Where great minds and spirits met

IN French, they call it La Grand-Place. In Dutch, De Grote Markt. Even if you don’t speak the local languages, the name is still recognisable: a big, grand place, used as a market.

It has been for centuries, serving as the beating heart of Brussels, dating back to the 1000s when the city was gradually taking shape.

Farmers from the surrounding countryside would arrive in horse carts, their loads brimming with grains, fruits, and vegetables fresh from the fields. They exchanged their produce for bolts of cloth and household items offered by peddlers.

The air was alive with the mingling scents of manure and freshly baked bread, while the shouts of vendors echoed through the square.

By the 13th century, Brussels had amassed enough wealth to construct permanent indoor markets at the northern edge of the square: separate halls for meat, bread and cloth. These stone buildings transformed a rustic gathering into a well-organised commercial centre.

Over time, power followed money. Tall and imposing civic buildings rose above the merchants’ stalls, and mayors and councillors moved in, making the square not only the city’s commercial hub but also its political centre. The majestic Town Hall still functions today, and the Grand Place remains a place where commerce, culture and civic pride intersect.

The square is one of Brussels’ most popular tourist attractions. Its cobbled surface swarms with visitors, cameras raised to capture the ornate gabled façades that surround it.

Electric vintage cars circle the perimeter for €70 (US$83) a ride, the drivers dressed in capes cut to resemble 19th-century styles, welcoming passengers with courtly gestures. The plate number of one car is Brussels-001, one with rich history.

Restaurants fill the square’s corners with the chatter of diners, their outdoor tables crowded beneath awnings. Down the narrow side streets, the air is sweetened by waffle shops with where long lines of tourists.

The Grand Place holds a deeper grandeur. Its cobblestones echo with the footsteps of exiled thinkers and wandering writers who once lived nearby.

Some of Europe’s most brilliant and troubled minds found shelter in the city of Brussels. Their homes may now be ordinary apartments or shops, but plaques on the walls whisper reminders that some of humanity’s most brilliant souls had once passed through these doors.

Drafting of communist manifesto

Brussels is a city of thousands of narrow streets, most unremarkable to the casual passer-by.

Rue Jean d’Ardenne is one such street – quiet, tucked away, lined with plain three-storey homes weathered by Belgian rain. The walls are streaked with black, bicycles lean at odd angles, and the occasional blue-and-white rubbish bag sits slumped against a lamppost.

No 50 is a four-storey building that blends into its surroundings. “Ordinary” must be a key word among any writer’s hands to describe this old building.

However, a modest metal plaque carries shock for anyone reading it. It says: Karl Marx, 1846-1848; Installed by the Ixelles Historical Society.

Everyone knows this name. Here, in this modest Brussels residence, Karl Marx lived for two years. He was expelled from Prussia and moved to France, but later, deported back.

In 1845, this wandering thinker arrived in Brussels – a frontier city willing to harbour exiles – and this house near the Grote Markt is where he once lived.

The White Swan has long been a fixture of the square.

Originally built in the 1500s to serve merchants and farmers, it was reduced to ashes during French bombardments but rebuilt in 1698. Its richly ornamented façade, glittering with baroque details, earned it the nickname “the jewel of elegance” of the Grand Place.

Over the centuries it changed hands and purposes, eventually becoming a café.

Most beautiful square

Directly across from the White Swan stands La Maison du Pigeon, the Pigeon Hotel. Like its neighbour opposite, it was destroyed in the French bombardments and rebuilt in 1698.

For centuries, it served travellers passing through Brussels, offering rest to merchants, soldiers and occasionally exiles.

In 1851, three years after Marx had departed Brussels, the Pigeon received its most celebrated guest: Victor Hugo.

Hugo had once supported Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte but turned into a fierce critic after the latter declared himself Emperor Napoleon III.

Forced into exile, Hugo fled to Belgium, where he first lodged at the Pigeon Hotel.

Hugo didn’t linger at the Pigeon long, but his time there was productive. He composed Napoléon le Petit (Napoleon the Little), his scathing denunciation of Napoleon III’s regime, a pamphlet that spread across Europe and reinforced his reputation as both a literary giant and a political conscience.

Today, a plaque on the building reminds passers-by that Hugo once lived here, gazing out at the square that awes visitors still.

A poet’s bitterness, legacy

From the Grand Place’s northeast corner, a short walk past several grey-stone churches leads to a quieter street of ageing buildings. On one of its dim walls hangs a plaque: Charles Baudelaire, 1864-1866; The Grand Mirror Hotel.

The name needs no introduction. Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), is among the greatest poets of the French language.

His verses, heavy with eroticism, decay and mortality, still appear atop best-seller lists in the Francophone world.

Yet in life, his fame was more fraught. Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857, earned him both notoriety and legal trouble.

French prosecutors accused him of obscenity; the courts banned portions of the book and fined him 300 francs, a crushing sum when a skilled worker earned only three or our francs a day.

By 1864, weary and broke, Baudelaire sought refuge in Brussels. He took up residence at the Hotel du Grand Miroir – the Grand Mirror Hotel – a modest boarding house favoured by struggling writers.

To make ends meet, he delivered lectures and sold books.

But his oratory lacked decorum. At one lecture to young female students, he startled his audience by saying, “It was with you that I lost my virginity as an orator” – a line that sent many young women fleeing in embarrassment.

During his stay, Baudelaire continued to write. Alongside poetry, he penned Pauvre Belgique! (Poor Belgium!), a manuscript filled with biting critiques of the country and its people.

Yet, rather than holding his bitterness against him, the city chose to honour his memory.

Today his former residence bears a plaque, and in 2017 the Brussels City Museum mounted an exhibition on Baudelaire, featuring Pauvre Belgique! as a central theme.

Marx, Hugo and Baudelaire were not the only intellectual exiles who found their way to Brussels.

The roll call of names who once lingered in its cafés and boarding houses reads like a who’s who of 19th-century Europe: Alexandre Dumas, Heinrich Heine, Mikhail Bakunin, and many more.

Brussels, known for its tolerance, provided them with a haven in which they could write, reflect and continue their debates with words.

That’s what makes the Grand Place grand in the spiritual sense.

While being a tourist magnet, a commercial hub, a civic square, its true grandeur lies deeper, in the layers of history and memory embedded in its stones.

It was here that Marx sharpened his theories, that Hugo praised the beauty of architecture, that Baudelaire vented his frustrations.

To walk across the square today is to tread the same ground where these restless spirits once walked.

The Grand Place is not just the heart of Brussels.

It is, in a sense, a crossroads of human history – where thought and art, politics and poetry, have converged, and where great thinkers and great writers clashed in minds.

That is what will make it truly grand for another 1,000 years. — China Daily/ANN