In the Library
The Lion of Flanders
Hendrik Conscience, 1838
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 142k words
£1.99
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The Lion for Flanders! Whoso is French is false; strike home!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace also turns a national struggle against a foreign army into a vast crowd of private lives, but Tolstoy argues with history where Conscience simply celebrates it.
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Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Les Miserables also gives a whole people's rising a novel's full pageant of the street, but Hugo follows one convict where Conscience follows the guilds.
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo also runs on a proud, wronged hero and a long reckoning, but Dumas keeps it private revenge where Conscience makes it a nation's.
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About the book
"Schild en vriend." Shield and friend: two Flemish words that a French tongue could not quite get round, and on a May night in Bruges they decide who lives until morning. Hendrik Conscience wrote this novel in a Belgium whose courts and newspapers spoke French, and he wrote it in the language of weavers and butchers, about the summer those weavers and butchers, armed with pikes and the spiked clubs they called goedendags, walked out to meet the finest cavalry in Europe. Pieter de Coninck, the weaver who reasons, and Jan Breydel, the butcher who cannot bear to wait, hold the city between them while their count's son Robert, the Lion himself, sits in a French prison. The prose is banners, church bells and oaths sworn over swords, unashamedly romantic, and it moves like a crowd surging through a gate. Read it for the marsh outside Kortrijk, where the gilded spurs of fallen knights were gathered by the hundred, and for the strange thrill of a book that taught a people to hear their own language as worth fighting for.