'Ende want van onzer stadt van Nivele vergheten was daer inne'. Nivelles, le Brabant wallon et la charte de Cortenberg: une présence ténue dans la mémoire et dans les faits?

Bousmar, Eric
(2012) XVIde colloquium ‘De Brabantse Stad’: « Het Charter van Kortenberg (1312) als inspiratiebron voor stedelijke identiteit en herinneringscultuur in het oude hertogdom Brabant (veertiende-twintigste eeuw) / La charte de Cortenberg (1312) : source d’inspiration pour l’identité urbaine et mémoire culturelle dans l’ancien duché de Brabant (XIVe-XXe siècle) » — Location: ’s-Hertogenbosch (14.October.2011)

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Abstract
The 1312 charter of Cortenberg is not part of the collective memory in modern and contemporary Walloon Brabant. The town of Nivelles was the most likely to develop such a memory, being the only town from the area to delegate a member in the late medieval Council of Cortenberg as well as –until 1995- the historical chief city of Walloon Brabant. Nevertheless, it did not. During the Brabantine Revolution (late 18th C.), the charter of Cortenberg was not alluded to as a polical argument and later, in the 19th-21st C., it played no role in the local historical culture. Two explanations may be found to this situation. The southern, French-speaking, part of the late medieval Duchy of Brabant weighed little in terms of politics, economy and demography as compared to the Dutch-speaking part. The political culture of the Duchy was predominantly Dutch-speaking. Not a single Walloon acted as a representative of the towns in the Council established in 1312 by the so-called Charter of Cortenberg, albeit four Walloon cities or boroughs had been present at the scealing. Only 20 years later, the city of Nivelles was allowed to sent a representative to the Council. From then on, he was the only Walloon urban member in this Council. As we see, the historical facts did not offer any glorious place for Nivelles in a Brabantine narrative. The role of the city, although real, remained a minor one. A second explanation lies in the existence of an alternative memory, that was cultivated by local elites and that revealed to be by far more powerful. In the 19th-21st C. the town landscape is dominated by its Collegiate Church, the remnent of the Chapter suppressed during the French Period (1798) and of the abbey founded by S. Gertrud. It was the founding abbess (whose father was the direct ancestor of the Carolingians), the old Chapter and the successive abbesses ruling the City that the local population commemorated, not the subversive communal autonomy or the Brabantine realm. This appears very clearly on several interconnected occassions : the 1930 historical pageant celebrating Hundred Years of Belgian Independance, the annual procession of S. Gertrud, the processional Giants as featured in the reality as well as heroes in the dialectal litterature, the various administrative, commercial and touristic uses of the past in the city, the local historical vulgarisation. In this way, Nivelles was not seen as a second-rank town but indeed fancied itself as the cradle of the Carolingian dynasty. Consequently, Nivelles did not emphasize the municipal autonomy or the intra-urban Brabantine solidarity against the authority, but a very local solidarity built around the old feudal power of the abbess. Even today, in a secularised world, this configuration remains. In Nivelles, the collective memory of the Ancien Régime is oriented towards the intra muros and not towards the Duchy of which the City was part. Even in a « simplified » way, this configuration of memory is still today the support of a strong local identity.
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Bousmar, E. (2012). ‘Ende want van onzer stadt van Nivele vergheten was daer inne’. Nivelles, le Brabant wallon et la charte de Cortenberg: une présence ténue dans la mémoire et dans les faits? Noordbrabants Historisch Jaarboek, 29(2012), ésentation de l’auteur p. 253. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/246147 (Original work published 2012)