he compared the German conquerors with Atilla’s 5th-century colleagues who who had swept into Europe, driving the Goths west and attacking the Eastern Roman Empire, and he was not doing so to highlight the German mobility of attack or skill with the horse, their finesse in archery or their nomadic ways. Kipling was of course intending to communicate barbarism, the forces of savagery at the gates of Rome and of civilization itself. Of Europe. Of Belgium. Of England.

It was a comparison that had been made in a much more proudly complimentary way by Kaiser Wilhelm II back in 1900 and in a rather less complimentary one by Kipling himself a few years after that. Kipling’s pejorative sense of Hun would stick around, echoed often after his first use. I remember it from reading during my own weird, world war phase as a boy, though I didn’t get the reference then.  

British writers, among others, made much of the destruction of Louvain and the many atrocities, both real and imagined, which followed. It was all part of the larger narrative of ‘the Rape of Belgium,” as it was called. It was said that the German soldiers had cut off the hands of children, that they’d crucified farmers along the road, that they’d rung nuns to death between church bells, bayoneted babies, and pinned the mutilated bodies of women to doors with their swords. There was very little that they were not accused of.

A lot of this was invented to help whip up anti-German feeling and support for the war effort, but not every charge British propaganda brought against them was so cooked up. Hundreds of civilians were killed at Louvain, and just days earlier, there had been massacres and destruction in Dinant, as many more were killed or forcibly displaced throughout Belgium in a collective punishment approach intended to terrify the people and discourage resistance, a collective punishment possibly triggered in Louvain by panic over friendly fire incidents in the first place, thought that was and would be contested. 

By the time the German occupation forces were done there in Louvain, some 1,100 houses were destroyed, about a fifth of the city, but it might have been worse. When the American diplomat, Hugh Gibson, drove into Louvain to check on the disturbing reports he’d been hearing, he was told by a German officer that, quote:

“We shall make this place a desert. We shall wipe it out so that it will be hard to find where Louvain used to stand. For generations people will come here to see what we have done, and it will teach them to respect Germany and to think twice before they resist her. Not one stone on another, I tell you.”

International reaction would see those orders softened, would save the place from truly becoming the desert which the officer imagined, but not in time to save that Louvain library. What had happened there, and what had been lost?

After this quick break, we’ll talk about that. 

…

The University of Louvain was founded in 1452, rekindling a town suffering the decline of its textile industry and making it the first university in the Low Countries. The town became a centre for Beligan printing, home to the first Belgian printer, a John of Westphalia who was active there in the later 15th century, and then the celebrated Thierry Martens in the early 16th century. It was also home to important scholars of the period, including, at least temporarily, the humanist, theologian, and philosopher Erasmus. It would grow in colleges that numbered 46 by the end of the 16th century, each with their own book collections. 

By 1636, the central library was founded from these collections, and over the centuries, its holdings expanded. Growing with its university’s wealth, the privileges accorded by an 18th-century governor general of the Low Countries, the contributions of personal collections, and beneficial circumstances such as the suppression of the Jesuits whose Louvain library the university was able to purchase from. Suffering the forcible removal of hundreds of early prints to Paris in 1794, during the reign of the Committee of Public Safety there. Suffering the suppression of the university itself in 1797 to be refounded in 1816. Temporarily closed again in 1830 as the Belgian revolution gave rise to the country we know today, reopened in 1835.

The library which burned in the late August of 1914 held a collection which had passed down through the centuries virtually intact, the incursion of the French Revolution having been described by Mark Derez as only “scrap[ing] the icing off the cake.” “The library was the reflection of the intellectual history of the Low Countries,” Derez writes, “with its various movements and controversies such as Humanism, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and Jansenism.” The library was home to some 2-300,000 works, with 230,000 a number that is often given. Its collection included some 800 medieval manuscripts and over 1,000 incunabula, or early printed documents, from before 1500. That was what was lost when soldiers entered the library late on the night of August 25th, 1914, and put fuel and incendiaries to work, destroying what had been the old weavers’ hall and its contents. 

There’s an anecdote about the Rector of the American College there. He’d been rescued by the American ambassador who recorded speaking with him after, and how having seen his father and brother’s homes burnt, the pillaging and destruction of his town, and lines of people waiting to be shot, he, quote:

“...told it all calmly. But there in the Halles of the University was the Library; its hundreds of thousands of volumes, its rare and ancient manuscripts, its unique collection of incunabula—all had been burned deliberately, to the last scrap. [He] had reached this point in his recital; he had begun to pronounce the word bibliotheque—he had said ‘la biblio…’ and he had stopped suddenly and bit his quivering lip. ‘La bib…’ he went on—and then, spreading his arms on the table before him, he bowed his head upon them and wept.”

Perhaps it was just a case of a last straw, but of all the horrors he’d witnessed, the rector was unable to speak of this one.

One manuscript survived in the hands of an escaping professor. He’d had it out to consult and had carried it away from the ruined town, burying it within a small iron safe in a garden near Ghent, where it quite possibly might still be found in whatever condition that iron kept it in. One 17th-century fragment somehow survived to turn up in Massachusetts in 2021, kept in the Clark University archives for who knows how long before it resurfaced during the cleaning of a filing cabinet there. 

Four manuscripts that had been loaned from Leiden University at the end of 1913 would not make it. One of them that was lost was a text produced in a monastery around 1463. It contained the words of a 14th-century mystic, priest, and writer Jan van Ruusbroec. Fortunately, that particular text had at least been the subject of an in-depth study and a photo had even been taken of one of its pages, available to be seen online if you’re so inclined, though it’s not an especially striking page visually speaking.

The librarian of the time, Paul Delannoy, described being able to view the devastation, but only eight days after the initial fire, only at a distance, and only at personal risk. 

