Jan-Baptist Verlooy - Occupation By The French

Occupation By The French

Verlooy’s enlightened ideas facilitated his choice for collaboration with the French during their military occupation of the Southern Netherlands. The Battle of Jemappes reignited his revolutionary fervour and he passionately dedicated himself again to politics. He was elected a provisory Brussels Deputy and became one of those tasked with visiting prisons to liberate those detainees who could be regarded as victims of arbitrariness or gothic and feudal laws. In the Treurenberg prison, Verlooy and the other investigators found only debtors. They also established that in the madhouses several individuals were detained rather for inhumane reasons than any natural disability. In the prison of Vilvoorde, they discovered prisoners who were detained due to not well-founded verdicts.

As a Deputy, Verlooy got into conflict with the majority of the provisory Deputy’s of Brussels, as he was anxious to establish a Belgian republic at once. Together with other radical democrats, he defended the immediate establishment of a central provisional government, whereas moderate democrats led by Cornet de Grez supported the election of a Convention nationale. Both parties tried in vain to get the support of the French General Dumouriez, commander of the French army of occupation.

When the foundation of a Belgian democratic republic seemed to be fruitless and as the policy of the French government proceeded from revolutionary intervention to annexation, Verlooy declared himself to be in favour of union with France.

On 15 January 1793 he published a Dutch pamphlet of forty pages, Zijn Geloof, Vryheyd en Eygendommen in gevaer ? (Are faith, freedom and property in danger?), in which he accused the privileged whom he thought to have become partisans of Austria and who would have called for the return of the Germans. Verlooy supported also the policy of the French Revolution towards religion.

In 1795 (18 Nivôse an III), he was appointed Mayor (maire) of the City of Brussels. While the French were at war with the whole civilised world of those days as well as demanding enormous efforts from the Belgians whose homeland they were simultaneously reshaping, Verlooy and his colleagues had the ungrateful task to protect their fellow citizens courageously and with dignity against the abuse and the atrocities of the new rulers. Verlooy did not keep his function as maire of Brussels for long: he withdrew from public life as soon as he saw through the real nature of the new regime and because he was also experiencing health problems. His health was already failing as a result of it being overstrained by what he went through during the Pro Aris et Focis episode of his life. He resigned as Mayor on the 10 Prairial, an III. On 1 November 1795 (10 Brumaire an IV), he led a delegation of Belgian patriots who came to find the representatives of the people, the commissaires of the Pérès and Portiez de l’Oise government who had arrived in Brussels with a mission, in order to warn them about the abuse with which the appointment to public functions is made and is renewed since the victorious arrival of the republican troops .... Appointed Judge of the Civil Court of the Department of the Dijle on 7 Frimair an IV (28 November 1795), Verlooy was forced to refuse this public function because of his health.

Verlooy died on 15 Floréal, an V (4 May 1797). His death had hardly been noticed in Brussels.