I Alone Know Best

The King of the Belgians speaks in his own defence

King Leopold’s Soliloquy by Mark Twain

This piece by Mark Twain is satirical, but it is only so satirical. It’s bitter, vicious. It bites. But it is more a statement of what the author thought than anything else. It’s almost an extended opinion piece in the newspaper. And it is only rarely funny.

Now, that might be best. It might be appropriate. For the subject under discussion is not amusing. What Twain wanted to talk about (what the whole world, at least in his telling, wanted to talk about) was the situation in the Congo. Of course, the word ‘situation’ would be putting it mildly. What Twain wants his readers to know about is not a situation. It is, as he puts it, a great and terrible crime. But we will return to that.

If you expect, of this short book, something witty, something veritably amusing, you may be disappointed. Sure, there are funny moments. I laughed once, I think, in about sixty pages. If you want to chuckle often, this is not the book for you. And it might contradict your memory of reading other books by Twain, or other stories. But before you throw this one down and say it’s nothing like the others, think a little about the genius of Huckleberry Finn, possibly the greatest novel ever written in America.

I say this not in mitigation. Not to spare the author’s blushes and reputation. Think of that book. Of course, you remember the comedy most. You remember the Duke and the King and their absurd capering. You remember Huck and his friends and their hijinks. But of course, the book is not simply a catalogue of amusing stories and attempts to avoid being made to wash. That’s Tom Sawyer you’re thinking of. No, Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful book because it has great heart. Great heart and pathos. It can make a grown man cry, not long after making him laugh.

That is the secret of its brilliance.

I won’t pretend for an instant that this little pamphlet, this small effort, is of quite the same character. It does not aspire to be literature (whatever that is). But in fixating upon unpleasant things, and trying to make the reader feel perhaps unwelcome emotions, it isn’t far off from what Twain often did, and often did in his very finest works.

Well, all that said, and everything preliminary thus got out the way, what is this book all about?

It’s a dramatic monologue, in theory a speech as if from a play. The whole time, the entire length of it, there’s only one man speaking. That man is Leopold II, king of the Belgians (and ruler, more relevantly here, absolute ruler of the Belgian Congo, a state of many tens of millions that was, at the time of writing, his legal possession; his possession personally).

We are to imagine, for Leopold, a man of let us call him advancing years. A bearded man. Wearing stately dress, an example of some fine manners.

And he is, at least in theory, in possession of some of the Victorian virtues. He possesses more than one crucifix, one on his person. And at least one of them is richly jewelled, as was the continental fashion. There is, in theory, no harm in that. Nor is there harm, Twain implies (at least in the normal frame of reference) pulling out the crucifix and looking upon it, and even kissing it, eagerly, as Leopold does.

But these things can become absurd. They might even be rendered obscene.

And what Twain has Leopold do is almost obscene. He pulls out the crucifix so often, and kisses it with such eagerness it almost becomes hunger.

What is this man seeking absolution from?

In Twain’s telling (and in Leopold’s telling, too) he is seeking absolution from accusations that would have given Genghis Khan and Timur pause.

What are the accusations? The killing, the wholesale killing, of ten or so million Congolese. Perhaps fifteen million, if the numbers bear out. The killing, hunting for sport, of women and children among them. After the latter were ‘outraged,’ in the language of the time.

The mutilation of survivors and the dead; the cutting off especially of hands.

All in the pursuit of what? Profits, personal profits, from the Congo’s rubber concessions. Something it is unkingly to want and to desire, and obscene to seek at the expense of other men’s lives.

Leopold strides up and down. He declaims to the readers that all of this is nonsense, all of it lies. The missionaries who have seen it, or said they have, are liars, too. And the foreign press, it makes up so many stories.

And interval now, while the crucifix is once more kissed.

Anyway, Leopold resumes, the eternal auditor, the authority who will one day judge me, must know that I did all of this while spreading the word of the Lord and in saving souls. In hastening death to those encouraged to convert, it is possible, he conjectures, I even saved more souls than I damned.

Throughout this monologue, in between Leopold saying either that what he was accused of did not happen or that those who were victims got what they deserved, he quotes (sometimes at length) from reports and memoirs of those who claimed to have been to the Congo and to have seen the worst of what happened there close at hand.

These men were missionaries, mostly. And some were foreign officials, diplomats, statesmen. People like that, for what they’re worth.

Mutilations, murders, poverty, cannibalism.

All of it on the head of the king, the emperor of this place, the man with the legal power to stop anything he did not like, if only he saw it and cared enough to insist that it cease.

The critics he quotes compare Leopold to every mass killer in history, every Mongol conqueror, every famine, every plague. Perhaps only the Flood carried away more human souls. And some suggest that he will be the most notorious inmate of perdition for the next eight-hundred thousand years. No one will come after him to take his crown.

All while Leopold storms up and down and protests. Says that he is innocent, violently innocent, and that he knows best. That he alone knows best.