Prince Charles becomes Regent of Belgium

On 21 September 1944 in Brussels, Prince Charles, Count of Flanders, the younger brother of King Leopold III, took the constitutional oath as Regent of the Kingdom of Belgium before the joint houses of parliament. The day before, parliament had declared that the King was “unable to reign” and had elected Charles in his place. Some sources, especially French-language ones, place both the swearing-in and the assumption of office on 20 September itself; most, however, state that he took the oath the following day.

The regency closed the first stage of the Belgian state’s return after four years of occupation. A fortnight earlier, on 8 September, the government of Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot had come back from London to the liberated capital. The King could not take up power because he had been held in German captivity since June, but that was not the only issue. Since 1940 a deep conflict had been growing between the monarch and the government, which after the war turned into the so-called Royal Question and divided the country for several years.

War chronologies describe Leopold III as a king “accused of collaboration”. That is a simplification. No formal charge was brought against him at the time; the dispute concerned his conduct in May 1940 and during the occupation: the surrender of the army against the government’s position, his decision to remain in the country, his meeting with Hitler and his remarriage. The King’s opponents saw this as submissiveness towards the occupier or as conduct unworthy of a monarch; his supporters saw it as defending the country and the prisoners of war. A commission of jurists appointed by the King himself concluded after the war that he had not committed treason, but this did not end the political dispute.

King and government: the split of 1940

The crisis had its origins in the events of May 1940. Leopold III, who under the constitution had taken command of the army, believed that as commander-in-chief he ought to share the fate of his soldiers. On 25 May, at Wijnendale Castle, he turned down the ministers who were urging him to go into exile like King Haakon VII of Norway. Three days later the Belgian army surrendered and the King became a prisoner of war, confined in the Palace of Laeken outside Brussels. The Pierlot government condemned the surrender, and the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud blamed the King for the defeat. Before the end of 1940 the ministers in exile, invoking Article 82 of the constitution, declared that a king in enemy hands was unable to reign and assumed the exercise of his powers. After several months of hesitation and a stay in France, the Pierlot government operated from London from the autumn of 1940.

In the occupied country the King was for a time very popular as the “prisoner king” who had stayed with his people. Two events undermined that popularity. On 19 November 1940 Leopold III was received by Hitler at the Berghof; he asked for the release of the prisoners of war and for guarantees of independence but obtained nothing, and his opponents later presented the visit itself as an attempt to come to terms with the Third Reich. In December 1941 it emerged that the King, a widower since the death of Queen Astrid, had married Lilian Baels in September. A wedding at a time when thousands of Belgian soldiers were held in German prisoner-of-war camps was very badly received, especially in Wallonia, where most of the prisoners came from.

The political testament and deportation

In case he should be outside the country at the moment of liberation, Leopold III drew up a so-called political testament in January 1944. In it he criticised the ministers who had condemned him in 1940, demanded changes in the government, questioned the commitments the government-in-exile had made to the Allies, and practically ignored the resistance and the Belgians fighting alongside the Allies. The document was placed in trusted hands with instructions to pass it to the government after liberation.

On 7 June 1944, the day after the Normandy landings, the Germans, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, took the King to the Reich, to Hirschstein Castle on the Elbe in Saxony; his family joined him a few days later. When the Allies entered Belgium, nobody in Brussels knew exactly where the monarch was being held.

The government returns on 8 September

Allied troops crossed the Belgian border at the beginning of September, and on 3 September British armoured units liberated Brussels. On 8 September an aircraft brought Pierlot and members of his cabinet from London. Historians agree that their return was met with indifference: to many Belgians the ministers were men who had spent four years in the safety of London, far from hunger, repression and deportation for forced labour. The government now had to rebuild the administration in a country part of which was still under occupation, while in the zone behind the front the Allies held much of the real power.

After their return the ministers were handed the King’s testament. A copy also reached the British King George VI and the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. According to historians, the text was badly received both in the Belgian government and in London. It also revived divisions within the government itself which had been kept hidden during the war. For the time being, however, nobody proposed settling the dispute: the King was a prisoner, and the priority was to give the state a functioning head.

