Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
Well, yeah, the "real" Leopold of Belgium turns out to be a power-hungry money-grubbing cheapskate who wouldn't financially support his own sister but still tried to cultivate her daughter the future queen, at a time when it was customary for widows to rely on their own families and he was receiving some £30,000-50,000 a year in pension from the British government just for being Princess Charlotte's widower. Not to mention a crashing bore who drove a mistress to run away from his total lack of dinner-time conversation and his obsession with "drizzling", something which involves using a machine to recycle old epaulettes into new gold and silver thread.
But the past and present consensus seems to be that the Belgian Congo was a very bad place to live for a number of reasons that did indeed include needlessly amputated appendages (apologies for forgetting exactly which ones or exactly what the rationale for them being lopped off was) and apparently got even worse under that particular colonial administration.
And that's what Leopold gets associated with, even if he didn't do the lopping himself or directly order anybody else to do so.
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Actually, it was Leopold II who is associated with Belgian Kongo and chopping of
hands. Leopold I was our first king, and he was a fairly decent guy if what they thought me in school is true.