Philippe Lesbroussart
Lesbroussart is a man of great culture. He mastered many modern and ancient languages. Among other things, he was a member of the Société de littérature de Bruxelles, a member of the Académie royale and founder of the Société des douze. But Philippe Lesbroussart is best known for his role as General Administrator of Public Education in 1831, in charge of drafting an organic law on university education, in which he called for a single university, with faculties scattered across the country's cities.
Of Ghent origin, Philippe Lesbroussart (1781-1855) is a key figure in the history of belles-lettres at the University of Liège. Political circumstances forced him to abandon the studies he had begun at the Collège thérésien de Bruxelles to join the French administration, where various encounters enabled him to deepen his training in the field of literature.
He became a teacher in Aalst (1804), then at the Lyceum in Ghent, where he frequented the city's cultivated circles and tried his hand at poetic writing. His poem Les Belges (The Belgians) won a prize in an Aalst competition in 1810. After teaching rhetoric in Ghent (1813) and poetry at the Royal Athenaeum in Brussels (1817), he succeeded his father in the rhetoric class the following year, continuing to frequent many literary figures and learned societies. With Raoul and de Reiffenberg, he revealed his talent as a literary critic in the Mercure belge, while producing his own poetry and plays.
One of his articles in the Courrier des Pays-Bas aroused the animosity of the Dutch authorities - which did not prevent his appointment as professor of general history at the Brussels Museum (1827) - and then the recognition of the provisional government, which appointed him general administrator of public education and executor of the reorganization of higher education (1830). This delicate position, which led him to consider abolishing several of the country's faculties, earned him the animosity of the academic world.
However, he rejoined them in 1835, when he was appointed Professor of French Literature at the University of Liège. He also gave a popular course in comparative literary history, and became president of the Revue Belge de Liège, an organization designed to encourage the work of young writers. Admitted to the Académie royale de Belgique in 1838, he was rector of the Université de Liège from 1840 to 1841, before being granted emeritus status in 1848.
Illustration Joseph Delboëte, d'après H. Lambert, P.J.B. Lesbroussart, héliogravure, s.d., Musée Wittert- ULiège, inv. 44741