Quote:

“Broken pillars, an impassable heap of bricks, stones, and beams smouldered in the fire which slowly consumed thousands of volumes between huge portions of dangerous and threatening walls: that was all remained of the majestic building known as the Halles Universitaires, and of the rich treasure it contained. In the streets of the ruined and deserted city, where the soldiers were completing their work of pillage, and further on even into the country, leaves of manuscripts and books fluttered about, half burned, at the mercy of the wind.”

For Delannoy, the tragedy was twofold: the loss of the library’s vast collection and also that of the building itself, “a gem of the most beautiful architecture of two distinct periods—the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.” 

Its first stone had been laid in 1317, its last in 1345. Delannoy outlined its two large halls, one of which had been kept pretty much as it had been, the other going through many changes. He described arches resting on pillars, the capitals ornamented with fruit and foliage. He described mighty beams of oak supported by brackets and the subjects presented there in carving: “foliage, burlesque scenes, fantastic or hybrid beings.” In the 17th century, one of the halls was divided into study quarters and a story added for lectures. Delannoy enthused over the decorative moulding, the statues of philosophers, and the columns with their symbols of the arts and sciences. He of course enthused over the library’s contents.

The library had only just installed new metal bookcases with movable shelves—installed by Germans, he remarked—and the process of moving all those texts stirred up to the surface all sorts of surprises and works that had gone dustily forgotten. He highlighted the mixed parchment and paper text in the hand of 15th-century theologian Thomas à Kempis. He spoke of the books of hours, several of which were richly illuminated, of works of history, Belgian and Brabant, of collected lectures of celebrated professors, scarcely examined, and of those incunabula which the library had recently begun to catalogue. He particularly bemoaned the loss of the theological collection, that the library had also begun to catalogue just two years earlier. “In doing so,” he wrote, “we came upon surprise after surprise, and the publication of the catalogues of these treasures, which had not so far been exhaustively examined, would have been of very great use to the history of the theological controversies.” 

There were examples of 16th-century Flemish bookbinding, of the work of Renaissance physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius, of the papal bull for the original founding of the university. 

“A monument of the fourteenth century,” Delannoy summed his beloved library up, “a model of the architecture of the period in pleasant and harmonious lines, original and varied designs; magnificent halls, recalling by their majestic aspect and perfect sculpture the most beautiful specimens of the Renaissance; treasures stored up by centuries of fruitful labour and patient research, manuscripts, incunables, very rare prints, relics piously preserved by past generations: …all that is nothing compared with the delirious joy felt by a few hundreds of soldiers, drunk with wine and carnage, in contemplating the tragic spectacle of a town in flames, and in terrorising and massacring an innocent population.”

Delannoy, the Louvain librarian, was outraged by what he’d witnessed, and for what had been lost in the fire. He was not alone in his outrage, and it was not just British writers like Kipling who made accusations of quote/unquote “savagery” in responding to the town’s destruction, and in particular the library’s, or cast about for historical comparisons, even highly questionable ones, with which to communicate it. 

“Until today,” wrote one man from Louvain, “I had refused to believe what the newspapers said about the atrocities committed by the Germans; but in Leuven I have seen what their Kultur is like. More savage than the Arabs of Caliph Omar, who burnt down the Alexandrian library, we see them set fire, in the twentieth century, to the famous University Library.”

The writer, a young Jesuit who was reportedly shot, was not the only one to evoke that particular spectre from the distant past. You’d see the same thing in the statement of American President Harding, who bemoaned the “irreparable loss of scholarship” and likened it to “the burning of the great library in Alexandria,” perhaps, like the Louvain Jesuit, referring to the 7th-century event, maybe instead to that of the Roman period, though I don’t think Romanness denoted barbarism in quite the desired way in the minds of these early-20th-century men.

As for Louvain, its librarian promised that it was not finished, and he had some things to say about barbarism himself. 

“The halls of Louvain will rise again from their ashes,” he wrote. “They will become, as in former days, the centre of a school of learning of which the glorious past is a guarantee for the future. In building a new and magnificent Library we wish not only to restore to our professors and students those materials indispensable to all scholarship and scientific work; we wish also to show present and future generations that … the civilized and right-thinking world knows how to unite in execrating barbarity as it deserves, and in solemnly avenging the intellectual and artistic patrimony of which barbarians have callously robbed it.”

And as to rising again, he was right. Louvain would rise again, its library’s reconstruction and restocking a matter mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles and also supported with books from England, the U.S., and Japan among other sources. There were difficulties with funding and disagreements over details, the unfortunate proposed Latin inscription that was to read “Destroyed by German fury, rebuilt by American donations,” among them, but the work would be done. The library, in the 1930s, was back on its feet. But cruelly, it would not remain that way. 

On the night of May 16th, 1940, war returned to Louvain, along with the German army, and the library was burned again, blame for the destruction cast about between the British and Germans. “Louvain Again,” ran a headline in The Times. 

A librarian at Louvain wrote to his Columbia University colleague that, quote: 

“I am indeed grieved having to tell you that the library was nearly completely gutted by fire; that the fine stack rooms at the back, housing our precious collections, are no more and that only terribly twisted and molten girders remain of it. It is painful to behold . . . gone also the collection of incunabula, manuscripts, medals, precious china, silk flags, and catalogues. Practically, we have to start again at the bottom.”

The entire process of rebuilding and refilling those shelves, managed only painfully recently, would need to begin again, but it would be done. In 1950, the library at the university of Louvain was again reopened, and it is still in use today and, I trust, safe from fire for the foreseeable future. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this slight departure from the podcast’s usual focus. We’ll be back to more familiar territory next time, with an episode about a 15th-century Italian physician and engineer. Thank you very much for listening. I’ll talk to you then.