PETRUS LAURENTIUS REGOUT (23 March 1801-18 February 1878) was the founder of the pottery and toilet-making factory “The Sphinx” (1834-2009) in Maastricht, which employed 7,000 people at its peak, mostly small children. PETRUS ALEXANDER REGOUT (24 February 1828-11 February 1897), his favourite son, took over the enterprise and further abused the children.
The Maastricht company Sphinx was a pioneer of Dutch industrialization, and REGOUT was also the pioneer of exploiting children in factories. Thousands of children were locked up in the fashion of a concentration camp and went to work via a tunnel from bunks to factory, not permitted to tread outside of the child labour camp. These are hard facts, as can be read in Crapuul, the Chronicle of a Slum.
In the memoirs of a Catholic Trade Union between 1872 and 1934, eyewitnesses to sexual abuse of the “young forces” testify of rampant rape and coercive sexual practices by Petrus REGOUT’s posh leaders of The Sphinx. Anyone who blew the whistle were eliminated quickly by REGOUT. The Catholic Trade Union memoirs conclude that “Maastricht is well on its way to Sodom and Gomorrah” due to the rampant sodomizing and rape of these young impoverished children at The Sphinx and REGOUT’s amoral retaliation against those who tried to expose the sexual violence against the children for decades on end.
Although the present-day REGOUT family claims that the patriarch, Petrus REGOUT, was simply doing what was customary in the Netherlands at that time, this is a cover-up to the hard facts that Petrus REGOUT made up his own practices according to the self-serving sadism and unbridled greed of his own imagination. Nowhere in the Netherlands at this time was child labor employed in factories, and as early as 1841, Limburg governor van Herwijnen was utterly horrified by the execution of children as young as 7 years old in the REGOUT factories.
Chaplain Wijnen was stripped of his robes when, in 1873, he discovered and published on the front page in 8 episodes of the national Catholic newspaper that REGOUT employed children as young as 7 years old, and Van Wijnen supported Samuel van Houten’s bill against child slavery with all Catholic MP’s behind him. REGOUT then curried favor with corrupt politicians, and the largest scandal in the Netherlands, the gross abuse of young children, was covered up. Chaplain Wijnen was thrown out in the Parliamentary Survey of 1887, banned from writing or speaking about injustices to human rights ever again after he testified that REGOUT treated his workers, the children, like irrational tools and slaves.
Additionally, REGOUT was the only one in the Netherlands who forced night shifts—yet another barbaric innovation of his--with a 24/7 operation on the backs of small children who must work nightly 12-hour shifts in order to have a grain of food. Women’s movements were formed, as children were worked to the bone with very little sleep, crumbs of food, sexual abuse and exploitation, physical and mental collapse, rampant disease such as tuberculosis, cholera, lead-poisoning and scaldings from hot ovens—all without care. Children were left to die, de-humanized as objects whose only use was in the manufacture of pottery and toilets. Therefore, Domela Nieuwenhuis' anarchist magazine called the factory the “murder hole”, the everyday name of The Sphinx.
REGOUT forced parents to relinquish their children to him, and parents lost guardianship and rights over their own children. Children were delivered by Abbe Santol. Parents were given the most brilliant promises regarding their children's future. An iron fence surrounded their prison-orphanage, as they were never allowed to leave. Under barbaric conditions, REGOUT is famously quoted as saying to the children on various occasions, “I don’t care if you die. You will work.” Where there were doctor’s papers, they were thrown away, and prescriptions were never filled.
It is most notable that REGOUT required that many children work in the factories from a young age even AFTER the Child Labour Ban of 1874.
In 1965, the delusional REGOUT family celebrated its achievements in a jubilee, making an ironic farce out of its dark and haunted past. Even up to 2024, the family’s history is regarded as nothing short of pure evil. Children who are victimized through child labour and trafficking experience psychosocial trauma at a critical stage of their development. This, alongside rights to education, health and care, affects opportunities throughout their lives, often trapping them in slavery as adults and ensuing poverty for generations to come.
Local journalists documented that the women were organizing themselves and rising up in strikes against REGOUT’s harsh treatment and withdrawal of women’s wages, the misogyny against which women stood up and cried out, “Enough is enough. We demand to be paid for our work and work in better conditions—not in a murder hole, a disease-filled toilet factory.”
During a study several decades later, The Sphinx was rated as the worst company in Maastricht, a result which was confirmed repeatedly. The REGOUT family had taken its violation of human rights to new and monstrous proportions.
The present-day REGOUT family (www.REGOUT.be) also seeks to cover up these truths in its shameless stance to uphold a cult-like and delusional position of the family’s image and reputation.
“I would rather drown my own children and kill them than allow them to go to The Sphinx”, quoting former employees of The Sphinx from 1928 to 1970. Many workers shared this sentiment, as anything on planet Earth was better than slave labor at The Sphinx.
