Skip to main content

Albert I of Belgium Biography

Albert I of Belgium

(Brussels, 1875-Marche-les-Dames, 1934) King of Belgium (1909-34), nephew and successor of King Leopold II of Belgium.Son of Philip, Count of Flanders, and Princess Maria de Hohenzollern, from childhood he received a careful education and entered the prestigious École Militaire de Bruxelles.In 1900 he married Princess Isabel de Baviera, with whom he had two children: Leopoldo Felipe Carlos, future King Leopoldo III, and Carlos Teodoro Enrique.

Albert I of Belgium

That same year he made a long trip through the Belgian Congo in which he examined the hardships and needs that the territory demanded, so that, On his return, he recommended to the government the need to build a railway network in the colony, in addition to demanding a radical change in the treatment of its indigenous inhabitants, treated as slaves.

In 1913, already as King of Belgium, Albert I made a diplomatic visit to Berlin, where he was informed by the German Emperor himself, Wilhelm II, of the intentions to go to war with France and of the invasion plan of that country, which included the passage through Belgium of the German armies.Back in his country, Alberto I devoted himself to reinforcing his army in anticipation of the imminent war: he substantially increased the number of troops and established compulsory military service.In turn, Albert I informed the French government of Germany's plans.

Finally, after the outbreak of World War I, on July 31, 1914, Albert I sent a letter to the German emperor informing him of Belgium's neutrality in the conflict.On August 2 of the same year, Wilhelm II issued an ultimatum to Belgium in which he asked Albert I for free passage to German troops in Belgian territory, all of this to carry out the plan devised by Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and directed by General Helmuth von Moltke, which consisted of carrying out a lightning occupation of Belgium and penetrating France from the north, which would allow, once Paris was occupied, to transfer the bulk of the German troops to the eastern front.

After the resolute refusal of Albert I to the German requests, the invasion of Belgium began two days later.Alberto I was placed at the head of the Belgian army, in which he distinguished himself under the orders of the French general Ferdinand Foch, operational chief of the Belgian troops.After the hard battle of Autweup, in October 1914, the German army occupied practically the entire country and forced the troops of Albert I to retreat to the southwest of Flanders, the only Belgian area that had not yet fallen into German orbit.While the Belgian government was transferred to free France, King Albert I remained on the battlefront, where he energetically resisted the continuous attacks of the German forces and closed the way to Dunkirk and Calais, necessary to maintain communications, to the invader.with the British Isles.

After the end of World War I, Albert I appealed to the allied powers to abolish the Treaty of London (signed in 1839), by which Belgium was considered neutral country and therefore conducive to being violated and invaded in the event of a warlike confrontation, as had happened.The request of Alberto I was accepted, incorporating the measure between the points fixed in the Treaty of Versailles (1919), by which Germany had to pay Belgium large war reparations, both economic and territorial.

Alberto I personally led, until his death, the reconstruction of his country, destroyed and devastated by the occupation of German troops.It carried out effective support work in the reindustrialization of Belgium, in which the effort made in the construction of a powerful merchant fleet stands out.After having encouraged the national pride of his subjects with his direct participation in the war, Albert I established the services of voluntary work for the sake of the reconstruction of Belgium, a measure that all the political forces of the country unanimously supported, which always accepted the arbitration of the king in all serious or delicate matters of government.

In 1926, Albert I of Belgium helped introduce a monetary reform, necessary for the country, whose consequence was make the internal and external economy of Belgium more flexible.A great fan of extreme sports, he met his death while practicing mountaineering, on February 17, 1934.He was succeeded to the throne by his son Leopold III of Belgium.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arthur Penn Biography

Arthur Penn (Philadelphia, 1922-New York, 2010) American film director.After World War II he joined a theater company as an actor and attended drama classes at the Actor's Studio; in 1951 he entered the NBC television network as a program manager.In 1958 he made his first film, El lezurdo ; the cold reception he received at its premiere meant a temporary brake on his film career, but he prospered as a theater director in Broadway plays.In 1962 he returned to the cinema with The Miracle of Ana Sullivan, a film for which Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars.In 1964 he suffered a new setback with Acosado (1965), while La huría humana (1966), with Marlon Brando, was received with divided opinions.His next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), was a resounding success, finally achieving his talent.Like Bonnie and Clyde , some of his other films address the past in terms applicable to the present, and his films of the 1960s are regarded by many as the most relevant American work...
Post a Comment
Read more

Apartheid

In the history of Africa, one of the most significant moments and periods was that of Apartheid, and that consisted of a racial segregation lived in the twentieth century that lasted until the early 90s in South Africa. It is hard to believe that in a country like Africa , and specifically in Sufafrica , the colonialism of the first white powers, will end up in a period of segregation in which the black population barely had rights and that I ended up separating them from everything. Article index How it was born and what is Apartheid: In the mid-twentieth century and although the black population was mostly over the white, appears what we know as Apartheid , derived in fact from a certain white supremacy that had been imposed since the beginning of this Century (In fact in 1910 only the whites could access the Parliament and a 1913 law on indigenous lands limited the land that could be in the hands of blacks to 21 million acres. This word is translated from African...
Post a Comment
Read more

