Hymans becomes Belgian foreign minister

On 1 January 1918 the Liberal Paul Hymans became foreign minister in the Belgian government in exile, based at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre. He replaced the prime minister, Charles de Broqueville, who since August 1917 had himself been in charge of diplomacy. Broqueville remained head of the government, but instead of foreign affairs he took over the newly created Ministry of National Reconstruction, which was to prepare the country’s post-war recovery from ruin. According to Belgian lists of governments, other portfolios were also changed the same day: economic affairs, until then run by Hymans, were taken over by the Catholic Prosper Poullet, and a second socialist besides Émile Vandervelde, Émile Brunet, joined the Council of Ministers.

Why Broqueville went

Sources explain the change above all by his colleagues’ mistrust of the prime minister. According to the Swedish historian Carl-Henrik Höjer, author of a classic work on Belgian parliamentarism, Broqueville showed interest in soundings that the Germans were making through Baron Oskar von der Lancken, head of the political department of the German occupation authorities in Brussels. Lancken was seeking a compromise peace with France and Belgium, and one of his intermediaries was the Belgian industrialist Baron Evence Coppée, who reached Aristide Briand. Broqueville for a long time did not inform the Council of Ministers of these talks. When the matter came to light, it caused great irritation, especially to the colonial minister Jules Renkin and to Hymans, who together with Vandervelde firmly rejected any compromise peace. A biography of Broqueville prepared by the Belgian Senate adds that his domineering way of running the government also caused growing discontent. Handing diplomacy to one of the staunchest opponents of deals with Germany was meant to calm the coalition.

The new minister

Hymans, born in 1865 in Ixelles near Brussels, was a lawyer, a historian of parliamentarism and one of the leaders of the Belgian Liberals. At the beginning of the war he went with a mission of parliamentarians to the United States to present the case of invaded Belgium to President Wilson, and in 1915 he became minister in London. In January 1916, when the government became a cabinet of national unity, he joined it as minister without portfolio, and in October 1917 he took over the economic affairs ministry. As foreign minister he demanded the full restoration of Belgian independence, reparations for the destruction and revision of the treaties of 1839, which had imposed perpetual neutrality on the country.

What came next

The change did not save Broqueville. His plans for post-war reforms, including electoral reform and concessions to the Flemish movement, met with resistance from conservative Catholics, and the prime minister’s position was also weakened by old disputes with King Albert I over command of the army. At the end of May 1918 the prime minister resigned, and a new government was formed by Gérard Cooreman. Hymans kept the foreign ministry in the following cabinets too. In 1919 he led the Belgian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and in 1920 he became the first President of the Assembly of the League of Nations.