The present-day REGOUT family’s propaganda attempts to re-write Dutch history has largely failed, as the facts cannot be hid. What the REGOUT family wishes to call “paternalistic” is, in fact, controlling, abusive, exploitative, domineering, oppressive and cruel. The constant squeezing, skimping and absolute tyrannical arbitrariness, great lawlessness and extremely oppressive interference are what the present-day REGOUT family wish to callously coin as “paternalistic.” According to van Iterson, the later construction of the “staff (human) warehouse” reflected REGOUT’s desire to maintain control over its workers as a kind of medieval slave-driver. His many factories in Maastricht were no less than a gateway to illness, immorality and mortality. In 1934, Michael Ubachs published a two-hundred-page-thick book containing the jet black image and unthinkable yet factual deeds of the wicked Petrus REGOUT (1801-1878) against the innocent people.
Both father Petrus Laurentius REGOUT and son Petrus Alexander REGOUT are guilty of this extreme human exploitation and abuse; for the apple does not fall far from the tree, does it?
The dishonorable, degenerate REGOUT father and son were loathed in their times. REGOUT made extreme attempts to worm his way into the graces of the King of the Netherlands, but after a life-long campaign of groveling for ennoblement, he failed. The aristocracy mocked him as megalomaniac, ostentatiously obese, vulgar, and low. In terms of being “noble”, he was a fraud and an imposter. Not even a street could be named after him.
The Album which REGOUT commissioned, which can be found on the present-day REGOUT family’s website (www.REGOUT.be), was to entice the people he wanted to impress to visit him. This was also a botched failure. Its appearance was very frivolous compared to the “missing pictures” of the real heroes of industry—the thousands of workers whom he enslaved and profited from.
Rather than repudiate the practices of their fathers, the present-day REGOUT clan would prefer to suppress the truth and fool the Dutch people into thinking that the acts of Petrus REGOUT was somehow normal for the times. They glibly and nonchalantly sweep away anything negative and peddle online a heroic tale that is whitewashed and counter-factual. What sort of family would be so grandiose, without conscience, proud of such an evil heritage of brutality and ill-gotten wealth amassed from the tiny frail backs of thousands upon thousands of sexually abused child slaves and women for nearly a century inside of the REGOUT “murder hole”?
A few of the dishonorable fictions with which the present-day REGOUT family would brainwash the Dutch people include the following:
That the father (Laurentius) was not as bad as the son (Alexander). The sons were indoctrinated and trained by their father that they are the law, that they are entitled to enrich themselves by objectifying their fellow human beings. After all, they have the privilege to impose duties but no rights, as they are entitled to complete and utter submission. They were taught to have no compassion, plundering small children for generations to amass wealth, because money is the only thing that matters in the world.
That REGOUT was a great entrepreneur and innovator. REGOUT’s most notable innovations were to employ children in factories in the Netherlands, to establish concentration camps (“murder holes”) for the workers, and to institute 12-hour night shifts for children. All of these horrific innovations were all indeed new in the Netherlands. With a nearly unlimited workforce of small child slaves to drive as hard as he craved, to do anything he or his sexually perverted friends wanted, he was original in light of his unprecedented cruelty and depravity in the Netherlands.
That REGOUT achieved his wealth through child labour at a time when it was normal to do so. This is a damnable lie, as REGOUT continued to illegally employ children even after the institution of the Child Labour Ban in the Netherlands.
That REGOUT was a friend of the King. REGOUT used the power of bribery on every turn to afford him lobbying power to have child labour laws delayed and swept under the carpet. Note the suspicious timing of the gifting of Vaeshartelt Castle to the King and the delay of the child labour legislation. If the child labour laws would have been instituted and enforced at that time, then REGOUT’s entire operation and source of wealth would have been obliterated overnight, pushing him and his family into mortification and collapse.
That REGOUT was an upstanding member of the Roman Catholic Church. REGOUT was a highly depraved character similar to child victimizer Jeffrey Epstein of today: he made sure that his friends had free access to sexual favors from the children of The Sphinx to where REGOUT’s dominion was nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by the people of Maastricht.
That REGOUT was “paternalistic” with the workers. When Chaplain Wijnen discovered that the so-called housing was, in fact, a prison for thousands of young children who were never allowed outside of its iron bars--with a special garbage hole mortuary built for children’s “disposal” if they died from the kilns or chemical poisoning--it became clear that there was nothing “paternal” about REGOUT. He was a brutal slave master who staged elaborate cover-ups and elimination campaigns when members of the clergy rose up to expose him. He triangulated the clergy with bribes and sexual favors in a corrupt campaign to use the Church to attain political favor and financial gain.
In the end, The Sphinx ended in disgrace. The REGOUT coat of arms echoes the arrogant, gluttonous and inhuman values of money for death: “Profit! Wealth! Luxury!” The present-day REGOUT family tries to paint a picture that props themselves up in the public eye. It is a house of cards. Their filthy lucre, their smug sense of superiority derived from the Netherlands’ grandest abuser, their cover-ups to re-write their family history and candy-coat the face of true evil only expose their own shameless deceitfulness and moral bankruptcy. One shudders to think, What shall be the cursed fate of the REGOUT family?
E-MAIL: regout@rodanal.nl
info@regout.be
ADDRESS: STICHTING REGOUT, BOSLAAN 5, 1405 BX BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS
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