Cooreman becomes prime minister of Belgium

On 31 May 1918, in the Belgian government in exile, which sat at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre, the almost seven-year premiership of Charles de Broqueville came to an end. The Catholic who had headed the cabinet since June 1911 and had led Belgium through four years of war resigned, and was succeeded by Gérard Cooreman, also a Catholic. This date for the change is given, among others, by the Belgian Chamber of Representatives and the British chronology of the war. The biographies of both politicians prepared by the Belgian Senate and the encyclopaedia of the Flemish movement give 1 June as the day Cooreman took office, and Belgian lists also date his government from then. Formally neither of them bore the title of prime minister, but rather that of head of the cabinet. The title of prime minister became established in Belgium only after the war.

Broqueville’s fall

Broqueville’s position had been weakening for months. His government colleagues resented the fact that in 1917 he had conducted talks on German peace feelers on his own initiative, and on 1 January 1918 he had to hand over the foreign ministry to the Liberal Paul Hymans. The biography prepared by the Belgian Senate adds that his overbearing way of running the government caused growing dissatisfaction, and that this contributed to his resignation. According to Dutch-language studies he also differed with Hymans on language policy: faced with the demands of the Flemish movement, which the Germans in occupied Belgium tried to exploit for their own ends, the prime minister was inclined to make concessions, while Hymans and the conservative Catholics were reluctant to do so.

The most serious, however, was the dispute with King Albert I. The king held that as commander-in-chief, by virtue of his constitutional oath, he personally commanded the army and needed no ministerial countersignature for military decisions. Broqueville, who throughout the war had acted as intermediary between the king at De Panne and the government at Le Havre and had covered the monarch’s decisions with his signature, took a different view. According to the Belgian historian Laurence van Ypersele, that is precisely why the king replaced him with Cooreman in May 1918. Sources also mention a dispute over a royal plan concerning the army.

The new head of government

Gérard Cooreman was born in 1852 in Ghent, into a wealthy Catholic family of the French-speaking bourgeoisie. He was a lawyer, banker and insurer, and had been active in politics since the 1890s: he sat on Ghent city council, in the Senate and, from 1898, in the Chamber of Representatives, which he presided over in 1908–1912. In 1899 he was for a few months Minister of Industry and Labour, and in 1912 he received the honorary title of Minister of State. In 1914 he gave up his seat to become director of the Société Générale de Belgique, the country’s largest financial holding company. After the outbreak of war he left with the government for Le Havre and, as Minister of State, took part in meetings of the Council of Ministers in an advisory capacity.

Cooreman was not a front-rank politician, but he had a reputation as a conciliatory and pragmatic man. In the Catholic party he stood in the middle, between the Christian democrats and the conservatives, and on the Flemish question he was moderate and understood the demands for equal rights for the Dutch language. The king probably hoped that he would preserve harmony within the government, in which Liberals and Socialists had sat alongside Catholics since 1916, and between the government and the army. According to French studies Cooreman accepted office on condition that after the victory he would return to his business. In addition to heading the cabinet he took over the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The other ministers, including Hymans at foreign affairs, kept their posts.

What came next

Cooreman’s government was a transitional cabinet, and the king himself treated it as such. During its short tenure a decree of 2 October 1918 regulated the use of languages in military criminal proceedings, and a commission was set up to study the Flemish question, though it never met. On 13 November 1918, two days after the armistice, Cooreman resigned, and the king entrusted the formation of a new government of national unity to Léon Delacroix. Broqueville returned to the government as Minister of the Interior.