Historical Tyrants 1: Leopold II of Belgium | European History

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Congo Free State, Leopold II
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Leopold II, Congo Free State, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Congo Free State
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Congo Free State, Henry Morton Stanley
5. 12:00 – 15:00: Congo Free State, George Washington Williams, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
6. 15:00 – 18:00: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leopold II

Notable quotes from "Historical Tyrants 1: Leopold II of Belgium | European History"

• Tips, dropping dirt. This time, not Belgian Earth, but rather the soil of the Congo Free State, a colonial project belonging exclusively to Leopold. And it is not breaking ground on a new museum.

  about Congo Free State · at 0:39

• Europeans had not yet claimed, Central Africa. The area now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo was largely uncharted territory for Europeans.

  about Democratic Republic of the Congo · at 4:07

• His election as chairman, and started making moves on the Congo. His agent in doing so was the adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, who recently gained fame for locating the…

  about Henry Morton Stanley · at 5:05

• Abuses could not go unrecognized for long. In 1890, the African-American soldier, Reverend, and politician George Washington Williams met Leopold II, and impressed by his rhetoric, decided to go see the Congo Free State for himself.

  about George Washington Williams · at 12:27

• His behalf. But the scandal grew in 1898. Joseph Conrad's serialized novel Heart of Darkness premiered based on his experiences as a steamboat captain in the Congo. In 1904, a…

  about Heart of Darkness · at 13:13

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Leopold II — Person · 5 mentions · first at 0:10
  The soil as a crowd applauds. Watching this ceremonial start of construction is Leopold II, the builder king, a man who is fulfilling his lifelong dream of renewing the urban…
• Henry Morton Stanley — Person · 2 mentions · first at 5:10
• George Washington Williams — Person · 1 mention · first at 12:33
• Joseph Conrad — Person · 1 mention · first at 13:15
  Her on retainer as a lobbyist to lie on his behalf. But the scandal grew in 1898. Joseph Conrad's serialized novel Heart of Darkness premiered based on his experiences as a…
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — Person · 1 mention · first at 13:32
  And by 1906, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the caricature artists at Punch magazine had also joined the fry. Meanwhile, Liupold supported a whole press office printing out.

Books & papers

• Heart of Darkness — Book · 1 mention · first at 13:19

Places & events

• Congo Free State — Place · 9 mentions · first at 0:44
• Democratic Republic of the Congo — Place · 2 mentions · first at 4:13

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Brussels 1897. A shovel stabs into the dirt, lifting up the soil as a crowd applauds. Watching this ceremonial start of construction is Leopold II, the builder king, a man who is fulfilling his lifelong dream of renewing the urban center of Belgium's capital to be as impressive as the great cities of Europe. This is Liupold's vision of Brussels. Modern architecture, museums, state buildings, ceremonial arches. He insists it will be stunning, even referring to the money financing these projects as stun funds. Meanwhile, a world away, a second shovel tips, dropping dirt. This time, not Belgian Earth, but rather the soil of the Congo Free State, a colonial project belonging exclusively to Leopold. And it is not breaking ground on a new museum.

0:53 Instead, it's spilling dirt into a pit filled with severed human hands. Despite the great distance, these scenes are part of the same story. For the brutality of one pays for the beauty of the other. Stunning indeed.

1:15 Today's historical tale is brought to you by our creator own streaming platform, Nebula. The best place to watch independent, thoughtful, and human-made shows like this one. What a piece of work, Zoe. Hey, could you get me Extra History HQ in the line? And a fresh cup of Joe would be great, bud. Thank you. It's going to be a long night. Oh, hey there. You must be the new recruit I heard was coming. Welcome to TSI. That would stand for tyrant scene investigation, but you already knew that. I take it you're here to assist in our four-part investigation into some of the most infamous tyrants in history. Well, all right. In this series, we'll open our state-of-the-art historical crime lab, where we'll run a post-mortem on leaders of the past, the manners in which they used power, what motivated their crimes, and how history remembered them. You ready? Great. Start the recorder. Lift the sheet. Subject is

