Union Leader

Julien Lahaut was born in 1884 in Seraing, an industrial suburb of Liège in Wallonia, southern Belgium. A son of the working class, Julien was involved from an early age in the country’s great class struggles, such as the strikes to demand universal suffrage. His father, a boilermaker, was a pioneer in the local socialist section of the Iron City, as Seraing was nicknamed. At the age of fourteen, Julien left school, like all working-class children, and was hired by Cockerill, a huge steel company and at the time the flagship of Belgian industry. The whole economic life of the region revolved around this firm. However, working conditions there were precarious.

Lahaut joined the trade union movement at a young age. He was at the forefront of the metalworkers’ strike in 1902 — and was sacked in retaliation. He later found work in Val St-Lambert and cofounded the “Stand Up” union, the Liège-based forerunner of the later Metalworkers’ Union. He became a union official in 1908, following a strike at Val St-Lambert and a further dismissal. Another striker — his soon-to-be wife, Géraldine Noël — was dismissed at the same time for the same reason. Lahaut’s grassroots work enabled the Metalworkers’ Union to organize throughout the industrial area of Liège.

Always at the forefront of the class struggle, Lahaut was imprisoned in 1913 during the last general strike for universal suffrage, accused of having “undermined freedom of work by hurling insults at those who work.”

Then came the Great War. Belgium was occupied. Lahaut enlisted and joined an armored car corps. This elite unit was sent to the east, to fight the Germans on the Ukrainian front. The fighting was extremely violent. In 1917, the squadron observed the Russian Revolution from a distance and sympathized with the Bolsheviks, the supporters of the popular power expressed in the soviets (workers’ and soldiers’ councils). Lahaut returned from Russia in 1918 convinced that Lenin was right — and that revolution was within reach. Worker militants like Lahaut saw the Soviet Union as the “great light in the east,” as the title of a novel by Jules Romains put it.

On his return to Seraing, Lahaut returned to his union job. In 1921, there was a strike at a local steel plant in Ougrée-Marihaye. Against his socialist comrades’ advice, Lahaut led this fight, and its outcome would mark his final break with social democracy. This was a tough — and lengthy — industrial dispute. After seven months of deadlock, the trade union workers’ federation cut the workers’ strike pay. The mass Belgian Labour Party (POB), with which the union was affiliated, insisted on remaining in government, reaching agreements with its liberal and Catholic partners. This was a stab in the back for the working-class families who had bled themselves dry in the strike. But Lahaut remained loyal to these workers and organized foster care for their children. He was arrested again. Party officialdom took advantage of the situation to liquidate the strike and denigrate him in the trade union press. Lahaut was immediately expelled from the Metalworkers’ Union. It was not until 2010 that Francis Gomez, president of the union in Liège, officially rehabilitated him.

Lahaut reacted to this conflict by joining an independent trade union — the Knights of Labor — as well as the newly founded Communist Party of Belgium. In 1923, even before joining the PCB, he was detained for several days, accused of being one of the seventeen authors of a major “communist plot against the state.” After his acquittal, Lahaut quickly took up a position in the PCB leadership. He was elected as a local councilor in 1926, a position that he held until his death. He became provincial councilor for Liège in 1929 and was elected a member of parliament in 1932, following the bitterly fought miners’ strike of that year. Lahaut held numerous rallies in the rebel towns and villages of the Borinage mining region, was arrested, and left prison only once he had been elected an MP, which in turn gave him parliamentary immunity. In the Chamber of Representatives, he was a powerful tribune for popular anger. He would remain there to his death, except during the Occupation period.

From Anti-Fascism to the Workers’ Resistance

Yet the threat of war already loomed over Europe and the world. The far right was gaining ground. As early as 1924, galvanized by Benito Mussolini’s rise in Italy, the first Belgian Blackshirts attempted a strong-arm move to seize the streets of Liège. Lahaut and a group of metalworkers pushed them back, in an early anti-fascist struggle. Lahaut kept the cane of one of the Blackshirt militiamen as a trophy.

On 1 May 1933, in reaction to the Nazi coup d’état in Germany, a procession of Young Socialist Guards snatched the swastika flag from the German consulate. The MP Lahaut waved it in Parliament to denounce the Belgian right’s complacency toward Adolf Hitler. At the Brussels Universal Exhibition in 1935, Lahaut disrupted the Italian pavilion, again at the cost of his arrest and sentencing by the courts. His anti-fascism was also evident in his support for Republican Spain, which was in the grip of the fascist general Francisco Franco’s uprising. The popular forces of the left-wing democratic government were no match for Franco’s troops, who were heavily armed by Hitler and Mussolini. The PCB organized large solidarity fundraising campaigns for the Spanish Republic, and Lahaut himself led two food convoys to Valencia and Madrid. As well as encouraging the volunteers of the International Brigades to fight the fascists militarily, he took three children of republicans into his own home. In Parliament, in 1939, he asked the government to do the same for Jewish children hunted down by Nazi Germany.

Then came the invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and the German Occupation that rapidly descended on the country. Lahaut’s first task was to bring refugees back from France. The Germans kept an eye on him — but did not intervene. Lahaut strove to revive an underground Communist organization, and encouraged his comrade Louis Neuray to seek election as chief shop steward of the ACEC-Herstal industrial plant. In December 1940, Neuray led the factory out on strike, right under the nose of the Nazis. This was one of the first significant actions of the trade union resistance.

In January 1941, Lahaut managed to scupper a rally by the local fascist leader Léon Degrelle, despite the protection he enjoyed by the occupying forces. But the strongest act of defiance came in May 1941. The “strike of the 100,000” was doubtless the most emblematic event of the Belgian workers’ resistance. To dare to strike against the Nazis — and, what is more, to win the strike — was a peerless symbol of hope at a time when Hitler’s triumphs brought such despair. The success of the strike and Lahaut’s leadership of it greatly enhanced the Communists’ prestige. These actions also showed that the Communists had not waited for the invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, to join the anti-Nazi Resistance, as is often claimed.

