Look at the light switch on your wall. Go ahead. Or the plug
behind the couch, where the dust bunnies hold their conventions. Inside those
little things are metal parts, and one of them is probably brass. Brass is
copper and zinc married together, and it’s tough and doesn’t quit, which is
what you want from something you’ll touch ten thousand times without once
thinking about it.
People were making brass long before anyone could make pure
zinc. That always strikes me as strange. They had the cake before they’d
invented flour. The trick was to take copper and cook it with an ore called
calamine, and somewhere in the heat the zinc crept out of the rock and into the
copper, like a rumor going through a small town. Nobody understood the
chemistry, but the stuff came out gold-colored and strong, so they kept doing
it.
Eventually calamine became worth real money all by itself.
That’s how it goes with people and rocks. Once a rock is valuable, someone is
going to fight over it.
A Corner of Nowhere
Near the place where Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands
crowd together, there was a village called Moresnet. You’ve never heard of it,
and that’s fine. Most people haven’t. It was the kind of place you’d drive
through without noticing, if there had been cars. It had a mine, though, and
the mine had calamine, and that was the whole problem.
It started as a three-way argument. Then it narrowed to two,
the Kingdom of Prussia and the Netherlands, and I’d bet the Belgians weren’t
sorry to step back. In 1815 the great powers sat down at the Congress of Vienna
to redraw Europe after Napoleon. They were tired and full of opinions, and they
were sloppy about the borders. Nobody meant any harm by it. A line that is almost
clear is the most dangerous kind, because everyone thinks it’s clear in his own
favor.
So there was a mine, and two kingdoms each swore it was
theirs, and neither would blink. And out of that stubbornness came something
that had never really existed before and wouldn’t again: Neutral Moresnet.
The Gap Between the Lines
A Swiss historian named Charles Hoch gave a lecture on all
this before the Geographical Society, and W. W. Tucker wrote it down and
translated it in 1882. Hoch went through the treaty language the way a mechanic
goes through an engine that won’t turn over, and he found the fault.
Article 25 gave Prussia a slice of territory at the edge of
the Aubel canton. Article 66 laid out the Dutch border and never mentioned that
slice at all. Two lines were drawn on two maps by two sets of careful men. They
didn’t meet. Between them lay a little wedge of ground, and either side could
stand at its edge and say that’s ours with a straight face.
Sitting in the wedge was a mine.
The Man Who Held the Mine
His name was Jean-Jacques Daniel Dony. He was an
entrepreneur from Liège who had been working that mine since the Napoleonic
days. Dony was no dreamer. On January 19, 1810, he got a patent for a furnace
that could pull zinc out of calamine, and St Paul de Sinçay, writing in 1883,
would later call him the pioneer of zinc smelting in Belgium. That meant big,
industrial, real zinc, the kind you could build a business on.
He’d held the concession since 1806, with an annual royalty
owed to the state of 40,500 francs. A lawyer named Mosselman, acting for Dony’s
creditors, explained years later that this was nothing unusual. French mining
law of July 28, 1791, capped such concessions at fifty years and permitted a
yearly royalty. It was an ordinary arrangement of the dull, respectable kind,
the kind that comes back to bite you.
Because four years later the rules changed.
The Mining Law of April 21, 1810, made holders of
time-limited concessions permanent owners. That was Article 51. Article 40
abolished the royalties altogether, with no compensation. The reasoning, as
Mosselman put it, was simple enough: a man doesn’t pay rent on his own
property. The old royalty was swapped for a fixed one and a proportional one.
On July 5, 1811, Dony agreed to a proportional royalty of 3,005 francs a year.
So he thought he was square with the world. He thought the
paperwork was settled. Then Napoleon lost at Waterloo, and with him went the
authority behind every piece of paper he’d ever signed.
What the Treaty Did Not Say
Once Napoleon was gone, the concessions his government had
granted weighed about as much as the paper they were written on. Remco Beckers,
in Power, Lust and Zinc, notes that the Dutch and the Prussians each
flatly refused to give up the mine. Each side appointed a border commission.
The two commissions met, argued, and parted without agreeing on the line around
Moresnet. They had all the time in the world, and no one in a hurry ever came.
It came to a head on June 26, 1816. Under Article 17 of the
Treaty of Aachen, the boundary was left undefined, and the most contested
corner of Moresnet was placed under joint administration. Neither kingdom could
station troops there. Neither could hold it by force.
