Jan-Baptist Verlooy - Brabant Revolution

Brabant Revolution

From the end of 1787 or beginning of 1788 on, he was regularly in contact with another advocate, Jan Frans Vonck. Vonck organised meetings with a group of advocates, usually at this home: Pieter Emmanuel de Lausnay, Martinus J.F. De Brouwer and Willem Willems. The meetings were in the Dutch language.

In the spring of 1789, Verlooy founded with Jan Frans Vonck the secret society "Pro Aris et Focis" (for Altar and Hearth), in order to prepare a rebellion against the emperor. In the fall of 1789 he became member of the "Committee of Brussels" of the "Democrats" (with J.J. Torfs, Pieter Emmanual de Lausnay, J.Bpt.D. 't Kint, A. Daubremez, C.A. Fisco and De Noter). In fact, it is Verlooy who made the proposal to Vonck to organise a secret society with the name Pro Aris et Focis tasked with the liberation of the Belgian provinces from Austrian Habsburg despotism. They would simultaneously organise the rebellion in the cities and the emigration of patriots who would create an army willing to invade the homeland, which would also be the sign for a general revolt. Verlooy justified his intentions in a Dutch pamphlet and gave an explanation of his project: “three million Belgians suffer slavery... among them not less than 700.000 are fit enough to fight and are dissatisfied; ... one could easily find 300.000 people willing to risk their goods and their blood for their homeland. But in the same way as a prison guard is able to easily keep 200.000 prisoners in control - as they are locked up in isolation - a small number of soldiers - hardly 13.000 of them - separate us and keep us in slavery.” Vonck translated the regulations of the society into French, as they had first been drawn up in Dutch, and made them commonly known in all Walloon towns and cities. Thus, the initiative of Vonck and Verlooy led from a speechless but profound irritation and isolated riots to an overt and organised revolution.

During the Brabant Revolution which then started, he was thus part of the most liberal faction of the revolutionaries, known as the Vonckisten, named after their leader.

Verlooy’s Projet raisonné d’union des Provinces Belgiques had been published on 21 January 1790. The pamphlet was instantly seized by order of the Counsellor-General Prosecutor of Brabant. Verlooy was pleading for a kind of suffrage, based on ownership of property or tax assessment but which excluded few citizens of the right to vote, while allowing separated elections for the nobility and for the clergy. He also stated precisely that the deputies of the social classes would sit together in the Grand Conseil National. Verlooy became Vice President of the Société Patriotique, founded to take the lead for democratic action, and signed immediately after Vonck, the famous Adresse from 15 March 1790 requesting better representation of the population in the States. This Adresse would force him to run away and leave Brussels for Namur in the footsteps of Vonck, and afterwards to seek temporary shelter in Givet, Rijsel and Dowaai where he tried to reconcile the two main factions of the Brabant Revolution: the rather conservative Statists and the rather liberal Vonckists. He also brought together the exiled democrats in a new secret society: Pro Patria.

Verlooy only returned to Brussels after the Habsburg governors were restored to power.