Brussels’ “Little Boy Who Pees”

I was born in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Later, I walked on London Bridge and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower. Then I decided I wanted to see Brussels’ icon: the Manneken Pis, a two-foot-tall statue of a little boy, naked (most of the time), taking what the British call a wee. What kind of world capital, I wondered, embraces a peeing little boy as its symbol?

There’s no question that the “little boy who pees” is Brussels’ most beloved emblem (thanks to the Belgian Tourism Office for the translation). From time to time, the city dresses him in fancy costumes, which are then kept in the municipal museum. All over town, arrows point to him as chief among the important sights. The chocolate shop next door (this is Belgium—there’s always a chocolate shop next door) is even named after him.

The bronze statue by Jerôme Duquesnoy has been standing at the corner of the rue de l’Estuve/Stoofstraat (as the capital of a two-language country, Brussels and all its signs are bilingual in Dutch and French) since 1619, when it replaced an earlier stone version. Its origins are lost in myth, but one story is that it represents a little boy who saved Brussels by urinating on the lit fuse of an attacking army’s bomb.

After a few days in Brussels and much wandering around narrow cobbled lanes and grand squares, I got at least an inkling of an answer: Brussels is the capital of a culture that cherishes more than grandeur the small details of daily life. Its signature dishes are frites—what we call french fries—and waffles, its most famous poet the cabaret singer Jacques Brel, its public art more likely to celebrate comic book characters and mayors than kings and conquests.

In that respect, Belgium is rather like the other Low Countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; think, for example, of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or most of the work of Vermeer. Yet that answer only begs another question: How did the Low Countries get that way?

There’s no scientific answer to that question. We can’t know for a fact what makes one culture law-abiding and another anarchic, what makes one give every guest enough food to choke an army, and another, right next door, serve exquisite miniatures.

Yet history gives pointers and suggestions. The Low Countries did share Europe’s propensity for conquests—there were the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo (the latter having been one of the most appalling instances of European empire-building). But the Low Countries’ history varied in some fundamental respects from that of their more grandiose neighbors, Britain and France. Britain was unconquered for centuries; France was defeated more than once but emerged each time as a proud nation.

In both, as feudalism metamorphosed into mercantilism during the Renaissance, and then into capitalism, the ancient aristocracies vied desperately for power and prestige with the new merchant and business classes. During that same crucial era, however, the Low Countries weren’t independent nations but possessions of the Hapsburgs—the Holy Roman emperors and Kings of Spain. The Netherlands didn’t achieve independence until 1648, and Belgium not until 1839. And at independence, neither had a home-grown ruling nobility or landowning class.

So when, with independence they threw themselves into the business of business, there was no genuine royal or landed class to fight the merchants—and no one to say that business was one whit less respectable than land ownership. Respectable it was—to invent, hustle, trade and profit—and respectable it remained. Today in Brussels, the main square, the famous Grande Place, is not the site of a palace, but the site of the city’s carefully preserved City Hall and 17th-century guild (trade association) halls.

The Manneken Pis is only a few meters away.

A final note: In a much more recent development—in 1985, to be exact—Brussels unveiled Jeanneke Pis, a statue of a little girl squatting to urinate, in an alley just across the Grande Place from the beloved little boy. No signs point to her location.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak