What if King Albert I didn't die.

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Albert I king of the belgians aslo know as the soldier/knight king died in a mountaineering accident while climbing alone the Roche du Vieux Bon Dieu at Marche-les-Dames, in the Ardennes region of Belgium near Namur in 1934 he was 59 years old.

What if that didn't happend? How this would have changed Belgium history? Would his survival have an influence in the WWII?
 
If he didn't die, he would've been 125 by now, and definitely the world's most famous monarch.

But seriously: suppose he lived through WW2, I doubt it would have much impact on the course of the war itself, though I imagine the Royal Question would have been avoided, as would the murder of Lahaut.

I don't know if he'd stayed in Belgium or would've fled to London. But even regardless of how he would've handled WO2, he couldn't possibly have screwed up his personal relationships with leading politicians as Leopold III managed to do, even before the war. Considering his actions after WO1 (the 'Coup de Loppem'), I also imagine him to be somewhat less tempted with authoritarianism as his son was. He also has a lot more credit, being a 'hero' of the Great War, so I could imagine the popular 'state of grace', which Leopold initially enjoyed when he decided to stay in the country, lasting.
Plus: there would have been no Lilian to play heaven's gift to the antiroyalists. (Well, she would've existed, but her marriage to Leopold would probably have been butterflied away.)

Leopold could still screw it up as crown prince during the war, off course. But he might not be as much a focus of attention as he was as king, or simply be in the position to screw things up as much. Chances are he would've simply succeeded his father, perhaps somewhere in the fifties, and reigned as a perhaps slightly controversial monarch until he died in 1983.

More interestingly, what happens to Belgian politics without Royal Question? Perhaps a more rapid weakening of the Communist Party?

Also, Belgian conspiracy theorists would focus even more on Van Eyck's 'Just Judges', out of necessity.
 
As I mentioned last night in the thread about how the French might have held out against Germany in 1940, the most significant possibility coming from Albert's staying alive is that Belgium might continue in a French alliance in the 1934-1940 time-frame. I don't know Belgian politics well enough to know for sure, but I've heard it said that Albert would have worked to keep the French alliance. If he succeeded, then the Germans would face French troops already inside Belgium when they tried to go west in 1940, which means that the French wouldn't have to risk an encounter battle in Belgium.

The Germans excelled at off the cuff improvised battles, where their fast communications, mobility, and hard-driving commanders did well. The French, at least the active divisions, were very good at defense from a prepared position once they had a chance to set up and register their artillery.

The key question in the war was which type of war it would be, one where the French had to lurch forward into Belgium to meet the Germans, almost guaranteeing that the war would be a German-type of war, or one where the French were already where they wanted to be in Belgium and the Germans had to go up against their prepared positions.
 
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