Where did the bodies of the soldiers killed at Waterloo go? This question is on the lips of all historians who have studied the aftermath of the battle. It also appeals to visitors that the Brabant plain welcomes and who hope to find one or more cemeteries, as is often the case for places of memory of the world wars.
Many witnesses of the time have recounted, whether in writing or through spectacular engravings, the thread of events in the days following June 18, 1815. The dead, sometimes burned on funeral pyres, were buried hastily into mass graves (1). Despite the abundant documentation making it possible to locate the locations of the mass graves, archaeologists struggle to find the slightest human remains. Only two skeletons were discovered between 2012 and 2022, despite increasingly sophisticated techniques (2).
Historiography has repeatedly attempted to explain this mystery. The theory most often cited is that of the exhumation of the skeletons in the 1820s and their export to England, where they were transformed into powder, rich in phosphate, intended for spreading on crops. This practice was first mentioned in 1822 in the British press (3). The exploitation of bones by agriculture is not a fantasy but a proven practice that then tends to develop (4). However, no archive document allows us to verify the alarmist assertions of the English daily newspapers about Waterloo. No local authority noted any exhumation and no witness confirmed the facts in the 1820s
Using both history and archaeology, the three authors of the present study aim to formulate an alternative theory and support it through numerous new sources, multiple testimonies, and recent archaeological discoveries. In this article, it will be highlighted that the bodies of Waterloo were mainly unearthed not in the 1820s but after 1833 when the value of the bones rose drastically due to the demand created by the beet industry sugar factory, which had just settled in the Braine-l'Alleud region. It will be argued that the peasants, who benefited from the silence and a certain tolerance from local and national authorities, shamelessly sold the bones of the dead with the complicity of Belgian and foreign investors.
The authors of this research will first discuss the exploitation of the remains of the dead during the Napoleonic battles in Europe after 1815. They will then present the archaeological and historical evidence concerning the fate of the soldiers who died at Waterloo.
The trade-in of soldiers' bones in Europe
The aim of this article is not to trace the fate of the corpses of soldiers killed during the Napoleonic Wars, a subject which will be the subject of another publication, but it still seems crucial to understand the context before looking into the Brabant Plain. Indeed, the fate of the bones of battle victims is closely linked to the development of agriculture at the end of the 18th century and to the food industry. Parallel trends are observed in different regions.
At the beginning of the 19th century, bone was a prized material in Great Britain, where its rich phosphate content made it possible to fertilize fields. The first animal bones were ground in mills as early as 1780 but the practice became popular in 1819 when English merchants scoured port towns in search of the precious material. The bones are theoretically taken from the bodies of animals, but numerous reports indicate that human remains are also sold illegally by unscrupulous traders.
This phenomenon, however, is not as important for our research as the rise of a branch of the food industry. Following the continental blockade ordered by Napoleon, a serious blow was dealt to the sugar supply in Europe. To obtain this raw material, it is then necessary to turn to the exploitation of sugar beets. Extraction techniques, perfected in Germany in 1805-1806 and popularized in France in 1811, made it possible in a few years to make sugar a commodity accessible to all. In 1811, the French industrialist Derosne popularized the use of animal charcoal, also called animal black, to purify beet syrup by filtration.
In just four years, the industry adopted this material, obtained by cooking animal bones, often slaughterhouse leftovers. The bone market, which was previously reserved for the poorest classes, became a lucrative business but, as a disastrous consequence, the temptation to sell human remains was great, despite the bans on illegal exhumations. We observed the first looting of mass graves of soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars as early as 1819-1821 in Lübeck and Hamburg. Numerous incidents are referenced in the German states in the 1820s and 1830s. The rapid rise of the sugar industry claimed other victims: ancient cemeteries, pits of plague victims, and no place of eternal rest seems to be found. shelters of speculators (5).
The case of Waterloo
The examples mentioned above allow us to understand the European context and to measure the extent to which the practice of pillaging the graves of Napoleonic soldiers seemed common at the time. We must now turn our attention to the case of Waterloo. Let us turn first to archaeology. The battlefield has been the subject of excavations since 2015. The period engravings, which represent the mass graves, as well as the accounts of witnesses to the burials make it possible to determine the sites which deserve to be investigated as a priority. Technologies also highlight anomalies in the ground, all signs of potential mass graves. For these reasons, Belgian-British teams have examined the lands of Hougoumont, Mont-Saint-Jean, and La Haye Sainte on several occasions. Archaeologists have no difficulty locating traces of the battle. Objects, bullets, residue, everything shows the violence of the fighting of 1815. However, the bodies of the soldiers remain untraceable. A skeleton was exhumed in 2012, and another in 2022, a very meager reward for so much effort (6). This absence of bodies, as disappointing as it may be for those in the field, is nonetheless interesting. It helps prove that the bones are no longer where they should be. Archeology cannot of course determine the fate of the missing skeletons of dead soldiers; it is up to historians to do so.
