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Flag of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre - Image by Arnaud Leroy, 3 May 2005
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The municipality of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre (18,056 inhabitants on 1 January 2007; 4,679 ha; municipal website) is located at mid-distance of Charleroi and Namur, in the industrial basin of river Sambre. The municipality of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre was established in 1976 as the merger of the former municipalities of Jemeppe, Balêtre, Ham-sur-Sambre, Mornimont, Moustier, Onoz, Saint-Martin, and Spy. The qualifier "sur-Sambre" was added for the sake of differentiation from Jemeppe-sur-Meuse, part of the municipality of Seraing since 1976.
The main industrial sites in Jemeppe-sur-Sambre belong to the Solvay Group (Ixelles (headquarters), Neder-over-Hembeek (Solvay Research & Technology), Jemeppe-sur-Sambre (chemicals and plastics), Lillo (chemicals and plastics), and Oudenaarde (plastics and transformed products).
Ernest Solvay (1838-1922) was the son of a quarry master from
Rebecq-Rognon. At the age of 23, he developed with his brother Alfred a new process for the industrial production of sodium carbonate. They founded Solvay & Cie on 24 December 1863, flirting with bankruptcy on several occasions during the nearly 10 years it took them to perfect the process.
From 1870 to 1880, Solvay promoted the global expansion of the company.
Factories were set up in Belgium, France, England, Germany, Russia and
the United States. Ernest Solvay oversaw the organization and
development of his industrial empire with remarkable insight. For
example, he was one of the first to make industrial use of
electrolysis.
Ernest Solvay was also a man of progressive social ideals, which he
implemented within his factories. He established before legal
obligations a social security system, pensions for the workers in 1878,
an 8-hour workday in 1897, and paid vacations in 1913. After becoming
wealthy, he looked to society at large, and founded several scientific,
philanthropic, and charitable foundations, including the Institutes of
Physiology (1895) and of Sociology (1901), as well as the prestigious
School of Business (1903) which still bears his name.
His overriding passion for science was again expressed in 1911 when he
organized a meeting in Brussels of most of the famous physicists and
chemists of the time. Participants included Marie Curie, Albert
Einstein, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré and Duke
Louis de Broglie. This was the birth of the Solvay international
physics council, which has met 20 times between 1911 and 1991,
assembling some of the most brilliant scientists in the world.
Ernest Solvay bought in 1893 the castle of La Hulpe and was confered the title of Count Solvay of La Hulpe by King Albert I.
The castle of Mielmont was built in the 12th century on a spur dominating the valley of Sambre. The building is protected by four towers, including a donjon with 2.1-m thick wall. Due to the building of the castle directly on the rock, some rooms do not have a single right angle. The castle was severely damaged during the French Revolution and revamped by the Beauffort family in 1870-1875. It is owned today by the de Cock family.
The cave of Spy (website) is one of the most important Paleolithic caves in Europe. Excavations made in 1886 by the archeologist Marcel de Puydt, the geologist Max Lohest and the paleontologist Julien Fraipont are considered as a milestone in the history of science. They provided definitive evidence of the existence of an archaic human being older than the modern man, that is the Neanderthal Man.
The cave opens south-south-west on the valley of Orneau, flowing there
in a fomer meander of the Sambre, in layers dating back to
Carboniferous (Visean level, 300 millions BP). The cave is made of a
main room and a few, short gullies, and has three entrances. The human
skeletons found in the cave date back to 40,000-50,000 BP; they
belonged to Neanderthal men. The cave was also inhabited in later
periods (Later Paleolithic, Neolithic and Gallo-Roman times).
The first excavation in the cave of Spy was made by Dr. Rucquoy, from
Namur, in 1879. He found 2500 hyena teeth, deer and reindeer antlers,
and seven mammoth tusks. In 1885, de Puydt and Lohest started the
excavation of the terrace of the cave, using explosives. They
found remains of a human skull, flintstones, pottery and bones. They
hired the miner A. Orban, who dug a gallery (like in a coal mine) and
followed a "lode". The excavation disrupted several layers of
settlements, which were irreversibly destroyed. In 1886, the explorers
found more human remains and invited Fraipont on the site of the cave.
Fraipont wrote a scientific report of the findings and described the
skeleton, fairly complete, of a young man, the skull and the arms of an
elder woman, bones from a child etc. The remains were dated
40,000-50,000 BP, according to the mammoth remains found beside them.
Further campaigns of excavations analyzed the "rubble" from the first
excavations and found remains of later periods.
The first Neanderthalian remains seem to have been found around 1700 in
Canstadt, near Stuttgart. At that time, nobody dared to identify them
as human remains. In 1830, Phlippe-Charles Schmerling, a practitioner
from Liège, discovered two skulls in Engis; he claimed they belonged to a fossil human being, but nobody wanted to believe him. In 1857, Dr. Fühlrott analyzed human remains excavated by workers in the valley of Düssel. He identified them as the remains of a fossil human being, but Pr. Virchow, the German top anthropologist at the time, said there were remains of a modern man suffering from rachitism and arthritis. At that time, the Darwinian ideas were not widely accepted and the theory of the evolution of the human being with time was extremely nefarious. The finding of the Spy Man, undoubtly dated, definitively validated Fühlrott's theory and the archaic species Homo neanderthalensis was eventually accepted.
Ivan Sache, 3 May 2005
The flag of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre is divided white-red by a wavy
diagonal with the municipal coat of arms in canton.
According to Armoiries communales en Belgique. Communes wallonnes, bruxelloises et germanophones [w2v03], the flag, adopted on 26 October 1995 by the Municipal Council, is prescribed by a Decree adopted on 29 May 1996 by the Executive of the French Community.
The odd division of the flag recalls the curve of the Sambre and a letter "S", for Solvay.
The coat of arms of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre is "Gules a chevron argent three roses of the same placed two and one".
Servais [svm55] shows the coat of arms of Jemeppe, before the administrative reform, as "Gules billetty argent a lion or". These arms, granted by Royal Decree on 4 February 1930, belonged to Knight Antoine Mallet, who built the castle of Jemeppe in the 13th century.
Arnaud Leroy, Pascal Vagnat & Ivan Sache, 3 May 2005