Marius Renard - Le Hainaut - 1905

Le Hainaut, Industry, Commerce, Administration, The Race, Custom, Manners, by Marius Renard,

Marius Renard, having grown up in Borinage and teaching in the industrial region of Saint-Ghislain, knew from within the realities of the coal mines, glassworks, chicory factories, paper mills and printing workshops 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, the provincial administration, and human realities – race, manners, customs.

The numerous medallion engravings drawn by the author illustrate emblematic sites: the château de 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 Belgian cultural, political and social life in the early 20th century. Son of a gin trader from Borinage, an orphan from his father at the age of two, he pursued partial studies at the Athénée of Mons before training in drawing and mechanics at the École industrielle of Saint-Ghislain, where he later taught for many years drawing, geometry, technology and industrial economy. A self-taught man of encyclopedic curiosity, he was simultaneously a technician at the Grand-Hornu coal mine, a professor, a journalist at Journal de Mons illustré and L’Avenir du Borinage, a realist novelist (the novel Gueule Rouge, 1894, portrait of the world of miners), painter, illustrator, and a militant of the Belgian Workers’ Party. His political career led him to Anderlecht, where he was mayor from 1939 to 1946 – he was dismissed by the German occupants 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 quarto format of 135 pages, enriched with numerous medallion engravings drawn by the author himself. Binding half-black morocco, smooth spine with title and author on paper. Binding rubbed, joints partly split. Some fingerprints and stains on the pages."}