The general strike of 1960–1961 (French: Grève générale de 1960–1961), known popularly in Wallonia as the Strike of the Century (Grève du Siècle), was a major series of strikes in Belgium which began on 14 December 1960 and lasted approximately six weeks.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,147 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Grève générale de l'hiver 1960-1961]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Grève générale de l'hiver 1960-1961}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The general strike was instigated by the militant trade union, the General Labour Federation of Belgium (Fédération Générale du Travail de Belgique, or FGTB; Algemeen Belgisch Vakverbond, ABVV), against an attempt by the government of Gaston Eyskens to improve the state of Belgium's public finances after the independence of the Belgian Congo by introducing a series of austerity measures known as the Unitary Law (Loi Unique or Eenheidswet). It has been described as "one of the most serious class confrontations in Belgium's social history", which brought out 700,000 workers out on strike.^[1] A number of clashes took place between strikers and the police, Gendarmerie, and Belgian Army. In one incident, the Liège-Guillemins railway station was ransacked by strikers on 6 January 1961. Although the strike began across Belgium, it soon lost momentum in Flanders where workers returned to work after a few days. The strike continued in Wallonia, a region largely reliant on heavy industry and already starting to experience deindustrialization, for several weeks. The law was eventually passed on 14 February 1961. Four strikers died.

The strike is considered a key moment for the Walloon Movement and an influence on the formation of Walloon identity. It led to the foundation of a new ideology of Renardism which linked Walloon nationalism with syndicalism. The strike also led to the creation of the pro-federalist Walloon Popular Movement (Mouvement Populaire Wallon, MPW) in 1961 and an increasing polarization between Flemish and Walloons which culminated, from the late 1960s, in the "Linguistic Wars" and, ultimately, in Belgium's gradual transformation into a federal state.

The 1983 film Winter 1960 is based on the strike. The strike was the subject of the documentary film Lorsque le bateau de Léon M. descendit la Meuse pour la première fois (1979) by the Dardenne brothers.

• Belgian general strikes
• Misère au Borinage (1933)
• André Renard
• Split of the Catholic University of Leuven
• Congo Crisis (1960-65)