Who was Jules Clément, brewer and lemonade-maker?

Jules Clément is the figure of the second generation of the Clément house. He took over the coaching inn “Bruyère à la Croix” in 1923, after Henri and Sidonie, and ran the house with his wife Marie-Lidwina for 31 years, until 1954. Under their watch the establishment evolved: Jules did not just keep an inn, he became a brewer of beer and a lemonade-maker.

That double activity is revealing of the period. In interwar Belgium, local breweries were everywhere, anchored in their village, and many combined beer-making with the production of soft drinks and lemonades to widen their outlets. Jules fitted that pattern: he produced on site, he served on site, and he developed the drinks side of the house alongside the dining business inherited from the previous generation. The modern trading name “Brasserie Chez Clément” carries the direct imprint of that craft.

The 1923-1954 stretch covered some of the harshest decades for a local business: the aftermath of the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War Occupation, and the post-war reconstruction. The house crossed all of it and stayed operational, which presupposes real adaptive capacity. The precise choices Jules made through these episodes belong to the family archives and remain to be documented, but the continuity of the sign is established, and that in itself is a robustness signal.

In 1954 Jules and Marie-Lidwina handed over to Marcel and Andrée Clément, who opened the third generation. It is under Marcel that the house would add, in 1976, a dedicated wine bar, an innovation for Walloon Brabant at the time. But it is Jules's era that durably anchored the word “brasserie” in the commercial identity of the place: he carried it in the literal sense, by brewing beer on site. Today's house, at Rue de la Bruyère 230 in Genval, inherits that legacy directly.