Charles de Broqueville

Charles, 1st Count de Broqueville (ʃaʁl də bʁɔkvil; 4 December 1860 – 5 September 1940) was the prime minister of Belgium, serving during World War I. Charles de Broqueville was born into an old noble family with its roots in French Gascony. He was the son of Count Stanislas de Broqueville (1830-1919) and Claire de Briey (1832-1876). He received private education from Catholic priest Charles Simon, from which he also learned Dutch. He married Berthe d'Huart (1864-1937), a granddaughter of Catholic statesman Jules Malou, through whom he gained further connections to politics. First elected to the Chamber of Representatives in the 1892 election, he represented the arrondissement of Turnhout until June 1919. He was seen as part of de jonge rechterzijde (the young right-wing), and was politically a midway between Christian democracy and more traditional forms of conservatism. The leader of Belgium's Catholic Party, he served as prime minister between 1911 and 1918 and headed the de Broqueville government. Once it became clear that Germany intended to violate Belgian neutrality in August 1914, he oversaw Belgium's mobilization for war. Despite the mobilization, de Broqueville opposed King Albert I's proposal to deploy the Belgian Army along the German frontier in 1914 but strategically placed them throughout the country. He recognized that wartime support for Belgium depended upon its continued status as a nonprovocative neutral power. During the war, de Broqueville was more willing to make concessions to the Flemish Movement than King Albert, in order to secure Belgian unity in the long term. He made several promises to the movements for after the war, such as the Dutchification of Ghent University and better conditions for the Dutch language in standard education. In 1917, he proposed a customs union between France and Belgium, in order to help Belgium recover post-war, though the idea was rejected, out of fear that Belgium would become a junior partner in such a union. The German invasion of 1914 forced the Belgian government into exile at Le Havre.