Auguste Voisin (nr Boulogne 1800 – Gent 1843) became a teacher in the Flemish town of Kortrijk/Courtrai upon finishing his studies at the University of Gent in 1825. In 1830, the year when Belgium seceded from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, he moved back to Gent, where he initially continued to earn his living as a teacher, but also taught courses in history and literary history at the university. In 1836, he was appointed university librarian, and from 1840 also held a professorial title.

Voisin was a man of clubs and societies. A connoisseur of contemporary fine arts and literature with interests in the field of history and antiquity, he constantly sought out like-minded company. In Courtrai, he founded a Société des Beaux-Arts, while in Gent he was secretary of the Société des Beaux-Arts et de Littérature. At the same time he was on the editorial board of the Gent-based Messager des Sciences historiques, re-established in 1832, the leading Belgian forum in its field, to which he contributed a series of diverse articles, notices and text editions on history, literary history and art.

French-born but raised in Gent, Voisin was attached to the post-1830 Belgian state and devoted himself to its “national” history. Yet it was primarily the history of the ancient (medieval) County of Flanders that attracted him, and the history of his home city of Gent. In 1834 he published his seminal brochure on the Bataille de Courtrai ou des Eperons d’Or, gagnée par les Flamands en 1302. Drawing on documents provided to him by his Kortrijk patron Jacques Goethals-Vercruysse, he reconstructed the history of that medieval battle, in which the Flemish count’s army had defeated the French knights. In 1837 he gave historical advice to the Antwerp painter Nicaise de Keyser for an ambitious painting on the subject. The brochure, the painting, and the historical novel that Hendrik Conscience devoted to the Battle of the Golden Spurs shortly afterwards launched a rich and long-lasting memorial cult central to the historical consciousness of the emerging Flemish Movement.

Voisin combined his study of Gent’s history with active involvement in the conservation of the city’s monuments, calling for proper care for the medieval buildings, which were numerous and, in his view, gave the city its distinctive charm. As early as 1826 he published a voluminous work, which went through many reprints, entitled Guide des voyageurs dans la ville de Gand, ou notice historique sur cette ville, ses monuments et ses hommes célèbres, followed ten years later by Vues pittoresques des principaux monuments de la ville de Gand, accompagnées d’une description historique et d’une notice sur les institutions, la statistique, le commerce de cette ville. In 1834, he had shown that his interest in medieval heritage also extended beyond Gent’s city bounds. His Description des monuments gothiques du royaume des Pays-Bas (begun in 1830), sumptuously produced and with text in three languages (French, German and English), covered the entire territory of the Low Countries.

As a librarian, Voisin catalogued the collections entrusted to him; but his real passion was bibliophilia. He published on the legendary library of Charles van Hulthem, a native of Gent who died in 1832. Such work added to his European fame: Voisin corresponded with Jules Michelet, who was then still working in the Archives Nationales, with Charles Nodier, with Paulin Paris, with the archeologist Léon de Laborde, with Georg Heinrich Pertz (editor of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica) and with the theologian and Church historian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. In this way, he connected the Flemish city of Gent with Paris, Berlin, Munich and other centres of Romantic-historicist scholarship.