A Course in Government-Toppling

Though militant students have often shaken governments, particularly in the world's less stable areas, they have seldom actually brought them down. Yet last week, in stable, bourgeois Belgium, the government was toppled by students at the University of Louvain, the world's largest Roman Catholic university. The students' weapon: a major exacerbation of the longtime tension between Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flemish majority and its French-speaking Walloon minority.

Bottles & Songs. The ever-present rivalry had been comparatively quiescent during the two-year reign of Premier Paul Vanden Boeynants' center-right coalition government. Then Louvain's Flemish students, who make up 55% of the enrollment, demanded that the linguistically divided university be broken up and the French-speaking part moved into Wallonia (a linguistic frontier drawn up in 1963 places Louvain seven miles inside Flanders). Moving the French-speaking students and professors to Wallonia would cost an estimated $140 million and seriously damage the prestige and resources of the 543-year-old institution.

The Flemish students boycotted classes and took to the streets to riot in favor of their demands, hurling bottles, squirting fire extinguishers at French-speaking students and singing We Shall Overcome. While police turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, Louvain's governing board of bishops met and themselves divided along linguistic lines about the university's future. They turned the problem over to the government and, when eight Flemish ministers of Vanden Boeynants' moderate Christian Socialist Party threatened to resign unless the students got their way, Vanden Boeynants tried in vain for a compromise. When none could be agreed upon, Vanden Boeynants handed King Baudouin his government's resignation. His Cabinet will remain as caretaker until a new government can be patched together--a prickly task that may lead to the dissolution of Parliament and new elections.

Victory Marches. Defiant Flemish students, feeling a step closer to their goal, staged victory marches through the cobblestoned streets of Louvain, chanting Flemish slogans and bringing out the cops again. "Whenever the language issue crops up in this country," noted Vanden Boeynants sadly, "passion takes over." Language is the surface issue, but the root of the crisis goes far deeper. The Flemish bitterly resent more than a century of domination by prosperous, influential Walloons, who constituted a majority of the Belgian population until World War II. Since then, huge foreign investments in less-developed Flanders and a higher Flemish birth rate have shifted the economic and numerical balance. But most Flem ish still feel slighted in Belgian business and political and social circles, where they believe that the preferred French language gives Walloons an advantage. The Flemish are driving hard for what they consider equality, and are in no mood to compromise.

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