Taking the Wellington out of Waterloo

Spectator, The, Apr 1, 2000 by Johnson, Rachel

The Spectator has seen the secret plans for Waterloo, plans over which the anglophile Waterloo Committee (established in 1973 to protect and restore the battlefield) and His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Prince of Waterloo, have been kept, so far, completely in the dark. They show a curved underground museum, with at least three shops (loads more Napoleonic souvenirs) hugging the circumference of the lion mound. Commissioned by Kubla, the plans have been drawn up by architects BEAI, together with the construction company Tractebel and design firm Contour.

The existing visitors' centre will be turned into a restaurant. Out towards La Haye Sainte, site of the mass grave of 4,000 soldiers, will be a scalloped amphitheatre of parking for 1,000 cars. It will cost, the architects say, at least 500 million Belgian francs (75 million), and building could start as soon as June.

Most people agree, however, that the present arrangements at the battlefield are inadequate. A new museum is needed; so is proper parking. But the Walloon plan to dig a huge new museum at the foot of the lion mound will, once again, pit the French-speaking world against the Allies. There is every danger that Mr Kubla, who becomes visibly upset when he visits the small rooms in the Wellington Museum devoted to Wellington (the largest room is tactfully devoted to Napoleon), will reinforce his revisionist preference at the new museum. To put it bluntly, on current form Mr Kubla is likely to decree a Napoleonic pleasure dome.

`In general,' he said, in response to my observation that one could leave the present museum thinking that Boney had won, `we find that visitors prefer Napoleon'. `Even les Britanniques want to buy souvenirs of Napoleon, not Wellington.'

Leaving that wounding suggestion aside, there is a further, more insidious note to the plans of the Kubla-led Walloons, who will be in partnership with the company formed by the group of towns of BraineL'Alleud, Genappe, Lasne and Waterloo and, it is hoped, will get a generous dollop from the private sector. The partnership has already approached the European Commission to subsidise the museum, claiming that Napoleon was a sort of founding father of European political union, and so the Commission - whose goal is to build Europe from its Brussels HQ - should help to pay for it. In return, the partnership will offer the EC a space or room devoted to Europe, which could be flagged with the Commission's imperial insignia of gold stars on a blue background.

`I think it is absolutely outrageous,' says Barbara Emerson, a historian who has served on the Waterloo Committee, `to say that Napoleon sowed the seeds of a united Europe. The battle of Waterloo was fought to prevent Napoleon, a dictator, from dominating the mainland by force. It was the British who pushed Napoleon back and saved Europe from French hegemony.'

Moving on from the ideological objecti'zxe the real dangers to the battlefield posed by the construction work. `The lion mound is already fragile, and to excavate a huge area at its base to construct a commercial, subterranean museum will undermine it further,' says Gregory Pedlow, the chief of the historical office at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. `And don't forget this will be a Belgian project. What if they run out of money in the middle? Whatever happens, the battlefield could be a construction site for years. I cannot see why they can't buy La Belle Alliance or Mont St Jean and put the museum there at a fraction of the cost.'