As we stated at the outset, the sources concerning widespread exploitation of the bones of those killed on June 18, 1815, were few before the 1830s. The opinion that predominates today, namely the reduction into fertilizer powder of human remains around 1822, seems impossible to verify. Only one or another article in the international press of the time mentioned the fact: “It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and non-human bones were imported last year from the continent European to the port of Hull. The neighborhoods of Leipsic [sic], Austerlitz, Waterloo, and all those places where, during the last bloody war, the principal battles were fought, are filled with the bones of heroes and the horses they rode. » (7) The lack of details makes the news doubtful. The article tells us nothing about the authors of such profanations and keeps silent about any factual element. The English press is not the only one to peddle this story.
Other mentions can be found in Dutch and German newspapers and books. Thus, the Zeitungs und Conversations Lexikon, volume 2, states: “Before that, in the Netherlands, they cleaned the bones of thousands of horses from the battlefield of Waterloo. Some went to England, others were burned and crushed. The next generation will not spare mass graves and will transform their substance into vegetation. » (8) It is not impossible that bones were taken shortly after the Battle of Waterloo or during the decade that followed. However, we must remain cautious given the absence of factual elements and evidence in the archives of local authorities. In any case, there is no indication that large-scale exploitation took place between 1815 and 1832.
The period which began in 1833-1834 is much more decisive for the deaths of Waterloo. It corresponds to the explosion of the sugar industry in Belgium, a large consumer of bones, and the development of sugar beet cultivation. It seems crucial to contextualize the bone market on a national scale and the general trends observed over the years.
On September 14, 1824, a parliamentary resolution prohibited the export of bones, except those from which the gelatin had been previously extracted (9). This measure aims to protect manufacturers of gelatinous glue, particularly popular in cabinetmaking. At the time, the value of the bone was very low and the harvest was carried out by the poorest classes. The situation changed at the beginning of the 1830s, a decade that marked the explosion in the price of this very particular raw material. On January 28, 1833, a citizen of Liège submitted a petition to parliament to lift the ban on the export of bones abroad. A few years earlier, one hundred kilos of bones sold for two francs while the average price in 1833 was around 7.5 francs. Selling across borders is all the more interesting as the French tax exports heavily, more than 20 francs per hundred kilos (10). On March 25, 1834, a new law liberalized the bone trade abroad, although subject to a tax of 5 francs per thousand kilos, an anecdotal sum compared to that decided by France. This was a pivotal period in this trade, as the table below illustrates.
These data, taken from Belgian parliamentary debates, prove the explosion of the bone market in French industry, where this raw material is transformed into bone charcoal, called animal black at the time, used for its filtering properties. by the sugar industry. As the liberal parliamentarian Léopold Zoude summarizes: “Beet sugar requires very considerable use of animal black: the quantity it requires is a third by weight of the sugar manufactured. Thus, from the first year, these establishments need half a million black, which represents a million kilograms of bones. » (11) Unsurprisingly, this request leads to a lot of fraud. The same representative declares: “The export is much greater than the quantities declared, and however accurate and rigorous the surveillance at the border offices may be, it is impossible to prevent the fraud which takes place; this fraud, says the Tournay Chamber of Commerce, results from the difficulty of controlling the declarations on exit. Stinky bones are exported by the full load, without packaging, and in a way that makes verification almost impossible. » (12)
The sugar industry
The explosion in exports goes hand in hand with a notable increase in internal demand, which neither slaughterhouses nor butchers can meet. From 1833, numerous sugar factories were created in Belgium. Parliamentarians are the first to lament the departure of national bones to France, where sellers obtain a much higher price. François Donny, deputy of the Catholic party, uses a factory in Ostend as an example to illustrate the shortage affecting the country: “It works using processes imported from England, consumes a very large quantity of bones and pours into the trade in products so satisfactory that at each of the industry exhibitions it obtained medals. Well, the owners of this factory wrote to me that if the current order of things continues, they will be obliged to close their factories, and this is because of the extreme difficulty they experience in obtaining the raw materials they need. » (13)
