Language Crisis
Louvain-la-Neuve was born as a result of the Leuven Crisis.
Following the elections prompted by this affair, the expansion of the French-speaking part of the University was voted upon and approved on 18 June 1968. A few weeks later, the separation of the Catholic University of Leuven was made official. It resulted in the creation of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), the Dutch-speaking one, that would stay in Leuven, and the Université Catholique de Louvain, which had to move to the future site of Louvain-la-Neuve, except for the French-speaking medical faculty, which moved to Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, in the suburbs of Brussels.
The first blueprints of Louvain-la-Neuve were made in a hurry and under dramatic times. Put under the direction of Raymond Lemaire, Jean-Pierre Blondel and Pierre Laconte, this urbanistic project saw the first students arrive in 1972.
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Famous quotes containing the words language and/or crisis:
“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed crisis by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the military situation into a political situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
—Carlos Marighella (d. 1969)