2:04 Liupold II, King of the Belgians and sovereign of the Congo Free State. Date of reign 12171 1865 to 1271 1909. Let's get started. Now, at first glance, Liupold might not seem like a tyrant by traditional definition. Indeed, he is known in his own country as the builder king, who gave Belgium the kind of institutions and prestigious buildings other European capitals were known for. Domestically, his 44-year rule was stable and largely prosperous. He helped set the Belgian policy of neutrality and his time in power saw an expansion of rights for the populace, including the founding of public schools, institution of child labor laws, the right of workers to form unions, and universal male suffrage in 1893. Far from being an autocrat, the monarchy's power over Belgian politics actually shrank over his reign. Indeed, he was only the second ever monarch of Belgium, a country that had broken from the

3:02 Netherlands in revolution, and invited his father Leopold I to be its king. But it was not Belgium that Leopold II would rule as a tyrant, but rather a place he never personally set eyes upon and ruled largely through ledgers, the Congo Free State. Ever since his youth, Leopold had been an avid promoter of colonialism. While crown prince, he served in the Belgian army, traveling to North Africa, India, Egypt, and China, where he observed and studied the various types of imperialist measures European states were taking. The one he found most striking was the Dutch in Java, whose regime of forced labor he frequently cited as a potential model. During his service in the Senate, yes, he was actually simultaneously a senator, a military officer, and heir to the throne, he began to heavily push the concept of Belgian expansion, an effort he tried to carry forward after he was crowned king and attempted to buy the

3:58 Philippines from Spain, which as you can imagine was wholly unsuccessful. So with this easy route to empire shutdown, he started to look at the largest area that Europeans had not yet claimed, Central Africa. The area now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo was largely uncharted territory for Europeans. Famously inhospitable due to terrain, indigenous resistance, climate, and endemic diseases. Despite that, by 1876, Leupold had personally decided to seize the region. That year, he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference, a gathering aimed at founding an organization he could use as a cover for a colonialist venture in the region. The International African Association he claimed would be a philanthropic organization that brought civilization to the Congo by improving the lives of native people, missionary work, and opening it to free trade. His biggest claim, though, was that it would combat

4:55 the Islamic slave trade operating out of Zanzibar, which was a popular cause among abolitionists in Europe. Liupold got his organization, then engineered his election as chairman, and started making moves on the Congo. His agent in doing so was the adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, who recently gained fame for locating the explorer Dr. Henry Livingstone. You know, like from the phrase Dr. Livingstone, I presume. Yeah, that guy. However, Stanley was also widely known as untrustworthy and cruel, making him a perfect vessel for Leopold's expansionist dreams. Stanley went deep into the Congo, locating tribes and getting them to sign treaties in exchange for annual gifts of cloth.

5:37 These treaties were horrendous, quite literally convincing the headmen of indigenous groups to make marks on documents they thought were non-aggression pacts between them and Leopold, but in reality gave up their sovereignty. declared them subjects of Leopold II and gave him the rights to extract taxes in the form of goods and labor. Meanwhile, back in Brussels, Leopold formed a series of other organizations with similar names to the International African Association. This confusion though was intentional on his part since Leopold intended to play a shell game of which groups were engaging in social causes and which were nakedly political or commercial. And that worked to his advantage at the Berlin Conference of 1884 through 1885 where the great powers of Europe plus the United States gathered to systemize the scramble for Africa and avoid a conflict between European states. Using Stanley's

6:36 stack of treaties and his group of prominent philanthropic organizations, Leupold won exclusive rights to most of the Congo basin. Apart from losing a small chunk to France and being unable to charge customs on river traffic, Liupole basically got everything he wanted. He now effectively ruled as absolute monarch over the Congo Free State, a piece of territory far larger than Belgium with a population several times larger than his European Kingdom. All government employees in the Congo Free State would be Belgian, as would most of the officers in the force public, its military/p police force/resource extraction enforcers. A few years into his administration of the Congo Free State, Leupold declared all quote unclaimed land to be property of the state, meaning property of its monarch, making Leupold not only the sovereign, but the owner of most of its land. And if Liupold owned the land, he

7:34 also owned the resources on it, meaning he could set the price he paid local people for extracting it. Essentially, he'd created a massive monopoly. So, look, I know this is a lot of information. But these careful preparations and attempt to cover his tracks show that Leopold's crimes were premeditated. Unlike other tyrants we'll be examining in this series, these acts were not carried out due to paranoia, a lust for power, or even a response to real or perceived threats. Leupold wanted money, plain and simple, for himself and for his projects. Perhaps this is not surprising when you look at his character. Leopold was, even in his personal life, cold, misanthropic, and frequently cruel. He lived simply, decrying even regular baths or laundry service as quote extravagance. As a child, his mother and brother had died young, and he'd been kept at arms length from his father. Then, as a young boy

