Victor de Laveleye

Victor Auguste de Laveleye was a Belgian barrister, sportsman and Liberal Party politician who in the 1930s was among the fiercest opponents of the quasi-fascist Rexist movement and during the Second World War became the voice of free Belgium. From London he directed the BBC’s French-language broadcasts to the occupied country, aired under the name Radio Belgique. On 14 January 1941 he proposed to his listeners that the letter “V” become the patriots’ sign of recognition. From this idea grew the V campaign, which spread across the whole of occupied Europe, and the gesture of two spread fingers, popularised by Winston Churchill, became one of the symbols of the war. He died a few months after it ended, at the age of 51.

Family, war and sport

He was born on 6 November 1894 in Brussels, the son of the barrister Auguste de Laveleye and Emma Lynen. He came from a noble family with strong liberal traditions, connected with Antwerp. He was related to the well-known economist Émile de Laveleye, a professor at the University of Liège, and his uncle was Baron Édouard de Laveleye, for many years president of the Belgian Olympic Committee.

When Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914, the twenty-year-old Victor volunteered for the 9th Line Regiment. In the trenches on the Yser, where the Belgian army held on to the last strip of free territory after the battle of October 1914, he fell ill with typhoid. After recovering he served in a searchlight unit, and he ended the war at a flying school in France, where he obtained his pilot’s licence. He was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre.

After the war he completed his law studies at the Free University of Brussels, graduating in 1919, and became a barrister at the Brussels Court of Appeal. At the same time he was an outstanding sportsman. He represented Belgium at tennis at the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924 and twice won the Belgian doubles championship. He also played field hockey as captain of the Royal Léopold Club and of the national team, and at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam he was a reserve in the hockey squad. He later chaired the Belgian Hockey Association (according to some sources from 1931 to 1945) and from 1928 sat on the Belgian Olympic Committee. On 24 May 1923 in Arlon he married Renée Hubert, the daughter of a notary. They had a son and a daughter.

A Liberal against Degrelle

He entered politics as a defender of liberalism and parliamentary democracy against both communism and the new radical right. In 1926 he was elected a Liberal councillor in the Brussels municipality of Saint-Gilles; he lectured at the university, was a rapporteur at the party congress in 1932 and, as a journalist, wrote on international affairs in the daily Le Soir.

A special place in his career was occupied by the fight against the Rex movement of Léon Degrelle. The young and eloquent Rexist leader, who attacked the “corrupt” traditional parties, drew crowds in the mid-1930s, and in the elections of May 1936 he won 21 seats in the Chamber of Representatives. Before those elections de Laveleye was one of his main opponents and clashed with him, among other occasions, in a celebrated public debate in the Madeleine hall in Brussels. In October 1936 he was elected chairman of the Liberal Party. In this post he waged a fierce campaign against Rex, which coincided with the ebbing of support for Degrelle: in April 1937 the Rexist leader lost a by-election in Brussels to the Prime Minister, Paul van Zeeland, who was backed by all the democratic parties.

That same month de Laveleye joined Van Zeeland’s second government as Minister of Justice. According to some sources he replaced the Liberal François Bovesse, who left to become a provincial governor, and took the portfolio himself because other Liberals were unwilling to accept it amid the dispute over an amnesty for the Flemish “activists” who had collaborated with the German occupier during the First World War. His acceptance of the post caused discontent in the party, and in May 1937 de Laveleye had to give up its chairmanship. Since he had no backing from his own party on the amnesty question, he resigned in July 1937; he was minister from 20 April to 13 July. In 1939 he was elected to the Chamber of Representatives for the Brussels constituency and sat in it until his death.

From Limoges to London

On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked Belgium. De Laveleye, like many members of parliament, followed the government to France. After the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May, which King Leopold III agreed to against the wishes of his ministers, Belgian deputies and senators met in Limoges on 31 May. There de Laveleye voted to continue the war alongside the Allies. After the fall of France he did not return home but made his way to England; he reached London in June 1940, on 24 June according to some sources.