The choice of a regent

The Belgian constitution provided for such a situation in Article 82: if the King is unable to reign, the joint houses of parliament record that fact and appoint a regent. The heir to the throne, the fourteen-year-old Prince Baudouin, had been deported together with his father, so the natural candidate was the King’s brother. Prince Charles, born in Brussels on 10 October 1903 as the second son of Albert I, had grown up in England during the First World War and trained at a British naval college. He was a shy man who kept away from public life and was little known even among Belgians.

Under the occupation he had lived at Laeken, in a different wing of the palace from the King. After his brother’s deportation he went into hiding in the Ardennes and moved between hiding places under an assumed name; according to some biographers he stayed on a farm at Sart-lez-Spa. For several days after its return the government was unable to find him. Only with the help of people from his entourage did the prince appear in Brussels on 11 September.

Parliament met on 19 September for the first time since May 1940, still in the composition elected before the war. Pierlot presented a report on the activities of the government in exile, and the houses approved its policy. On 20 September the joint houses declared the King unable to reign and elected Charles as regent. According to the prince’s French-language biographer, 264 of the 369 members of parliament were present – some were in captivity or in territory still under occupation, and a few had fled as collaborators – and 217 voted for Charles, with 47 abstentions. On 21 September the Regent took the oath and assumed the royal powers.

The first weeks of the regency

One of the Regent’s first decisions was to entrust the task of forming a government of national unity. For want of other candidates, Pierlot again became its head. The cabinet sworn in on 26 September included communist ministers for the first time in Belgian history, reflecting the strength of the left-wing resistance – the Independence Front and the Armed Partisans associated with it – in the first weeks after liberation.

The country was not yet entirely free. North of Antwerp and along the Dutch border the fighting continued; the Scheldt estuary, without which the port of Antwerp could not receive ships, remained in German hands; and just over the border, in the Netherlands, the Allies were in the middle of Operation Market Garden. The government faced the supply of food and coal, inflation, the reckoning with collaborators and the future of the armed resistance units. This last question turned into a serious crisis in November 1944: the government demanded that the resistance lay down its arms, the communist ministers resigned, and on 25 November, during a demonstration in Brussels, the gendarmerie opened fire on the crowd, wounding several dozen people. In October the Regent signed the currency reform prepared by the Finance Minister, Camille Gutt, and in December a decree on general social security which put into effect the provisions of the clandestine social pact.

Significance

The regency was meant to be a short, temporary arrangement, yet it lasted almost six years. When in May 1945 the Americans freed Leopold III and his family at Strobl near Salzburg, the government of Achille Van Acker set him conditions for his return, which the King did not accept. In July 1945 parliament resolved that his inability to reign could be ended only by a decision of both houses. The King settled in Switzerland, and the dispute over him – the Royal Question – divided Belgium: Catholics and most Flemings supported his return, while socialists, liberals and communists, who were strong above all in Wallonia and Brussels, opposed it.

In the referendum of 12 March 1950 about 58 per cent of voters were in favour of the King’s return, but in Wallonia only about 42 per cent. Charles’s regency ended on 20 July 1950, and on 22 July Leopold III returned to the country. A wave of strikes and riots, during which gendarmes shot dead four demonstrators at Grâce-Berleur near Liège on 30 July, persuaded him to hand power to his son Baudouin; he formally abdicated on 16 July 1951.

The years of the regency were for Belgium a time of reconstruction and of choosing sides: the country joined the UN, Benelux – whose foundations had been laid in London as early as 5 September 1944 – and NATO, and women won the right to vote in parliamentary elections. Charles signed these decisions as regent, but politically he remained in the shadow of the governments. After 1950 he withdrew from public life, broke off contact with his brother, settled near Ostend and painted, signing his pictures Karel van Vlaanderen. He died in Ostend on 1 June 1983.