Jean(-Auguste) Stecher (Gent 1820 – Liège 1909), one of the first promoters of comparative literary studies in Belgium, started his career as a teacher in his native city of Gent, where he had also studied. In 1843 he himself received an appointment at the University of Gent, where he remained until 1850. He attended the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales in Paris in 1845-46, during which time he attended the lectures on Poland given by Jules Michelet at the Collège de France. In 1850, he was appointed at the University of Liège, where until 1893 he taught Classics, ancient history, French literary history, and the history of Dutch (“Flemish”) literature in Belgium.

Stecher combined proficiency in the comparative philology of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Franz Bopp with a medievalist interest (he had read Chateaubriand and Augustin Thierry in the 1840s), and applied this to Flemish literary history. His magnum opus was a 4-volume edition of the late medieval poet and chronicler Jean Lemaire de Belges (1882-91). Besides his academic work, Stecher was also a propagandist of scientific popularization. In 1866 he was one of the founders of the Société Franklin in Liège, which organized public lectures on Sundays and free evening talks, set up a library, established literary competitions for the “people”, and sought to improve workers’ cultural literacy.

Troubled by increasing tensions between the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons in his country, he sought to defuse the debate on historical grounds by pointing out that the medieval principalities at the core of Belgium – Flanders, Brabant, and Liège – had all been bilingual. Hence, he argued, a “diversity of races” (and languages) need not be a stumbling-block for a nation: on the contrary, it could be a cornerstone. He opposed the prevailing notion that each nation should consist in a “natural” unity of race and language. He was himself a living testimony to this principle: son of a German father and a Flemish mother, born and raised in the Flemish city of Gent, then settled in Walloon Liège. Having initially written in Dutch, he was now publishing exclusively in French; yet he considered it his mission to spread knowledge of Flemish culture, and set up a cercle des conférences flamandes in Liège.

When in 1886 his Histoire de la littérature néerlandaise en Belgique appeared, tensions had increased further. Stecher now presented Belgium as an arena in which Flemings and Walloons could stimulate one another in peaceful competition and exchange ideas. To promote this national spirit, he argued, further initiatives needed to be taken. More Flemish work needed to be translated into French, and vice versa (Stecher himself having translated Hendrik Conscience), and education was needed that was “in a certain sense bilateral”, where neither the “Romance” (Walloon) nor the “Germanic” (Flemish) elements had the upper hand. Stecher now also vindicated Belgium’s national characteristic, its duality, with its special international position: its two literatures and two languages were like two wings that were needed for harmonious flight in Europe over the long term. The very fact that Belgium was neither “Romance” nor “Germanic”, but both, ensured its neutrality and autonomy between the great powers.

This idea of Belgium’s bicultural national identity was to become influential in the thought of Henri Pirenne, the country’s “official” historian, who in 1900 opened his Histoire de Belgique with the statement that Belgium was rooted in a Mischkultur and as such was a microcosm of Europe.