Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private colonial project undertaken on his own behalf as a personal union with Belgium.

Leopold's administration was characterized by systematic brutality and atrocities in the Congo Free State, including forced labour, torture, murder, kidnapping, and the amputation of the hands of men, women, and children when the quota of rubber was not met.

After the king's death, it soon emerged that he had left his widow a large fortune in Congo securities, only some of which the Belgian government and Leopold's three estranged daughters were able to win back.

He explained his goal for his reign in an 1888 letter addressed to his brother, Prince Philippe, Count of Flanders: "the country must be strong, prosperous, therefore have colonies of her own, beautiful and calm.

Leopold's reluctance to use the Dutch language in public did little to solve the linguistic conflict in Belgium and made him more unpopular than his father with the Flemish Movement.

The public buildings were mainly in Brussels, Ostend, Tervuren and Antwerp, and include the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark (1852–1880), memorial arcade and complex, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (1905–1969)[25] and Duden Park in Brussels (1881); the Hippodrome Wellington racetrack (1883), the Royal Galleries and Maria Hendrikapark in Ostend (1902); the Royal Museum for Central Africa and its surrounding park in Tervuren (1898); and Antwerpen-Centraal railway station in Antwerp (1895–1905).

Thinking of the future after his death, Leopold did not want the collection of estates, lands and heritage buildings he had privately amassed to be scattered among his daughters, each of whom was married to a foreign prince.

On 15 November 1902, Italian anarchist Gennaro Rubino attempted to assassinate Leopold, who was riding in a royal cortege from a ceremony at Church of St. Michael and St. Gudula in memory of his recently deceased wife, Marie Henriette.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorised his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the people.

Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide a hand of their victim as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting.

For local elites, however, this system presented new opportunities, as the Free State and concession companies paid them with guns to tax their subjects in kind.

[30]: 25 [31] Several historians argue against this figure due to the absence of reliable censuses, the enormous mortality of diseases such as smallpox or sleeping sickness and the fact that there were only 175 administrative agents in charge of rubber exploitation.

[32][33] Reports of deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was forced by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration in 1908.

[6]: 84–87  On 5 February 1885, the Congo Free State, an area 76 times larger than Belgium, was established under Leopold II's personal rule and private army, the Force Publique.

The expedition was composed of two columns: the first, under Belgian Baron Dhanis, consisted of a sizable force, numbering around 3,000, and was to strike north through the jungle and attack the rebels at their base at Rejaf.

[36] Although Leopold had initially planned for the expedition to carry on much farther than the Lado Enclave, hoping indeed to take Fashoda and then Khartoum,[37] Dhanis' column mutinied in February 1897, resulting in the death of several Belgian officers and the loss of his entire force.

Nonetheless, Chaltin continued his advance, and on 17 February 1897, his outnumbered forces defeated the rebels in the Battle of Rejaf, securing the Lado Enclave as Free State territory until Leopold's death in 1909.

Abandoning the promises of the Berlin Conference in the late 1890s, the Free State government restricted foreign access and extorted forced labour from the natives.

Abuses, especially in the collection of rubber, included forced labour of the native population, beatings, widespread killings, and frequent mutilation when production quotas were not met.

[40] Missionary John Harris of Baringa was so shocked by what he had encountered that he wrote to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo, saying: I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo.

[46] Research by Lowes and Montero found King Leopold II's coercive labor practices for rubber extraction in the Congo Free State had long-lasting negative impacts.

Their work also examined how colonial co-option of local chiefs during the rubber era may have undermined leader accountability, linking to broader critiques of indirect rule strategies across Africa.

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led the British Crown to appoint their consul Roger Casement to investigate conditions there.

In Britain, former shipping clerk E. D. Morel with Casement's support founded the Congo Reform Association, the first mass human rights movement.

[6]: 37  Similar methods of forced labour were employed to some degree by Germany, France, and Portugal where natural rubber occurred in their own colonies.

[6]: 280 Efforts by Leopold to dampen international criticism of human rights abuses included the sponsoring of an author, May French Sheldon, by his British consule Sir Alfred Lewis Jones on an expedition of the Congo Free State in 1891.

"[60] In June 2020, a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brussels protested the murder of George Floyd, causing Leopold II's legacy to become once again the subject of debate.

He argued that people should recognize some positive aspects of the king as well as the negative, but hours after the six-metre (20 ft) statue was erected near Kinshasa's central station, it was officially removed.

According to Professor of Colonial History Idesbald Goddeeris of the University of Leuven (2018), most of the statues date from the interwar period, the peak of colonial-patriotic propaganda.

[73] From 9 June 2020 onwards, authorities in Belgium began removing some of the statues of Leopold, beginning with ones in Ekeren in the municipality of Antwerp[67] and in the Warocqué Faculty of Economics and Management of the University of Mons on that day.