8:30 with no real friends, he often only valued people for what they could do for him. Later in life, his daughter's most lasting childhood memories would be of being punished. He drove his wife away and did little to hide a string of teenaged mistresses. Now, since he did what he liked to all those closest to him, regardless of the impact on them, you can probably infer how he treated people who were not close to him, like the Congalles. And we won't belabor the point too much because I think you can see that this is the part of the tale that's going to get incredibly brutal and dark. So, viewer discretion from here on out is very much advised. The Congo Free State was a vehicle for monetary extraction carried out largely by private partnerships with commercial interests where half of the profits went to Liupold. When the initial ivory economy failed to pay off, yeah, by the way, he seized a huge chunk of Africa

9:24 without actually knowing which resources he planned to exploit. Henry Morton Stanley recommended he switch to rubber, which was becoming a valuable commodity internationally. Better still, though formal rubber plantations were being set up in various parts of South America and Asia, it would be decades before they started to fully produce, meaning Leopold had about 20 years to make bank as fast as he possibly could. commercial concerns and local allies began sending workers out to tap rubber trees, extracting a daily quota, and the forced public went to work enforcing those quotas, using torture, sexual assault, hostage taking, and murder as their primary tactics. Their most infamous weapon in this regard was a hippo hide whip, which could lash a person to death if applied heavily. They came into villages and kidnapped women and children, holding them hostage while the men went out to make quota. Should they

10:21 not return fast enough or with enough rubber, they killed hostages or cut off their right hands. At times, they'd take young males and press gang them into the force public since congalles made up the ranks below officer. These pressganged children would then be forced to fight slave raiding parties from Zanzibar. The irony should not be lost or skipped over here. Liupold had partially taken control of the Congo because he'd pledged to battle the slave trade. Instead, he had effectively enslaved young boys as soldiers to fight the slave trade, then also used them to enslave villages into gathering rubber.

11:02 Yet, service in the force public was no escape from the horror. Its European officers died at an extraordinary rate from disease and due to food production stalling from the chaos, local troops were regularly malnourished and starving. Despite that, they were forbidden to use their rifles for hunting. In fact, Belgian authorities accounted for every bullet exactly, issuing them in extremely small numbers. This was partially to prevent an uprising since the Indian mutiny of 1857 was still fresh in the minds of European colonials, creating a paranoia about issuing local troops modern equipment and stores of ammunition. Also, bullets were expensive to ship, making them a precious commodity in and of themselves.

11:50 As a result, free state administrators created a system where each time a soldier in the force public fired a bullet, they had to account for it by delivering the severed right hand of the person killed. This created effectively both a formal market and a black market for human hands. Soldiers would cut off hands so they could barter the bullets for goods. They'd shoot game to prevent starving, then raid a village for however many hands they needed to present. And colonial officers were actually put in charge of keeping track of these dismembered appendages. Such abuses could not go unrecognized for long. In 1890, the African-American soldier, Reverend, and politician George Washington Williams met Leopold II, and impressed by his rhetoric, decided to go see the Congo Free State for himself.

12:43 What he found there appalled him. So he wrote what he saw in an open letter to Leupold and the US government, helping popularize the term crimes against humanity. Now at this point, Leopold could have taken an out. He could have falsely denied knowledge of the abuses and pledged reform. Instead though, he simply hired a journalist to write a propagandistic account of her stage managed trip to the free state and keep her on retainer as a lobbyist to lie on his behalf. But the scandal grew in 1898. Joseph Conrad's serialized novel Heart of Darkness premiered based on his experiences as a steamboat captain in the Congo. In 1904, a British government report by Roger Caseasement, who you can learn more about in our Easter Rising series, condemned what he found there.

