200 Leopoldsburg - Leopoldsburg / Leopold II

Leopoldsburg — originally named Bourg-Léopold — grew around the military camp established there in 1835, and by the 1980s the Belgian medallic series commemorating Belgian communes had become a vehicle for exactly this kind of layered local history. Leopold II, after whom the town's name derives its royal half, ruled Belgium from 1865 to 1909 and simultaneously held the Congo Free State as personal property — a distinction that has made his commemoration increasingly uncomfortable in Belgian public discourse in the decades since this piece was struck.