Gembloux, Duculot, 1992 ; one vol. in-8°, 189 p. Price: 780 FB. — As part of the continuing celebration of the bicentennial of the Brabant Revolution, Jérôme Vercruysse and Editions Duculot have republished Henri Pirenne's narrative history of the Belgian Revolution of 1789. Professor Vercruysse notes in his introduction to the volume that in the seventy years since the original publication of Volume IV of Pirenne's monumental Histoire de Belgique, historians have found a myriad of sources unknown to Pirenne and have published new analyses of the revolutionary period. Nevertheless, Pirenne's narrative remains valuable because of its clarity.

Vercruysse introduces the two chapters that, he explains, have been almost directly reproduced from Pirenne. He sets the context for Pirenne's account in a concise analysis. Vercruysse also provides the reader with a comprehensive chronology and a brief bibliography.

Henri Pirenne's story begins with a description of the Austrian emperor, Joseph II, as sincerely but narrowly devoted to the cause of enlightening his subjects. Joseph II returned from his first and only visit to the Belgian provinces convinced that the people were backward and the government absurd. Hence there followed a torrent of reforms. He closed monasteries and convents, asserted his control over the seminaries, and then moved to dismantle the centuries-old administration of the Belgian provinces. "Ainsi, et tout d'abord, l'antique autonomie de la Belgique se trouvait condamnée à disparaître", Pirenne concludes (p. 65-66).

The opposition mobilized and coalesced within the Belgian provinces as soon as Joseph's reforms broadened beyond his attack on religious institutions. Citing a petition from the Conseil de Flandre of 1786, Pirenne chronicles the transformation of the provincial resistance from a conflict between an enlightened monarch and a backward people to a struggle between absolutism and national sovereignty. By 1787,