TOUT sur La Belgique | Podcast en français COURANT avec sous-titres.

Hello and welcome to the Fluidité podcast for foreigners learning French, episode 119. Today, you will learn everything about a fascinating French-speaking country, Belgium. So stay tuned! Do you learn French? Fabien offers you content in current French that talks about culture, history, French geography, but also about biographies, dialogues, or learning tips. Welcome to the Fluidité podcast. Before we start, I invite you to join our VIP club. It's my Patreon page where you have material to deepen my content and become better in French. For example, for each content I make, you have bonuses like the vocabulary list, bilingual transcriptions, the audio version, and a private group course where I explain the grammar of the contents. The VIP club is also a large community with more than 300 members, and we talk together every day on the Telegram group and on the Discord server. We do different activities to practice French, so you can also practice your French, find or share resources with other students, other learners, and it's very important for you to not feel alone in your learning and to always be motivated. So you have the link on podcast platforms and on YouTube to sign up for the VIP club, and you can stay as long as you want. Come with pleasure. In the description of the episode, you also have the YouTube video version, if you listen to me in audio, with subtitles in French or in other languages to improve your oral comprehension, and you also have the free French transcription in the description. We meet again to talk about Belgium, which is also a French-speaking country. Since I have already talked about Francophonie in the podcast or on my channel, and there is already an episode on Quebec and another on Africa. Belgium is like the little sister of France, so you will discover the history of the country in summary, and how it is that a certain part of the inhabitants speak French. You will also discover its culture, I will quote you some Belgian celebrities, and you will know why it is a great country. It will be a short episode for beginners, but first we talk a little about its geography. Belgium is a country in Western Europe, located northeast of France. It is located between France, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg. So it has borders with all these countries. Belgium also has a coastline on the North Sea. It is a small country in terms of size, since it measures about 200 km from north to south, and 280 km from west to east. Its capital is Brussels, which is written with an X, and in this case the X is pronounced S, as in 6, 10 or 60 for example. The country has about 11 million inhabitants, called the Belgians. A Belgian male or a Belgian female. Belgium is part of the European Union, and besides, Brussels is in a way the capital of Europe, since it has been the seat of European institutions since 1997. In French, a seat is an object on which one can sit, like a chair or a armchair, but it is also the main offices of a company or an institution. The capital of Belgium is also the seat of NATO, the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty. Belgium has gone through the hands of various empires or kingdoms, so I will simply summarize its history. In 57 BC, Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, which is equivalent to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg combined. He divided this Gaul into several parts, one of which was called Gallia Belgica, and it included Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. For the Romans, it was a strategic region to get closer to the Germanic peoples. From the 4th century on, the Franks, a Germanic tribe, went down to the Netherlands and allied with the Romans to settle there. The territory is in the hands of the Merovingians, led by the famous Clovis, originating from a city called Tournai, in present-day Belgium. The language of the Franks mixes with the Latin of the Romans and will gradually become French. This is the beginning of the creation of the Kingdom of the Franks, therefore a territory that was born in present-day Belgium and which will spread gradually throughout France, but also further east of Europe. So the French and France were somehow born in Belgium. Then it was up to the Carolingians to control the Kingdom of the Franks during the Middle Ages, without going into all the details. The Netherlands, of which Belgium was part, would then be under the control of Lothair and then the Dukes of Burgundy. It was then up to Charles V, born in Gaul, also in Belgium, to reign over several provinces together to form the Holy Roman Empire in 1500. These Netherlands remained under Spanish domination until 1713. Belgium was then separated from the Netherlands and ended up being annexed to France in 1793. In 1815, after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Belgium quickly passed under Dutch domination in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1830, the Belgians revolted against the Dutch government and Belgium obtained its definitive independence that same year. Leopold I became the first king of Belgium. Despite its size, the small country became a great industrial and colonial power at the beginning of the 20th century, notably by taking control of the Congo, which will be called the Belgian Congo for a while. In 1900, the country held the best GDP in all of Europe. Belgium hosted four world exhibitions before the First World War and another after the second in 1958. And it was for this occasion that the Atomium, one of the symbols of Brussels, was built, and you will see it if you look for images of the capital. Today, the country is divided into three regions. The Flemish region, also called Flanders, and which speaks Dutch. The Walloon region, commonly called Wallonia, where we speak French. And the Brussels-Capital region, where we speak at least French and also Dutch in some of its municipalities. French is therefore spoken by a little more than 70% of Belgians. When I told you that the country was powerful, here are all the inventions that come from Belgium. The saxophone, the chocolate praline, the roller skates, the electric tram, in part the combustion engine, the Big Bang theory, oil painting, the Atlas. And for fries, the mystery remains whole, so I would not want to create controversy between the French and the Belgians. But one thing is certain, the Belgians are the champions of fries or fritters, which are small stands or trucks where fries are served. There are everywhere in Belgium, so food is a national symbol. And who says Belgium, says beer. The drink is very present in the culture and it is a national pride since the country produces excellent ones. As I said in the episode on Tintin, the Belgians are among the best in comics and they produce very, very good ones. Another emblem of the country is the Manneken Pis, which is a small fountain that represents a little boy peeing. It proves that the Belgians are also known for their humor, their self-assertion, their simplicity and their great kindness. Between French and Belgian, we get along very well and we often tease each other, we tease each other, it means that we make jokes. Many known personalities around the world are Belgian. And yes, the famous singer Johnny Hallyday was not French, but indeed Belgian. We can also mention Stromae, the singer Angèle, on whom I made an episode, the great and unique Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jacques Brel, the writer Amélie Noton, Hergé and his Tintin, for whom I also made an episode, or the painter René Magritte. You should also know that in Belgium, we do not count certain numbers the same as in France. Indeed, the number 70 is logically said 70, and 90 is said 90 in Belgium. So it's easier for French learners who will live in Belgium. French spoken in Belgium is perfectly understandable by other French speakers, despite this famous Belgian accent that we French people make fun of, but it's because we love them. In French, there is a proverb that says, Qui aime bien, châtie bien. It means when you like the person, you like to flirt with the person. There are still thousands of things to say about Belgium, but I'll let you discover everything else by yourself on the Internet, or by visiting the country, it's even better. Thank you all for watching or listening to this episode. I hope you learned French, vocabulary, grammar and all that. Listen again several times to assimilate well, to improve your oral comprehension. And if you stayed until now, the episode interested you, so put a like. Otherwise, tell me why in the comments, and subscribe to my podcast and my YouTube channel. Bye, see you soon!