He was a young man who never seemed entirely satisfied with his place in the world.
His father was a formidable figure whose approval he struggled to obtain. Their relationship was difficult, and the son spent much of his life attempting to establish that he was worthy of the family name.
He also had an uneasy relationship with his country. He loved it, certainly, but regarded it as insufficiently important in the world. Other nations were ruled by more influential figures. Their leaders commanded attention abroad. He wanted the same respect, and he was determined to acquire it.
His relationships with women were equally complicated. His marriage deteriorated, and his wife eventually lived much of her life apart from him. There were numerous affairs throughout his life, along with rumors concerning his interest in teenage girls. Questions also surrounded the circumstances in which some of these young women entered his life. Who introduced them? What arrangements were made? Not every allegation could be established, but the rumors became part of his reputation.
Eventually, he became devoted to a young woman who had worked as a prostitute. She was sixteen when their relationship began. He was much older.
She would become an important figure in his later life, receiving extraordinary gifts and enjoying a position that scandalized polite society. Some of his legitimate children were considerably less fortunate.
But women were hardly his principal preoccupation.
He wanted wealth, influence, and recognition. He was particularly interested in acquiring interests abroad, where the opportunities seemed considerably greater than those available at home.
He understood something about the relationship between government and private enterprise. Political power could open doors that ordinary businessmen could never approach. Diplomatic recognition could establish ownership. The language of national greatness could conceal the pursuit of personal wealth.
And he was extraordinarily successful.
He secured control of an enormous foreign territory, vastly larger than his own country. Remarkably, he arranged to hold it not simply as a national possession but effectively as his personal domain.
The arrangement was presented as an enlightened undertaking, intended to bring civilization, commerce, and progress to people who supposedly needed all three.
It was, in reality, a business.
The resources were valuable, the labor was cheap, and the opportunities for profit were almost limitless. His agents operated with considerable freedom, and the enterprise became a source of immense personal wealth.
Eventually, however, disturbing reports began to emerge.
Workers were being brutalized. Families were separated. Villages were destroyed. People who failed to meet production demands were beaten, mutilated, or killed. The pursuit of profit had become inseparable from a system of terror.
The scale of the suffering was almost unimaginable.
Yet the man at the center of it all continued to enjoy the privileges of high office. He cultivated his public image, accumulated wealth, and pursued his private pleasures.
When international outrage finally became impossible to ignore, he was compelled to relinquish his overseas possession to his own country, negotiating substantial financial benefits in the process.
He died the following year, at seventy-four, without facing anything resembling justice for what had occurred under his authority.
His name was Leopold II, King of the Belgians.
His private possession was the Congo Free State.
And his fortune was built principally upon ivory and rubber.
From 1885 until 1908, Leopold presided over one of the most appalling episodes in the history of European colonialism. Forced labor, hostage-taking, mutilation, starvation, disease, and murder devastated Congolese society. The population loss ran into the millions, although historians continue to debate the precise number.
Leopold was not Adolf Hitler. He did not construct an elaborate racial ideology whose central purpose was the systematic extermination of an entire people.
His ambitions were, in some respects, more ordinary.
He wanted to be rich. He wanted to be important. He wanted his country, and particularly himself, to command the respect of the great powers.
The Congolese stood between him and what he wanted.
There is something especially chilling about that distinction.
We tend to associate the greatest crimes in history with fanatics: men possessed by grand ideological visions, racial hatreds, or revolutionary doctrines. We imagine that extraordinary cruelty must arise from extraordinary convictions.
But Leopold offers a different lesson.
A man need not begin with a plan to exterminate millions of people to preside over their destruction. He need only establish a system in which human suffering is an acceptable cost of doing business.
The atrocities became known during Leopold’s lifetime. Journalists, missionaries, and reformers exposed them. But the transfer of the Congo to Belgium in 1908 brought little justice to its victims. Leopold died the following year. Within five years, Europe was at war, and the catastrophe in the Congo would eventually be overshadowed by two world wars.
The king’s private fortune became the subject of disputes among those he left behind. The people whose labor and suffering had created so much of it received little consideration.
Leopold remains one of the great villains of modern history, although his name is far less familiar than those of the twentieth century’s ideological mass murderers.
Perhaps that is because his story is less comfortable to contemplate.
It is easier to recognize evil when it announces itself as evil, when it marches beneath a banner and proclaims a monstrous doctrine.
Leopold spoke instead of development, commerce, civilization, and national prestige.
He was a businessman with a crown, and an empire that happened to belong to him.
Sometimes millions die because a ruler wants them dead.
And sometimes they die because he wants something else, and they are simply in the way.