In 1834 and in the years that followed, the sugar industry was established in the Waterloo region. The location, rural but close to the capital, well connected to the road network, and surrounded by fields, is ideal. Immediately, the peasants began to transform the landscape of the battlefield. A table of the Braine-l'Alleud harvests in 1827 tells us that at the time wheat, meslin, rye, barley, oats, potatoes, and buckwheat were mainly grown. (14). Eight years later, sugar beets are gaining ground. This phenomenon is admirably described by a traveler in the newspaper L’Independence Belge: “I look up; I rub them, to be sure that I am not the toy of the illusions of my sleep. No more forest! No more tall trees embracing like an immense enclosure in this last arena of nations! No more strangled highways as far as the eye can see between their robust trunks! The plain continuing the plain, the earth razed everywhere, the sky surprised to see bare and barren lines on the horizon! – What does this mean, I cried, shaking my excellent friend, who had caught up on his good sleep. “What’s the matter?” he replied, drowsily. – The fact is that I can no longer see the forest. – You will see her half a league away. – But around the Waterloo plain? – Cleared. – Cleared! And since when? – For more than four years, to plant beets. –Beets? what's the point? – Parbleu! to make sugar. […] From the beet where the great centuries-old trees grew under which the nations passed to meet the destiny of a great man! Beetroot in place of a magnificent historic forest. If only it were wheat! Man must eat and in his insatiable needs, he would plow to Calvary. But for sugar! having mutilated the greatest memory in modern history for sugar! He who fought by the beet will perish by the beet. This is the fruit of your continental blockade, oh great Napoleon. » (15)
In addition to the cultivation of beets, there was the creation of a gigantic sugar production factory, pompously called the "National Sugar Refinery", located near the Tervuren road in Waterloo, less than five kilometers from the battlefield. (16). Another factory was set up near the mill drive, west of the town of Waterloo (17). Animal black factories, when it is not produced within the industry itself, are also located nearby. This phenomenon is not unique since there is also a bone charcoal factory near Quatre-Bras and in Fleurus, near the grounds where the battles of Ligny in 1815 and Fleurus in 1690 and 1794 took place (18 ).
The sources show: that the industry most dependent on bones is present in force where Wellington and Napoleon clashed. She must fight to find a raw material that has become expensive, and rare and is the subject of international trafficking denounced even in the Belgian parliament. Although many clues already allow us to guess the fate reserved for the soldiers who died on June 18, 1815, concrete facts still need to be provided. The French press of the time was filled with rumors concerning the trafficking of bones from the “morne plaine”.
L'Indépendant of August 23, 1835, mentions the following fact: "A company of industrialists has just purchased permission to search the battlefield of Waterloo, to remove the bones of the dead, which are piled up there in such large quantities number, and to make animal black. Remove the bones of the brave people who died on the field of honor, to make them into black animals! A single fact of this kind is enough to characterize an epoch” (19).
Other titles relay these speculations, such as La Presse: “We experience the feeling of disgust and shame with which the peasants of Waterloo blush, seeing speculators who flea market noble bones scattered on the battlefield, and that they intend to transform it into animal black” (20) or even the Echo of Commerce: “Every day we see convoys of cars passing through the Mons gate coming from abroad loaded with materials suitable for feeding animal black. Bones sell very expensively in France, especially in the Nord department; Belgium also sends us lots of them. All these convoys are heading towards the animal black factories, the products of which are necessary for our beet sweets. The stores of bones that are transported there rise in the open air, and the eye does not feel a little surprised at the sight of these high pyramids, such as we see at Marly, all built from the remains of animals, in in the midst of which human remains are too often not seen. However, where do these piles of debris come from? There is on the border of Belgium more than one battlefield where the earth covers thousands of dead; at Waterloo especially great was the number […]. » (21)
Les rapports conservés aux archives
Il serait étonnant qu’autant d’histoires naissent uniquement de l’imagination fertile de journalistes. Il en faut toutefois plus pour confirmer l’hypothèse choquante d’une exploitation des ossements des morts de Waterloo. C’est pourtant ce qui ressort des archives communales de Braine-l’Alleud et de Plancenoit, où l’on trouve plusieurs rapports et lettres entre différents niveaux de pouvoir.
Un premier procès-verbal, au sujet de champs ouverts illégalement, est envoyé au juge d’instruction de Nivelles en avril 1834. Le bourgmestre de Braine-l’Alleud affirme qu’« il est impossible d’en connaitre les auteurs autrement que par présomption suffisante pour les convaincre » (22). Des rapports ultérieurs révèlent que des exhumations illégales se sont déroulées dans les charniers de Braine-l’Alleud et Plancenoit en avril 1835. Les bourgmestres sont d’ailleurs tenus d’avertir l’autorité supérieure, le commissaire d’arrondissement (23). Ce dernier demande aux pouvoirs locaux de se mettre en contact avec le commandant de gendarmerie à Waterloo afin de faire cesser cette activité, punie par l’article 360 du code pénal (24).
