Théodore Verhaegen: the believing father of free inquiry

Free inquiry is the principle that every claim may be tested by reason and evidence, with no church or state having the final word. On 20 November 1834, the Brussels lawyer Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen (1796–1862) and the educator Auguste Baron opened the Free University of Belgium (Université libre de Belgique), the forerunner of today’s ULB and VUB. It was a liberal answer to the Catholic university that Belgium’s bishops had founded in Mechelen that same year. Verhaegen only started using the term ‘free inquiry’ twenty years later.

Brussels, 24 June 1834. In the Masonic lodge Les Amis Philanthropes, Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen rises to speak. He is thirty-seven, a leading business lawyer and Worshipful Master, the lodge’s president. What he proposes sounds reckless: a university in Brussels, outside the authority of both church and state.
The objections are obvious, and he hears them. There is no money. There are no professors. There is no building.
Yet after his plea, the collection box goes round. People in the room offer to teach. The mayor of Brussels, Nicolas Rouppe, himself a Freemason, finds rooms in the former palace of Charles of Lorraine on the Place du Musée.
Five months later, on 20 November 1834, the Free University of Belgium is formally opened in the Gothic Hall of Brussels Town Hall. Auguste Baron, head of the Brussels Athénée and the man who first had the idea in 1831, gives the opening address. Just under a hundred students begin the first academic year, spread over four faculties.
The man who set all these events in motion remains a puzzle. Verhaegen comes from a deeply Catholic family. And he will never entirely stop believing.

Mechelen and Brussels, 1834: two universities, one constitution

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen founded the Brussels university in response to the Catholic university that Belgium’s bishops opened in Mechelen in November 1834. Both universities relied on the same constitutional freedom of education.
Belgium’s 1831 constitution had granted something almost unheard of in Europe at the time. Anyone could find a school or a university. The bishops were the first to use that freedom, with the blessing of Pope Gregory XVI. A year later their university moved to Leuven (Louvain).
Liberals saw a threat. The 1830 revolution weakened the state universities of Ghent, Liège and Leuven. If the Church owned the only strong university, they feared, it would shape how a whole generation of doctors, lawyers and teachers learned to think.
It is tempting to cast the bishops as villains. That would be unfair. In 1832, Pope Gregory XVI had condemned liberal Catholicism and modern constitutional freedoms in the encyclical Mirari vos.
If you believe the truth has already been revealed, education means handing that truth on. By that logic, a Catholic university was not a power grab. It was a duty.
Verhaegen acknowledged that right. As late as 1856, he explicitly accepted that the bishops ran their own teaching as they saw fit. His objection was to monopoly.

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen defends the Church first, then freedom

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen began as a defender of the Church. In 1821 he successfully represented the vicars-general of the exiled Bishop of Ghent, Maurice de Broglie, who faced prosecution under King William I.
That fitted his background. Verhaegen grew up in a very pious Catholic family of lawyers from the Haacht area, near Leuven. His godfather and namesake, the priest Petrus Theodorus Verhaegen, served for a few months in 1797 as rector of the old University of Leuven. That same year, the French authorities shut the university down.
Another relative, the Jesuit Pierre-Joseph (Peter) Verhaegen, became the first president of Saint Louis University in the United States. Sources disagree on whether he was Verhaegen’s brother or his cousin.
So why did such a man later turn against the Church? A contemporary recorded Verhaegen’s own explanation: he defended the clergy while it was oppressed, but not once it became the aggressor.
This is the key to understanding Verhaegen. Verhaegen was no enemy of religion. He was an enemy of authority that escapes scrutiny.
In 1857, during the parliamentary debate on the so-called ‘convents law’, he told the Chamber: ‘We love Christ; we venerate Christ.’ At the same time, he rejected clerical domination. Most sources agree that he never fully broke faith.

Free inquiry: an ideal from 1834, a name from 1854

Free inquiry means that no claim is beyond criticism: not a pope’s, not a king’s, not a professor’s. At Verhaegen’s university the ideal existed from 1834, but the name only arrived in 1854.
A biographer writing in the 1930s described the original aim as higher education based on ‘rational and experimental methods’. On 1 January 1854, Verhaegen used the phrase ‘liberté d’examen’ for the first time. According to the historian Jean Stengers, the formula then spread with remarkable speed. Strikingly, it came not from the lecture halls but from the Liberal Party and Freemasonry.
By then the conflict had hardened. In December 1837, Belgium’s bishops condemned Freemasonry in a joint pastoral letter. Catholics who stayed in a lodge could be refused the sacraments. Verhaegen stayed, and from 1854 he led the Grand Orient of Belgium.
On 6 October 1856, he gave his sharpest definition. Facing bishops who attacked his university in pastoral letters, he called independent inquiry ‘not only a right, but also a duty’ for every professor. With that, free inquiry became more than just a freedom. It became a responsibility.

