He is best known for his romantic nationalist novel, The Lion of Flanders (1838), inspired by the victory of a Flemish peasant militia over French knights at the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs during the Franco-Flemish War.

[1] Hendrik was the son of a Frenchman, Pierre Conscience, from Besançon, who had been chef de timonerie (wheelhouse master) in the navy of Napoleon Bonaparte, and who was appointed under-harbourmaster at Antwerp in 1811, when that city formed part of France.

Soon after his second marriage Pierre took a violent dislike of the town, sold the shop and retired to the Campine (Kempen) region which Hendrik Conscience so often describes in his books; the desolate flat land that stretches between Antwerp and Venlo.

[2] At the age of seventeen Hendrik left his father's house to become a tutor in Antwerp and to continue his studies, which were soon interrupted by the Belgian Revolution of 1830.

[citation needed] Although nearby, across the river Scheldt, the Netherlands had a thriving literature that was centuries old, written in a language hardly different from Dutch spoken in Belgium, the Belgian prejudice towards "Flemish" persisted.

It was therefore almost with the foresight of a prophet that Conscience in 1830 wrote: "I do not know why but I find in the Flemish language indescribably romantic, mysterious, profound, energetic, even savage.

[1] A passage in Guicciardini fired his fancy, and straightaway he wrote a series of vignettes set during the Dutch Revolt, with the title In 't Wonderjaer (1837).

[4] His father thought it so vulgar of his son to write a book in Dutch that he evicted him, and the celebrated novelist of the future started for Antwerp, with a fortune which was strictly confined to two francs and a bundle of clothes.

Wappers even gave him a suit of clothes and eventually presented him to King Leopold I, who ordered the Wonderjaer to be added to the libraries of every Belgian school.

A small appointment in the provincial archives relieved him from the actual pressure of want, and, in 1838, he made his first great success with the historical novel De Leeuw van Vlaenderen (The Lion of Flanders), which still holds its place as one of his masterpieces,[3] the influence of which extended far beyond the literary sphere.

Yet Robert of Bethune, "The Lion of Flanders", is still presented as a symbol of Flemish pride and freedom, which is due to the romantic, albeit incorrect portrayal by Conscience.

During these years he lived a varied existence, for some thirteen months being a gardener in a country house, but eventually as secretary to the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.

[3] In 1855, translations of his books began to appear in English, French, German, Czech and Italian which achieved considerable popularity outside Belgium.

[5] The French writer, Alexandre Dumas, plagiarized Conscience's book, The Conscript, to produce a work of his own, profiting from the chaotic intellectual property laws of the time.

[6] Subsequent developments in literary understanding, particularly the realism movement which emerged in Conscience's lifetime, have meant that his work sometimes seems "outmoded and primitive" to modern readers.

According to Theo Hermans, Conscience "was no linguistic virtuoso, his narratives are sentimental, his plots unreal and his moral judgments conservative to the point of being reactionary.