Huysmans and Jaspar in London

On 5 July 1940 in London two Belgian politicians, the socialist Camille Huysmans and the liberal Marcel-Henri Jaspar, announced the formation of the Belgian National Committee (Comité national belge). It was to wage war at Britain’s side on behalf of those Belgians who refused to accept defeat. Supporters and opponents alike spoke of it as “the Jaspar–Huysmans government”. Behind the initiative lay the fear that the legitimate government of Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot, stranded in the unoccupied south of France after France’s capitulation, would follow the example of Marshal Philippe Pétain and treat the war as over. The committee was never recognised by the British government and within a few weeks had ceased to matter. It nevertheless served its purpose: under its pressure the lawful Belgian government finally moved to London.

The committee is sometimes called an “unofficial government-in-exile”. That is a simplification. From the end of June Jaspar presented himself as the founder of a “free” Belgian government, but what was created on 5 July was a committee chaired by Huysmans, not a cabinet with ministerial portfolios. Formally it was never a government.

The Belgian government in France

After the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May King Leopold III remained in the country as a prisoner of the Germans, and the ministers, who declared him unable to reign, took over his powers and announced that they would continue the war alongside France. They sat successively in Paris, Limoges and Poitiers. On 17 June, together with the retreating French government, they reached Bordeaux. That same day Pétain, prime minister since the previous evening, asked the Germans for an armistice.

On 18 June the Belgian Council of Ministers faced the question of what to do next. The majority, crushed by defeat, concluded that there was nothing for it but to rely on the French government. Three ministers – Camille Gutt of Finance, Albert De Vleeschauwer of the Colonies and Marcel-Henri Jaspar of Public Health – wanted to continue the fight alongside Britain. Pierlot rejected the proposal to go to London. The government did, however, take a precaution in case its ministers lost their freedom of action: the same day De Vleeschauwer was given the title of Administrator-General of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi with the widest powers, to ensure continuity of authority. The main concern was the colony, rich in copper, tin, gold and uranium: it must neither declare neutrality nor fall under exclusive British control. De Vleeschauwer left Bordeaux for Portugal and was in Lisbon by 22 June.

After the Franco-German armistice of 22 June Pierlot’s government followed the French authorities to Vichy. The ministers tried to find out whether they could return home and sought contact with occupied Belgium. The Germans refused to allow the return of members of a government that had condemned the King. At the same time the Belgian ministers were increasingly unwelcome in Vichy. There is nothing to suggest that Pierlot’s government intended to sign any act of capitulation, but throughout the summer it did nothing to leave France either. Seen from London, this looked like passivity that might at any moment turn into an accommodation with the occupier.

Jaspar breaks ranks

Marcel-Henri Jaspar was 39 and the youngest minister in the cabinet. A Brussels lawyer and nephew of the former prime minister Henri Jaspar, he had been Minister of Communications in 1936–1937 and, from April 1939, Minister of Public Health in Pierlot’s governments. He was a Francophile and an open opponent of Nazism, and his wife came from a family of Russian Jews. Outvoted on 18 June, he left Bordeaux without warning his colleagues. He obtained a visa from the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who in those days was issuing visas to thousands of refugees against his government’s instructions. According to most sources, by 21 June Jaspar and his family were already in London.

He acted much as General Charles de Gaulle had done a few days earlier, and indeed he spoke with de Gaulle. On 23 June he addressed the Belgians over the BBC. He called on ministers, officers, soldiers and sailors who were able to do so to join him and fight alongside the Allies, and in their name he promised them the resources of the Congo. “The war for the liberation of our homeland goes on and will go on until victory,” he said. The government in Bordeaux regarded this as a breach of cabinet solidarity and desertion of his post. It declared that it “absolutely dissociates itself from all the statements” of Jaspar, who “has excluded himself from the government”, and on 24 June stripped him of his portfolio. In London the Belgian ambassador, Baron Emile de Cartier de Marchienne, received him coolly.

