Marius Renard - Le Hainaut - 1905

Hainaut, Industry, Trade, Administration, The Race, Customs, Manners, by Marius Renard,

Marius Renard, having grown up in Borinage and teaching in the industrial region of Saint-Ghislain, knew from the inside the realities of coal mines, glassworks, chicory factories, paper mills and printing shops that he describes. The work successively covers the historical overview and feudalism in Hainaut, the monuments (notably the La Louvière elevator, a true feat of hydraulic engineering), the landscapes, the industrial and commercial world, provincial administration, and human realities – race, manners, customs.

The numerous medallion engravings drawn by the author illustrate emblematic sites: the castle of Boussu, the Wasmes courtyard, the Fénelon house in Pâturages, the Sambre at the heart of Charleroi, views of coal mines and mining scenes after Constantin Meunier and Léon Gobert. The whole constitutes a premier visual and literary testimony on the appearance of industrial Hainaut at the height of the Belle Époque.

Marius Henri François Léon Renard (Hornu, October 6, 1869 – Knokke, July 19, 1948) is one of the most singular figures in the cultural, political and social life of Belgium in the early 20th century. Son of a gin merchant from Borinage, orphaned of his father at age two, he pursued partial schooling at the Atheneum of Mons before training in drawing and mechanics at the Saint-Ghislain Industrial School, where he later taught for many years geometric drawing, technology and industrial economics. A self-taught man with encyclopedic curiosity, he was simultaneously a coal technologist at the Grand-Hornu coal mine, a teacher, a journalist for the illustrated Journal de Mons and for L’Avenir du Borinage, a realist novelist (the novel Gueule Rouge, 1894, portrait of the miners’ world), painter, illustrator, and a militant of the Belgian Workers’ Party. His political career led him to Anderlecht, of which he was mayor from 1939 to 1946 – he was dismissed by the German occupiers in July 1941 – and to the Belgian Senate from 1932 until his death. He bequeathed to the city of Brussels his vast library.

Mons, Librairie classique E.-P. Dohet-Baude, 1905. The work is presented in a 4to format of 135 pages, enriched with numerous medallion engravings drawn by the author himself. Black half-leather binding, smooth spine with title and author on paper. Binding rubbed, edges partly split. Some fingerprints and stains on the pages."