Article 31 did one more thing: it guaranteed Dony’s
concession would stand, and it required him to supply calamine to the copper
works in both countries. Think about that for a second. Two nations that
couldn’t agree on a line on a map were still both dependent on one man and one
hole in the ground.
Other places have solved this kind of problem differently.
Up in Svalbard, a dispute over who owned the minerals ended with the treaty of
February 9, 1920. Norway got sovereignty, and everyone who signed got equal
mining rights. It was a tidy ending, like a closed door.
Moresnet never got a tidy ending. Sovereignty over it was
never handed to either state, and the unfinished business sat there and
festered. Because here’s the question nobody had a good answer to: who gets
to collect the royalties?
The Bill That Wouldn’t Be Paid
On December 29, 1821, the first formal demand for payment
was issued, and it landed on Mosselman’s desk. It demanded back royalties
running all the way to January 1, 1812. Since the concession office sat in the
neutral territory, the demand had to go out in the names of both governments,
through two special commissioners: Joseph Brandès for the King of the
Netherlands, and Jean-Martin-Daniel Mayer, the Prussian mining adviser in
Düren.
Two commissioners and two kings, all to send one bill.
Picture the paperwork.
Mosselman said no. He pointed at the law of 1810. The court
in Liège ruled on March 6, 1828. It recognized the concession as property,
which was a win for him, and then upheld the old royalty, which was not. So he
took it to the Cour de cassation and set out his case in a memoir dated July 3,
1828.
And the claim was never settled. Not then, not ever. Belgium
won its independence in 1830 and inherited the Dutch rights, and Prussia kept
pressing for the arrears like a man tapping on a window. But the neutrality of
the territory stood in the way, and so did Belgian refusal. The bill just hung
there, unpaid, for the rest of the story.
Vieille-Montagne
Nine years after that memoir, in 1837, Mosselman and his
children founded a company: Vieille-Montagne. It held the whole
concession, plus several zinc-processing plants, including a smelter at
Saint-Léonard in Liège and another near the mine.
In that first year the plants turned out about 1,888 tons of
zinc. By 1882 the company’s output stood at 39,000 tons, more than half of
Belgium’s total of 71,565 tons for that year. It wasn’t a mine anymore. It was
an empire with a mine at its root.
Here’s the funny part, though. Not all that zinc came out of
the ground at Moresnet. From the 1850s on, the plants were also using another
ore called blende. The company wasn’t married to one hole in the ground. It had
been quietly building a web of supply from other places, the way a smart man
builds a fire with more than one log.
Life Under the Zinc
One account comes from a report dated November 7, 1918, by
Brand Whitlock, the American ambassador to Belgium. By then the place was run
by a mayor and a council of ten. Under the mayor were two department heads, and
one of them was the director of the zinc mine. The mine was the territory’s
chief source of revenue. One of the local schools was even paid for by the
company.
So here was a country with no army, no real owner, a mayor,
a council, a school bought and paid for by a zinc company, and a bill that had
gone unpaid for a hundred years. It sounds like a joke. It was somebody’s whole
life.
The Question Under the Question
But what happens to a little state like that when the thing
holding it up runs out?
Hoch had seen it coming as far back as 1882. In his book he
wrote that Moresnet’s life as a neutral territory depended on the life of its
mine. When the ore was gone, so would be the interest of Prussia and Belgium.
The land wouldn’t be worth enough to justify the strange arrangement. The
reasons for keeping it a country would dry up with the last of the rock.
The ore did run out, more or less. Sources disagree on
exactly when. Some say the main calamine deposits were exhausted in 1879, with
small-scale mining crawling on until 1884. Others give 1885 as the year work
finally stopped. I’d guess the difference is between the big vein going dry and
the last man putting down his pick. A thing can die twice, once in fact and
once in the paperwork.
By Hoch’s logic, that should have been the end. The reason
for Moresnet was gone.
The Thing That Stayed
But history doesn’t care much for logic. Moresnet kept
going. The mine was spent, the reasons were spent, and still the little neutral
place hung on through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth, a ghost that hadn’t been told.
It lasted until the end of the First World War. And even
then it wasn’t the empty mine that ended it. It was the war, and the peace that
followed. On June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and Germany
recognized Belgian sovereignty over all of Neutral Moresnet. The provision took
effect on January 10, 1920.
Just like that, the odd little territory that two states had
shared for over a century became part of Belgium, and a place that had never
belonged to anyone finally belonged to someone.
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