Alexis-Michel Eenens
Alexis Michel Eenens was a Belgian lieutenant-general, military historian, and politician.
Family life
Eenens was the son of a wealthy merchant in textiles, Louis Eenens, and Anne-Marie Carlier. He was born in Brussels when Belgium was annexed to the French Empire, and the French Republican calendar was still in force, and his birthday is therefore properly 10 messidor An XIII. He married Adélaïde Barbe Joseph Gilain in Tienen on 8 August 1869. They had one daughter, Thérèse Marie Euphrasie Josèphe, who married a future procureur-général at the Belgian Supreme Court, Georges-Marie Viscount Terlinden.
Military and political career
He was admitted to the Artillerie- en Genieschool (Artillery and Engineering School) of the army of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in Delft on 15 July 1825 as a cadet. On 20 November 1828, he was promoted to sergeant-major and allowed to study at the Royal Military Academy in Breda. He was promoted to the second lieutenant in the artillery and assigned to the 5th battalion Militia Artillery at Namur on 5 January 1830, on the eve of the Belgian Revolution. Eenens joined the revolutionaries by taking part in a mutiny of the Namur garrison in September 1830. As a reward, he was breveted lieutenant by the Belgian Provisional Government and soon after promoted to captain. Stationed in Antwerp, he refused to defect to the Dutch with General Van der Smissen on 25 March 1831. He then joined the Belgian troops at Leuven and helped to defend that city in August.
Scholarly work
Besides his military career, Eenens also pursued a more scholarly career. In the 1840s he promoted the involvement of the Belgian army in the agricultural development of the poorer parts of Belgium. In 1844 he published Notes sur le défrichement de la Campine par l'armée, a pamphlet containing his proposals, but his ideas were rejected by the agricultural establishment. He also became a prolific writer on military history, specializing in the history of the Belgian Revolution. In 1875, he published Documents historiques sur l'origine du royaume de Belgique. Les conspirations militaires de 1831 (Bruxelles, 1875, 2 vols.), which caused quite a furore because he accused a number of prominent people of treasonous behavior during the revolution, in favor of the Orangist cause. This caused a fervent polemic, both with Belgian politicians and historians and with Dutch military historians, because he also accused the future King William II of the Netherlands (then commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces that attempted to suppress the revolution of 1830) of violating an armistice. Because of the scandal this polemic caused, the king asked him to relent, and when he demurred, relieved him of his function as aide de camp.