Antoni Rubió i Lluch Biography

Antoni Rubió i Lluch (Valladolid, 1856-Barcelona, ​​1937) Catalan historian and scholar.He studied at the University of Barcelona, ​​where he was a student of Milà and Fontanals.Doctor in 1878, in 1885 he succeeded his teacher in the chair of History of Literature at the University of the Catalan capital, from which he formed several generations of disciples, until his retirement in 1928.From 1908 he also held the chair of Catalan literature founded by the Catalan University Studies. He collaborated assiduously.in Catalan and Spanish, in the main academic publications in Barcelona.He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies.His trips to Italy and Greece put him in contact with the documentary and monumental sources of the history of these peoples in relation to that of Catalonia and especially with that of the period of Catalan-Aragonese domination in the Duchy of Athens.As a tutor and literary critic, he methodized the teaching of the history of Castilian literature. Am...
Post a Comment
Read more

John Bissel Carroll Biography

John Bissel Carroll (Hardford, 1916) American psychologist.Specialized in the psychology of language, he has studied the problem of different individual linguistic aptitudes and their pedagogical consequences.His works include The teaching of French as a foreign language in eight countries (1975).
Post a Comment
Read more

Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant Biography

Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (Marc Antoine Girard, lord of Saint-Amant; Quevilly, 1594-Paris, 1661) French poet.From a Protestant family, he converted to Catholicism in 1627.In Paris he became friends with Th.De Viau and frequented the literary salons, especially that of Mme.of Rambouillet.He was in the service of the Duke of Créqui and the Count of Harcourt and traveled throughout Europe.He was one of the first members of the French Academy (1634).He is the author, among other titles, of the satirical poem Ridiculous Rome (1643) and the biblical idyll Moisés saved (1643).His poetic work, condemned in his time by Boileau, has subsequently been revalued as one of the most original expressions of French lyric of his time.
Post a Comment
Read more

X-ray history

The X-rays were discovered in 1895 and from there they became a very revolutionary application in many branches of science, from astronomy to radiographs that we have not done so many times.the 120th anniversary of the X-rays knowing his inventor and the research that led him to such an important scientific advance. Article index Who invented the X-rays? The inventor or, rather, the person who discovered the X-rays was Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen , a German physicist who was focused on the field of electromagnetics Nothing else to present his discovery, Rontgen's theory received great attention from critics and public, and was translated into French, English or Russian. Although it is not a name as well known today as that of others you celebrate writers, the name of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen is written in gold letters in the medical field, where he has had and has and numerous applications.The importance of his discovery was such in his day that he was the first Nobel Prize ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eduardo Chillida Biography

Eduardo Chillida (Eduardo Chillida Juantegui; San Sebastián, 1924-2002) Spanish sculptor, considered one of the most important of the 20th century.Born into a traditional family with strong Catholic convictions, he was the third son of Pedro Chillida, a military man who would reach the rank of lieutenant colonel, and Carmen Juantegui, a housewife fond of singing who reconciled his domestic chores with practice of choral concerts within the Orfeón Donostiarra. Eduardo Chillida Eduardo Chillida studied primary and secondary school at the Colegio de los Maristas de his hometown and in 1943 he moved to Madrid to begin his career in architecture.Although he would never finish these studies (in 1947 he left the faculty to dedicate himself exclusively to drawing and sculpture), some of the precepts learned there, such as the relationship between volumes and space, would ultimately have a decisive importance in conceptual ideation.of his later sculptural works.Likewise, in those years, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jöns Jacob Berzelius Biography

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (Väfversunda, Sweden, 1779-Stockholm, 1848) Swedish chemist.Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by relatives who already noted in his school days his interest in science, especially in medicine, a discipline in which he graduated in 1802 from the University of Uppsala.His chemistry professor, J.Afzelius, had a notable influence on him and aroused his interest in chemical readings and experiments. Berzelius In 1806 he joined the faculty of the Karlberg War Academy as a professor of chemistry.In 1807 he took over the chair of medicine and pharmacology in Stockholm, whose budget was increased by the great need that the state had for military surgeons destined for the front in its confrontations with France (1805-1809 and 1812-1814) , which gave him some freedom to develop his research.In 1808 he became a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, of which he was elected perpetual secretary in 1818. In Berzelius's time, John Dalton and other chemists h...
Post a Comment
Read more

green Day Biography

Green Day American rock music group reminiscent of punk, formed in 1988 in Berkeley and made up of Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals, guitar), Mike Dirnt (bass) and Tre Cool (drums).Billie Joe Armstrong (born 1972 in California) and Mike Dirnt (whose real name is Mike Pritchard, born 1972), residents of the Californian town of Rodeo, formed the band in the late 1980s. Green Day Billie Joe Armstrong had grown up in a family of six siblings, whose father, a trucker and jazz musician, passed away when Billie Joe was ten years; Her mother, a waitress and country fanatic, gave her a year later a guitar that she still owns and plays.For her part, Mike Pritchard was the son of a heroin addict, which led to her being adopted by a couple who, in turn, divorced when Mike was seven.At the age of fifteen, Mike rented a room in Billie Joe's house. Tre Cool, whose real name was Frank Edwin Wright III, was born in 1972 in Germany, and grew up in Wilitis, a town north of San Francisco.Soon he ...
Post a Comment
Read more