The limits of Verhaegen’s freedom: against universal suffrage

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen’s freedom had clear limits: he opposed universal suffrage and compulsory schooling. In 1847 he left a liberal association he considered too democratic and founded the Association libérale. For him, free thought was mainly a matter for the propertied middle class. By the late 1850s, young progressive liberals were attacking ‘old liberals’ like him. Anyone who takes free inquiry seriously must apply it to Verhaegen too. What remains is a man who opened a door without seeing how wide it would one day swing.

Why was founding the ULB an act of trust?

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen’s founding of the Brussels university was an act of faith in one precise sense: an act of trust in human reason, not of belief in dogma. That is my reading, from the secular humanist principle of free inquiry. The distinction matters. Faith as the bishops meant it in 1834 closes questions: the truth is given, and teaching passes it on. Free inquiry keeps questions open: truth is something we search for together and may revise tomorrow.
That is why 1834 is a turning point. For the first time, Belgium had an institution whose reason to exist was freedom of thought. What made it free was not the absence of faith but the refusal to place any single conviction above inquiry. Verhaegen, who continued to venerate Christ, is living proof. He held to that stance until the end. In early December 1862 he came home ill from a Masonic congress in Italy. On his deathbed he asked three friends to keep any priest away and demanded a civil burial. He died on 8 December without the last rites, to the dismay of his Catholic family.
A civil funeral on 10 December drew enormous crowds. Soon afterwards, the freethinkers’ society Libre Pensée was founded in Brussels. Historians disagree on how much faith Verhaegen still held at the end. But his last act was one of self-determination: no institution decided how he would die.

Saint Verhaegen 2026: free inquiry facing new authorities

Free inquiry remains the founding principle of both ULB and VUB, the two universities that grew out of Verhaegen’s foundation when it split along language lines in 1969–1970. On Friday, 20 November 2026, they celebrate Saint Verhaegen again, while the principle faces new challengers. VUB even wrote a free inquiry into the first article of its statutes. The Saint Verhaegen celebration, or St V, began in 1888, when students openly honoured their founder and the press mockingly called it a canonisation.
The struggle of 1834 is not over; it has changed shape. I mean that as a parallel, not an equation. Today the pressure on free inquiry comes less from bishops than from governments deciding what universities may do. In 2019, under such a law, the Central European University had to move most of its teaching from Budapest to Vienna.
There is also a new kind of authority: the ready-made answer from a search engine or an AI chatbot. It sounds certain, it is fast, and it does not invite contradiction. Verhaegen’s principle becomes surprisingly current: no source is beyond scrutiny. Not even this column.

Which authority do you accept today without questioning?

Frequently asked questions

Was the founding of the Free University of Brussels an act of faith?

Not in a religious sense: the Brussels university was founded in 1834 precisely to free thinking from church authority. From a secular humanist reading, it was an act of trust in human reason. Strikingly, its founder Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen remained a believer himself.

Why was the Université libre de Bruxelles founded?

The Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) was founded in 1834 as a liberal response to the Catholic university that Belgium’s bishops opened in Mechelen that November. Liberals and Freemasons feared a church monopoly on higher education. The university opened on 20 November 1834 as the Université libre de Belgique.

Was Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen religious?

According to most sources, yes: Verhaegen came from a devout Catholic background and told the Belgian Chamber in 1857 that he venerated Christ. He fought the Church’s power, not faith as such. On his deathbed in 1862, he did refuse a priest, and historians disagree on how much faith he still held by then.

What is free inquiry (libre examen)?

Free inquiry (libre examen in French, vrij onderzoek in Dutch) is the principle that every claim may be tested by reason and evidence, independent of religious or political authority. Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen first used the term in 1854. Today it is the founding principle of ULB and VUB and a core value of Belgian secular humanism.

What is Saint Verhaegen (St V)?

Saint Verhaegen, or St V, is the annual student celebration held in Brussels on 20 November, the founding day of the Free University of Brussels in 1834. The name first appeared in 1888 as an ironic joke: a freethinkers’ feast with a ‘saint’. ULB and VUB use the day to commemorate their shared founding and the value of free inquiry.

Who was Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen?

Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen (Brussels, 1796–1862) was a Belgian lawyer, liberal politician and Freemason. In 1834, together with Auguste Baron, he founded the Free University of Belgium, which split in 1969–1970 into the French-speaking ULB and the Dutch-speaking VUB. He twice served as president of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (1848–1852 and 1857–1859).