Franco-Belgian agreement on military service

On 13 March 1915 at Le Havre representatives of France and Belgium signed an agreement suspending for the duration of the war the Franco-Belgian convention of 30 July 1891 on the application of the military service laws. It was signed on behalf of the President of France by the French minister to the King of the Belgians, Antony Klobukowski (PL), a diplomat of Polish descent, the son of a Polish émigré who had settled in Auxerre. The Belgian side was represented by the Foreign Minister, Julien Davignon. The place of signature was no accident: since October 1914 the Belgian government had been sitting at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre.

The 1891 convention

The convention concerned young men whose nationality had not yet been settled. Above all these were the sons of Belgians born in France and the sons of Frenchmen born in Belgium. The law of both states allowed them, on coming of age, to choose which country they wished to be citizens of. So that they would not be called up in both states at once, the convention provided that before the age of 22 they would not be entered ex officio on the conscription lists either in France or in Belgium. Anyone who changed nationality in the year after coming of age was released from all military obligations towards the state to which he had previously belonged.

The matter was not trivial. Before the war nearly 300,000 Belgians lived in France, many of them in the industrial northern departments, and many families had been settled there for generations. The convention had been concluded for five years with the possibility of renewal, and it remained in force right up to the outbreak of war. In peacetime it protected young men from double service. In wartime it meant that some of them served nowhere.

What the agreement changed

In the preamble both parties stated that in the present circumstances deferring the military service of young men covered by the convention was harmful to both countries. The application of the convention was therefore suspended until the end of the war. Men in the groups it covered were henceforth to be called up into the French Army. An exception was made for the minor sons of Belgians born in France to parents who had both been born outside France.

Anyone who produced a document confirming enlistment in the Belgian Army, or declared that he wished to serve in it, was not to be taken into the French Army. Such men were sent directly to the nearest Belgian depot unit. France also undertook to assist the Belgian government in any measures intended to bring the minors in question under Belgian military obligations. The agreement expressly stated that it did not settle the question of nationality.

Ratification and consequences

The instruments of ratification were exchanged at Le Havre on 22 March 1915. That same day President Raymond Poincaré signed the decree promulgating the agreement, which appeared in the official gazette the next day. As early as April, when the conscription class of 1917 was being drawn up, French communes were instructed to enter on the lists the young men covered by the former convention as well. Only those who showed that they had enlisted in the Belgian Army or were on its rolls were left out.

The agreement was part of a wider problem. The Belgian Army, which after the fighting of autumn 1914 held the last strip of the country on the Yser, needed replacements, and Belgian law allowed many young Belgians abroad to avoid service. Hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees were also living in France, and the presence of men of military age who were not serving in any army aroused resentment among some of the French. Eventually, in the summer of 1916, the Belgian government ordered the call-up of all men in exile aged 18 to 40, and the French gendarmerie helped it track down those who refused.