Charles de Coster (1827–1879) grew up and studied in Brussels, where he published a volume of Légendes flamandes in 1858. His main work is also a literary evocation of traditional Flemish tales, in this case involving the trickster figure of Till Eulenspiegel / Tijl Uilenspiegel. La Légende et les aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandres et ailleurs (the title already betrays an debt to the Rabelaisianism of Balzac’s Contes drôlatiques) appeared in 1867 and to some extent rehearses the repertoire of pranks with which the hero upsets the complacency of the elite and bourgeoisie. This echoes an earlier version: the Histoire joyeuse et récréative de Tiel l’Espiègle, which had appeared, with a preface by Prudens Van Duyse, in Gent (as part of a “Nouvelle bibliothèque curieuse” specializing in salacious reprints of older texts; Van Duyse’s preface was also published separately as Etude littéraire sur Tiel l’Espiègle, 1858).

However, De Coster’s reworking is dominated by a much more serious, even grim setting: the 16th-century repressive absolutist and inquisitorial regime of Charles V and Philip II, and the Flemish revolt against it. The cruelty of those years had recently been highlighted in Motley’s fiercely anti-Catholic The rise of the Dutch Republic (1856). In De Coster’s Ulenspiegel, the hero engages in the revolt and becomes the embodiment of liberty and resistance against tyranny, and, as such, an embodiment of a liberal, anticlerical ideal such as De Coster’s circles wished to see it incarnated in the Belgium of their day. The novel is also “Belgicist” in that it expresses, in French, an insistently and specifically Flemish, Breughelian local colour; a pattern later emulated by the so-called écrivains flamands d’expression française such as Georges Rodenbach, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren. Afterwards, the figure of Uilenspiegel, now a prominent embodiment of Belgian culture thanks to De Coster’s book, was to become (flanked by his trusty companion Lamme Goedzak and his beloved Nele) a more particularly Flemish (and implicitly anti-Francophone) icon.