What did Nicolas Parent do to earn this Medal? Update - I now know the sad story
I picked up this Belgium Carnegie Hero Fund Medal at an auction last month.
What I think is cool about Carnegie Hero Fund Medals are the stories of the bravery behind them. If it was a US Medal it would be easy for me to find out why it was given. Since this is from Belgium I am having trouble. I don't know French or Dutch so I have not been able to search the newspaper archives to see if their is a story about the incident. It is a Silver medal, so it was probably significant enough to make the papers in 1929.
I had found the e-mail address for the Belgium Hero Fund. I sent them a couple of e-mails, but have not gotten any response at all.
If anyone can help me find out why this Medal was given, and what Parent Nicolas did, I would appreciate it.
-Tom
Update: Thanks so much to Theo from the Belgium Carnegie Hero's Fund (CHF), who was able to find some information out about what happened. His e-mail is below.
Tom,
I send you the information about Niola PARENT.
On December 13th 1929, two armed robbers entered the accountant’s office of the Violette Coalmine Inc. in Jupille (Liège).
One of the perpetrators pointed his firearm at the cashier. The company’s night guard, Nicolas PARENT, tried to disarm the perpetrator. In doing so, he received a gunshot wound to the head and died a few hours later, leaving a wife and two small children behind.
Mr. PARENT was posthumously awarded the Carnegie Hero Fund medal.
Since 1912, some 3000 medals have been awarded in Belgium.
Some 20% of these were silver medals
Some 3% were gold medals.
The remainder are – of course – bronze medals.
Silver and gold medals are still awarded by the Belgian CHF!
Theo Van Santen,
Secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund Belgium
Comments
The person might be Nicolas Parent.
I couldn't find any heroes but there are people with that name on the internet.
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Nicolas Parent was a lawyer and a politician ,born in the (contested) region of Haute Savoie in 1817 and died in 1890 in a nearby town, also part of the Savoie region. The history of this region is quite complicated and started with Napoleon's defeat in 1813, when the region was returned to its former Italian speaking princes.
The population of the Savoie region felt kind of isolated in an Italian speaking population and there were constant efforts to be returned to France. It's a very complicated story that has been revived as recently as 1970-1984 and at some point, another neighbor, French speaking Switzerland claimed part of it too.
Savoie was reannexed by France in 1860 and remained part of the French hexagon to this day. Nicolas Parent was a very prominent figure that wanted the region to be returned to France and for this he published the Patriote Savoisien
a journal that served the purposes of the return of the region to France. The one thing that I'm missing here is that Nicolas Parent was not Belgian, but French and that Belgium had no skin in this game. You can read about the extremely complicated history of the Savoie and Haute Savoie in Wikipedia and other sources.
The only Nicolas Parent from Belgium that comes to mind is an architect who lives and works in modern day French speaking Belgium.
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Thanks for the searching, the background, and the PM. This Nicolas Parent won the Belgium medal on 13 December 1929. Not sure the typical timeframe in how long it takes after the event to win the award, but I would think it would be within two years. Also, about 20% of the US medals are given posthumously, and I remember seeing another Silver Belgium medal which was given posthumously. So if their was a Nicolas Parent that died around that time frame that might be a possibility.
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I had e-mailed the contact for the Belgium Carnegie Hero Fund a while back. I got a response this morning, saying that he hopes to have some information for me this week. I will let you know what I find out.
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Here is the answer I received from Theo at the Belgium Carnegie Hero's Fund:
Tom,
I send you the information about Niola PARENT.
On December 13th 1929, two armed robbers entered the accountant’s office of the Violette Coalmine Inc. in Jupille (Liège).
One of the perpetrators pointed his firearm at the cashier. The company’s night guard, Nicolas PARENT, tried to disarm the perpetrator. In doing so, he received a gunshot wound to the head and died a few hours later, leaving a wife and two small children behind.
Mr. PARENT was posthumously awarded the Carnegie Hero Fund medal.
Since 1912, some 3000 medals have been awarded in Belgium.
Some 20% of these were silver medals
Some 3% were gold medals.
The remainder are – of course – bronze medals.
Silver and gold medals are still awarded by the Belgian CHF!
Theo Van Santen,
Secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund Belgium
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Sad, but neat that the story got told. I wonder if a descendent sold the medal or if his widow did earlier to make ends meet.