13:32 And by 1906, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the caricature artists at Punch magazine had also joined the fry. Meanwhile, Liupold supported a whole press office printing out propaganda. Though, this was not the only PR crisis he had to deal with. Around 1889, the then 64year-old Leupold had become infatuated with a 16-year-old French sex worker who he made a baroness and showered with much of the profits of the free state, a fact that helped sink his reputation. Though even so, some Belgians still saw him as the builder king. And you know, if he harrowed some of the Congo to facilitate that urban renewal, well, I mean, [clears throat] despite some of that public indifference, by 1908, these scandals had become so intolerable that liberals and Catholics in the Senate forced Leopold to seed the Congo Free State to Belgian government control.

14:29 Unfortunately, this also meant giving him a massive buyout from the public purse, some of it directed towards his building projects. Though before handing over control of the Free State, he did order its archives burned, stating, quote, "They have no right to know what I did there." He died the next year, immensely rich, reigning exactly 44 years over Belgium, and it is estimated that his 24 years of rule over the Congo Free State cost 10 million lives, though perhaps even more. Because though the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960, Leopold II's damage arguably continues. His practice of forced labor set a reoccurring pattern.

15:16 And to this day, rival militia groups in the Congo will seize mines and use violence to extract rare earth minerals. In 2025, the DRC produced 70% of the world's cobalt. Final post-mortem report. Leupold was in some ways a very modern tyrant. One who used public private partnerships in his oppression, who engaged propaganda and the press in order to shape narratives, and who intentionally obscured or covered up his crimes. He kept the inhumity and violence of his rule overseas, far from the public, which could check his excesses, and who made citizens complicit by arguing that his massacres were in the interest of the populace. He ordered mass death for profit, a tyrant recognizable around the world today. But while he is the most modern tyrant the TSI is going to be investigating in this series, the one in the next drawer over is quite literally biblical. Herod the Great, the villain of the New Testament. Now, spoiler

16:21 alert, dude did try to kill Jesus. But then again, like, did he though? Well, we're going to tell you all about the twists and turns of that tyrannical tale in 2 weeks when it launches on YouTube. Or you could watch it adree right now over on Nebula, a streaming service a bunch of my creator friends and I helped build. But Matt, I hear you asking from the other side of that screen, why do you still have your Christmas lights up? Shh, come on, man. Don't don't wrap me out. But the other thing you might be asking is, "I don't have a Nebula account. What do I do?" Well, today is your lucky day because you could use our link go.nebula.tv/extrahistory to get a free 3-day trial, which is more than enough time to watch our Herod the Great episode, but not enough time to watch the thousands of other great shows on Nebula. Though, I do dare you to try.

17:09 If you accept, you could start with game shows from the Wendover crew like Jet Lag and The Getaway. Move on to films like Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend by Abigail Thorne and The Dinner Plan by Patrick Williams, both of which are delicious, by the way. Then catch some comedy series like the longrunning NYC standup show Abolish Everything, which I am on both seasons of, or Amy's Deadend Dreamhouse from Maggie May Fish. And then you can check out exclusive deep dive documentary series from real life lore like Mad Kings and War Room. And then once you experience Nebula for yourself and realize that it is the best deal in streaming, our link again, that's go.bula.tv TV/extrahistory gets you 50% off your annual subscription.

17:47 Just click the link below or scan the QR code right over here to lock it all in. And when you do, you'll be directly funding the creation of more shows for you to watch on Nebula and helping out our channel in the process. Again, thank you so much for that. Again, get access to Nebula by clicking or scanning here or stay on the YouTube machine and check out our next video here, though one will have ads sadly. Good news, everyone. Angelo Valenciana, Dominic Valenciana, Friso Van Santin, Hunter Z, Joseph Bla, Lotus Wolf, Thomas Tate, and Zelad's architectures are patrons so legendary I can't even put it into words. Wait, did I just do that?

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Historical Tyrants 1: Leopold II of Belgium | European History"?

In order: 0:00 Congo Free State, Leopold II; 3:00 Leopold II, Congo Free State, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley; 6:00 Congo Free State; 9:00 Congo Free State, Henry Morton Stanley; 12:00 Congo Free State, George Washington Williams, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad; 15:00 Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leopold II.

What is mentioned in this Extra History episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Congo Free State, Leopold II, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley, George Washington Williams, Joseph Conrad. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Historical Tyrants 1: Leopold II of Belgium | European History"?

The episode runs 18 min; the transcript is about 2,976 words in 22 timestamped sections.

More from Extra History

• All analyzed episodes
• Books mentioned on Extra History
• People mentioned on Extra History
• Topics mentioned on Extra History