However, Lahaut was arrested a month later, along with almost two thousand left-wing activists, most of them Communists. Taken to the citadel at Huy, he tried to escape three times but was injured and recaptured. Lahaut was deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp in September 1941. On finding his fellow prisoners from Breendonk, Lahaut — horrified at the sight of their weakened state — is said to have encouraged his friends from the Huy fortress to share their meager food reserves. Such solidarity with the new prisoners soon became the norm. This mutual aid saved not only the bodies but also the morale of the prisoners. It was vital in the Nazi concentration camp hell. German communists also helped him recover from dysentery.

Accused of sabotage, Lahaut was sentenced to death in July 1944 and sent to Mauthausen, a much harsher camp. It was there that a Polish prince, impressed by his fraternal attitude, is reported to have said that Lahaut “carried the sun in his pocket and gave a piece to everyone.” But Lahaut was on death’s door in 1945 and would come back to Belgium at the end of the war terribly thinned. On his return, he had to spend several weeks in recovery.

Honorary Chairman of the Communist Party

Julien Lahaut’s popularity reached its peak in the postwar years. The PCB made no mistake in choosing him as honorary president of the party. This was a time when the air was colored red: there were Communist ministers in the national government and a pluralist (and not just social democratic) General Labour Federation of Belgium (FGTB). The PCB was the third-largest party nationally, with eight-seven thousand members. As a rare token of public recognition of the Communist Party, in 1946 Lahaut was elected (if not without difficulty) to the vice presidency of the national Parliament. In “Red Seraing,” the Communists were the leading force. Lahaut was considered for mayor, too, but the Socialists maneuvered so that he had to settle for the alderman’s office for finance.

But the political times soon changed, and 1947 brought the beginning of the Cold War. The Communists once again became pariahs and were excluded from both the government and the leadership of the FGTB. World War III threatened to break out. In Belgium, the threat was felt during the crisis over the “royal question” in 1950.

Leopold III had been a persona non grata in Belgium since 1945. The king of the Belgians had compromised far too much with Hitler, meeting him in November 1940. His indecent remarriage during the Occupation and his authoritarian leanings discredited him in the eyes of public opinion. But the Right’s return to power in 1949 allowed him to come back to Belgium. The Christian Social Party organized a referendum to approve his return. The Catholic-dominated countryside rallied behind the royalist side.

Yet the king’s return in July 1950 provoked an unexpected popular anger. The industrial towns became hotbeds of protest, verging on insurrection. There was a general strike and marches were held daily. On July 30, the gendarmerie confronted demonstrators in Grâce-Berleur, near Liège, killing four workers. The threat of a major march on Brussels forced Leopold III to abdicate in favor of his young son, Baudouin. Communist MPs decided to disrupt his swearing-in in Parliament by shouting “Long live the Republic.” Most remembered is Lahaut himself saying these words, in his stentorian tones. A week later, he paid for this with his life.

An Anti-Communist Crime

For a long time, it was believed that his execution was the work of royalists, eager to save Baudouin’s honor. The name of the murderer remained unknown for some sixty-five years, following a botched, if not sabotaged, judicial investigation. But in 2015 historians were able to establish the responsibility of André Moyen and his sponsors.

Moyen, known as “Captain Freddy,” was the number two in Belgian counterespionage. He also ran a private intelligence service, which grew out of a network of former conservative resistance fighters, namely the Belgian Anti-Communist Bloc. Its activity centered on one clear aim: with the help of his friends in the country’s various criminal investigation bureaus, Moyen sought to ferret out supporters of the Soviet Union. He was convinced of the imminence of a Russian invasion of Western Europe and managed to infiltrate the PCB through multiple channels.

His approach was part of international networks of clandestine stay-behind cells designed to undermine a future Red Army occupation of Western Europe. His anti-communist obsession was shared by the minister of the interior, Albert De Vleeschauwer, to whom his monthly notes were sent. Moyen had told him of his plan to kill Lahaut already in May 1948.

De Vleeschauwer knew where he stood. One of his reports, three days before August 18, suggested that the spy was ready to do it again. Thirteen days after the execution, a new note admitted his guilt and threatened the PCB’s leading duo, Edgard Lalmand and Jean Terfve, and Frans Vanden Branden, a Communist trade union leader from the Antwerp dockers. It seems that Prime Minister Joseph Pholien was also aware of Moyen’s zeal. The highest levels of government could therefore have stopped Lahaut’s murder — but they covered up for his killer, until he finally died in 2008.

André Moyen’s group was financed by the powerful Société Générale consortium, and Brufina, the holding company of the Bank of Brussels. These capitalist trusts relied on Moyen to carry out political “checks” on the employees of the various companies they owned in mining and heavy industry. Their archives contain thousands of notes on “Communist suspects.” Much remains to be discovered in the private archives of these companies’ bosses, though their families are surely in no hurry to make them public.

Julien Lahaut was murdered by the elite of Belgian capitalism, first and foremost out of anti-communism. This was class and state violence — the kind most revealing of its antiworker nature.

Lahaut represented the best that the working class and the Communist Party had to offer to Belgium. “Noss’ Julien” was no rocket scientist, and far from always excelled. But he always acted in accordance with his principles, even in the worst situations such as during his deportation. This was, at least, how he was perceived by the mass of the people who attended his funeral (at least 100,000). There were even strikes to pay tribute to him in France and Italy. After his death, Lahaut continued to inspire his comrades, in the Communist Party and beyond. His grave is the site of a commemoration that still takes place every year, three-quarters of a century after his murder.