Broqueville becomes foreign minister

On 4 August 1917, the third anniversary of the German entry into Belgium, there was a reshuffle in the Belgian government in exile. The Prime Minister, Charles de Broqueville, who since 1912 had also headed the War Ministry, handed that portfolio to Lieutenant-General Armand De Ceuninck. He himself took over the Foreign Ministry from Baron Eugène Beyens, who since January 1916 had directed Belgian diplomacy. On the same day the socialist Émile Vandervelde, until then a minister without portfolio, was given the ministry of civil and military supply. The government still sat at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre, from where since the autumn of 1914 it had governed a country almost all of whose territory was occupied by the Germans.

The new Minister of War was a professional officer, not a politician. He was born in 1858 in Mechelen into the family of an artillery non-commissioned officer, and joined the army as a boy of thirteen. In 1914 he commanded a grenadier brigade at Antwerp and in the Battle of the Yser, and from January 1915 the 6th Division on the Flanders front, including during the German gas attack at Ypres in April 1915. According to Belgian biographies, after his appointment he did not go to Le Havre but worked alongside the army, near Veurne. He remained Minister of War until November 1918.

The sources speak cautiously about why Beyens left. The former minister in Berlin wanted Belgium to fight alongside the Entente as a neutral state whose neutrality had been violated by one of its guarantors, not as an ordinary ally. For that reason it did not accede to the London agreement against concluding a separate peace, and Beyens contented himself with the Declaration of Sainte-Adresse. His biographers write that this cautious policy was not understood by those who, in the government’s circle and sometimes in the government itself, dreamed of a greater role for Belgium and even of territorial gains. These criticisms, though confined to a narrow circle, were not unconnected with his departure. Broqueville’s biographers add that the Prime Minister took over diplomacy at a moment when the successes of the troops from the Belgian Congo in German East Africa, with the capture of Tabora in September 1916, had raised the question of the future of the Belgian conquests in the face of British ambitions.

The reshuffle also had a domestic background. Broqueville had repeatedly clashed with King Albert I over who really commanded the army. The King, invoking his constitutional oath, considered himself its personal commander and as recently as April 1917 had firmly rejected a note from the Prime Minister seeking greater influence for the government over military decisions. Now the War Ministry passed into the hands of a general from the front, while the Prime Minister took charge of foreign policy. According to the 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica, one of his more important moves in his new role was the creation, on the French and British model, of a six-member war cabinet.

Broqueville did not direct diplomacy for long. In September 1917 he passed on to Aristide Briand German peace soundings sent from occupied Brussels, without informing his colleagues in the government, which weakened his position. On 1 January 1918 the Liberal Paul Hymans became Foreign Minister, and at the end of May that year Broqueville stepped down as Prime Minister.