At the end of July the BBC offered him the direction of its French-language broadcasts to occupied Belgium. The first broadcast of Radio Belgique went on the air on 28 September 1940; the Flemish section, Radio België, was run by the Antwerp Liberal Fernand Geersens, who broadcast as Jan Moedwil. De Laveleye was both head of the programme and its principal announcer. As the programme’s call he used the slogan of the defenders of Verdun in 1916: “Courage, on les aura, les Boches!” (“Courage, we’ll get them, the Boches!”). The Belgians, whom the occupier had forbidden to listen to Allied stations, tuned in to him in large numbers, and his voice became for them one of the few signs that Belgium was still at war. The broadcasts remained under the editorial control of the BBC, not of the government of Hubert Pierlot, which operated in London from the autumn of 1940 and in November declared that Belgium was at war with Italy.

On the air de Laveleye also resumed his pre-war duel with Degrelle. The Rexist leader, who had been arrested by the Belgian authorities in May 1940 and deported to France, staked everything on collaboration with Germany after his return home, and on 5 January 1941 in Liège he declared himself for National Socialism. Radio Belgique’s commentaries denounced the collaborators, and some accounts count de Laveleye among the chief architects of the “ideological victory” over Degrelle.

The letter “V”

On Tuesday 14 January 1941 de Laveleye addressed his listeners with a proposal that made his name known beyond Belgium. He asked Belgians to adopt the letter “V” as a rallying sign, “because V is the first letter of the word Victoire in French and Vrijheid (freedom) in Flemish”, and Walloons and Flemings were marching together. Letters painted and chalked on walls were to show the patriots how numerous they were, and to show the occupier that he was surrounded by a multitude of people waiting for the first sign of his weakness.

The response was immediate. Within a few weeks “V”s appeared on walls in Belgium, the Netherlands and northern France. In the summer of 1941 the BBC took up the idea and, under the direction of Douglas Ritchie, who broadcast as “Colonel Britton”, developed it into the Europe-wide “V for Victory” campaign, whose signal became the rhythm of the letter “V” in Morse code and the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. On 19 July 1941 it was endorsed by Churchill, who from then on showed two fingers spread in the shape of a “V”. The German propaganda of Joseph Goebbels tried to appropriate the sign, announcing that it stood for the German Viktoria, but failed to take it away from the resistance.

Minister in liberated Belgium

After the liberation of Brussels in September 1944 de Laveleye returned home. On 26 September 1944 he joined Pierlot’s government, re-formed in Brussels, as Minister of Public Education, and remained in the post until February 1945, when the cabinet gave way to the government of Achille Van Acker. It was a difficult period: the government that had returned from exile had to restore the administration, disarm the resistance, begin the reckoning with the collaborators and face the growing “Royal Question” – the dispute over the return of Leopold III, whom the Germans had taken deep into the Reich. In 1945 de Laveleye was one of the Belgian co-authors of the Charter of the United Nations, adopted at the San Francisco conference.

He had been ill for years, and at the end of the war he suffered a personal tragedy: his son was killed while serving in the Royal Air Force. He died on 14 December 1945 in Ixelles in Brussels, at the age of 51 (some sources give 16 December, but Belgian biographical entries agree on 14 December). He was buried in the cemetery at Uccle. He was posthumously awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown by the Regent, Prince Charles; he was also a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Significance

Victor de Laveleye was no great statesman: his ministerial career lasted less than eight months in all, and his party chairmanship a few months. Yet he earned a place in history in two ways. In the 1930s he was one of the democratic politicians who openly stood up to Degrelle when Rexism seemed the wave of the future, and he helped to stop him before the occupation gave him a second chance. During the war, as Belgium’s leading voice on the BBC, he helped to sustain his compatriots’ conviction that their country had not lost, and his idea of 14 January 1941 gave occupied Europe its simplest and most recognisable symbol of resistance. The “V” gesture, spread by Churchill, outlived the war and still serves as a sign of victory and peace, although few of those who make it know the name of the Belgian Liberal with whom it all began. In Belgium he is commemorated by a small park next to the Horta metro station in Saint-Gilles, the municipality where he began his political career. A selection of his radio commentaries was published in 1949 by Robert Fenaux in the volume Ici Radio Belgique.