5 July: a national committee

Jaspar sought support among the Belgians who had reached England in June, including several parliamentarians. The most important of them was Camille Huysmans, who according to some sources had been in London since 27 June. He was 69 and one of Belgium’s best-known politicians: before the First World War he had been secretary of the Second International; in 1925–1927 he was Minister of Science and Arts; from 1933 he was Mayor of Antwerp; in 1936–1939 he was President of the Chamber of Representatives; and from 1939 he headed the secretariat of the Labour and Socialist International and acted as its president. A fierce critic of fascism, he had had to flee the country after the German invasion. Other politicians of the left joined the group, among them the socialist deputies Max Buset and Isabelle Blume. They later came to be called “the London rebels”.

On 5 July the Belgian National Committee was formed with Huysmans as chairman. Its model was the Free French, whose leader, de Gaulle, the British government had recognised on 28 June. The committee wanted to rally the Belgians who had found themselves in Britain, called on their compatriots at home to organise resistance to the occupier, and proclaimed that Belgium remained at war whatever the ministers in France might do.

London chooses the lawful government

Jaspar’s and Huysmans’s calculations came to nothing. Belgium’s situation differed from that of France. Pétain’s government had signed an armistice with Germany, and on 23 June London declared that it no longer regarded it as the government of an independent state. Pierlot’s government had signed nothing, had not broken the alliance and was still Belgium’s only constitutional authority – and, moreover, the only one that could dispose of the National Bank’s gold deposited in Britain and America and of the riches of the Congo. The Foreign Office did not want to multiply rival centres of Belgian authority. It preferred to wait until the lawful ministers arrived in London.

The haste with which De Vleeschauwer set out for London shows that the Belgian government understood the danger. Ambassador Cartier de Marchienne warned him that Jaspar and Huysmans were trying to create their own “free” government. De Vleeschauwer flew in from Lisbon on 4 July, the day before the committee was announced (some sources say 5 July). On 5 July he was received by Lord Halifax, and on 8 July by Winston Churchill. The Minister of the Colonies placed the Congo’s entire output of raw materials at Britain’s disposal and, according to his biographers, made it a condition that the British should not support Jaspar’s initiative. Churchill accepted the offer but added that he would like to see Pierlot and all his colleagues in London. From that moment the committee had no chance of recognition.

Pierlot’s government in London

De Vleeschauwer left London on 16 July and tried from Portugal to make contact with Pierlot. He succeeded only on 2 August: at Le Perthus on the Franco-Spanish border he met the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, and Gutt. Gutt, who already had visas, went with him to London (sources give 5 or 8 August). There the two ministers formed a provisional “government of two”, which the British accepted as representing the Belgian state. Pierlot and Spaak returned to Vichy to persuade the other ministers to step down. At a final Council of Ministers on 25 August they obtained their resignations, and at the end of the month they left France. In General Franco’s Spain they were detained and placed under police supervision in Barcelona. They escaped with the help of the Belgian consul, hidden in the false bottom of a van, and reached London on 22 October. On 31 October the “government of four” – Pierlot, Spaak, Gutt and De Vleeschauwer – held its first meeting and approved all the decisions taken since the summer by De Vleeschauwer and Gutt.

The Belgian National Committee was dissolved. Jaspar did not return to the government, which never forgave him for breaking ranks. By way of consolation he became Belgium’s diplomatic representative to the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Huysmans was reconciled with Pierlot and for the rest of the war headed the Belgian Parliamentary Office, which brought together the deputies and senators living in London.

Significance

The Jaspar–Huysmans episode lasted a few weeks but had lasting consequences. The threat of a rival centre of authority springing up in London induced Pierlot’s government to leave France, and the British to choose legality over enthusiasm. As a result Belgium, unlike France, did not have two rival governments during the war. In December 1940 Britain recognised the ministers in London as the legitimate and constitutional government of Belgium, on the same footing as the governments of the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. This government had at its disposal the gold, the merchant fleet and the Congo, whose troops fought the Italians in Ethiopia in 1941, while uranium from the mines of Katanga went into the American atomic programme. Belgian ground units were formed in Britain, and Belgian airmen fought in the ranks of the RAF.

The dispute over who truly represented Belgium was by no means over, however. Some Belgians at home and in the army in exile regarded the imprisoned King, not the ministers who had condemned him, as the lawful authority. After the liberation in September 1944 this conflict turned into the Royal Question, which led to the abdication of Leopold III in 1951. Huysmans was Prime Minister of Belgium in 1946–1947, and Jaspar pursued a diplomatic career that ended with the post of ambassador in Paris.