The reaction of the mayor of Braine-l’Alleud is particularly interesting. His main measure is to draft a proclamation which he displays in his commune and neighboring entities. This deserves to be reproduced in full: “The mayor. Excavations to unearth bones in the 1815 battlefield having been carried out, the undersigned was ordered to inform the inhabitants of his commune and neighboring communes that these facts are one of those provided for by article 360 of the penal code and punishable by imprisonment of three months to one year and a fine of 10 francs to 200 francs. Consequently, the owners and cultivators of land located on the battlefield cannot violate or allow to be violated the graves made on their property, and the administrative authorities and judicial police officers are invited to note the offenses of this type that could be committed. even now. » (25).
It is striking to note that this notice is addressed to landowners and farmers. These are the most likely to turn over the earth and transport large volumes without being noticed and must inevitably be confronted, also shortly after the battle, with numerous human remains and even mass graves. This is all the more plausible as sugar beets require particularly deep digging, as Parliamentarian Desmet explains: “To cultivate beets well, it is necessary to plow the land very deeply and with great care. » (26)
Other sources from the Belgian authorities would have made it possible to document with more accuracy the consequences of these illegal exhumations. Unfortunately, the contemporary archives of the Waterloo gendarmerie, as well as the reports of the district commissioner, were destroyed. Still, there is enough significant evidence to suggest systematic trading.
Testimonials
The writings of various foreign witnesses – we will cite only two here but others are accessible – allow us to learn more, such as that of Karl von Leonhard, a renowned geologist from Rumpenheim, who visited the battlefield around 1840 Near the farm of La Haye Sainte, he was surprised to see open pits near which several individuals were busy. His guide explains to him, a little confused, that the farmers are busy digging up bones on behalf of Brussels speculators dispatched by the industry. Questioned by the German tourist, the farmers claimed to only sell the remains of horses, before admitting to trading in the bones of soldiers of the Imperial Guard, so large that they could be confused with those of ungulates (27). The mayor having threatened his constituents regarding the exhumations in 1835, it is unlikely that they would admit more openly the dubious transactions in which they engaged.
Another testimony, from a French citizen, was published in the very serious Journal of Practical Medical Knowledge in 1858. The author, Doctor Caffe, who lost a brother at the Battle of Waterloo, states the following fact: " I do not forget having seen the same searches carried out at Waterloo, where I had the misfortune of losing a brother. And the bones, transformed into animal black, went to clarify the beet sugars of Belgium and the northern departments. » (28)
A major taboo
We should not see the trade in human remains as a big cabal but rather as the desire of penniless farmers to improve their daily lives thanks to a demanded and abundant resource. The weight of the bones of 10,000 dead and 10,000 horses, a low estimate but it is not our objective to debate the precise number of victims at Waterloo, is approximately 540,000 kg (29). Knowing that in 1837, 100 kg sold for 14 francs, there were therefore at least 75,600 francs, a considerable sum at a time when a kilo of bread sold for 0.25 francs, to be exploited in the plains of Braine-l 'Alleud and surrounding areas.
The mayors have no interest in putting an end to this lucrative industry which enriches their citizens as well as the region. It is also reasonable to wonder whether the opinion published in 1835 was not written to appease the international press, scandalized by the practice. It is in any case clear, given the testimonies of foreign tourists who target the places, that the looters of mass graves do not seem to fear the authorities. There is no mention of arrest for burial violation in the press of the time or in the municipal archives.
The question of the moral aspect remains to be addressed. Is it credible that peasants engage in grave violations, which nevertheless constitute a major taboo? Part of the answer is provided by Éric Bousman, professor of history at UCLouvain, who affirms that the inhabitants of the time did not feel concerned by this battle fought mainly by foreign nations. They suffer the destruction but do not integrate the event, “as if superimposed on the land”. “The battle was something imported, something that foreign armies (for the most part) had fought, in the middle of “our” fields and “our” farms. " (30)
It was only in the 1950s that the region was reclaimed on June 18, 1815. The farmers of the first half of the 19th century, little emotionally involved and attracted by the prospect of easy money, did not that there are few reasons to respect mass graves, a state of affairs that is found everywhere else in Europe.
Conclusions
The sources highlighted allow us to affirm that trade in the remains of soldiers killed during the Napoleonic wars was organized on a large scale during the first part of the 19th century. The writings of the municipal authorities show that the battlefield of Waterloo is not spared from this European phenomenon. Several pieces of evidence highlight the responsibility of farmers and the sugar industry, a large consumer of bones, mainly used to purify syrup from beetroot.
This article is only the beginning of a larger research that will focus on other battlefields, whether in Belgium or elsewhere. Archeology also has a role to play. Excavating old mass graves that were emptied, makes it possible to fill the lack of sources and to measure by other means the extent of this particularly shocking looting.
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