Background
De Broqueville was born at Postel, his parents' estate near Moll, on December 4, 1860. He was the descendant of a recently ennobled Belgian family of French origin.
De Broqueville was born at Postel, his parents' estate near Moll, on December 4, 1860. He was the descendant of a recently ennobled Belgian family of French origin.
De Broqueville entered local politics in 1886, and, in 1892, he was elected to the Belgian Parliament. A member of the Catholic party, dominant in Belgian politics since 1884, de Broqueville entered his first cabinet in 1910 as minister of railroads, posts, and telegraphs. The following year, he formed his own ministry and, against expectations, led the declining Catholic party to victory in the 1912 elections. The new premier, influenced by the growing fear of a European war after the Agadir crisis of 1911, became a strong advocate of military preparedness. Long an opponent of military expansion - he had stood against the 1909 reform that instituted a limited form of national conscription - in November 1912 he took over the war minister's portfolio and began to reform and expand the army.
Still, Belgium's military forces remained tiny by continental standards; and Germany, in particular, regarded the Belgian army as at most a negligible opponent in any future encounter. De Broqueville contributed to Belgium's image as a small, weak, and uncertain power by insisting with comicopera bravado that his country would fight against invaders from any direction who tried to cross Belgian territory in time of war. Anglo-French probing about possible military cooperation against Germany met a stone wall of Belgian hostility.
When the crisis came in the form of the German ultimatum of August 2, de Broqueville joined King Albert I in telling the Parliament at Brussels that Belgium would fight with all her strength. After Albert's brief, emotional address to Belgium's political representatives on August 4, de Broqueville followed with a detailed description of the German demands. More important, he welcomed members of the Left opposition into an expanded war cabinet. For Belgium the August 1914 campaign soon reduced itself into the siege of Antwerp. The government's refusal to order the army to fight a delaying action outside Brussels led to a storm of criticism from the French. The premier adroitly responded by sending a delegation to the United States. Under Liberal leader Paul Hymans, it forged a lasting practical tie to the world's most prestigious neutral nation.
With the king leading the army on the Yser, defending a small sliver of western Belgium, de Broqueville was left to run the government. The cabinet sat as guests of the French in Le Havre. Over the next two years, relations between the monarch and his premier were marked by sharp disagreement. This in turn reflected the widening chasm separating Albert and most of his ministers over several key issues. These were: the abandonment of Belgium's permanent neutrality; the effort to take territorial gains following future victory in the war; the proper response to German peace initiatives. By early 1915 the premier opposed maintaining Belgium in her prewar status of permanent neutrality. At the start of the next year, de Broqueville staunchly rejected Albert's call for seriously considering a German peace initiative; moreover, the premier was openly encouraging publicists crying for a postwar "Greater Belgium," to come mainly at the expense of Holland. But the two national leaders managed to avoid a public split; the monarch repeatedly restrained his chief minister or at least temporarily convinced him to change direction.
In October 1917, de Broqueville, who had given up the war ministry to take on the foreign minister's post, shocked his cabinet colleagues when they found him seeking a compromise peace. The prolonged military stalemate plus Albert's repeated insistence that this war could never end in an Allied victory won him over. But opinion in the cabinet had long ago shifted against the king. In 1916 some ministers had bandied the word "treason" about in discussing the king's negotiations with the Germans. Even members of de Broqueville's own party turned on him by January 1918 and forced him out from the foreign ministry. That May he was compelled to abandon the premier's post as well.
De Broqueville returned to public office at the close of World War I, serving as minister of the interior. By 1926 he was able to regain the portfolio of minister of war, and, in the last act in his political career, he led the government from 1932 to 1934. He lived long enough, to see his small country overrun once again and died in Brussels, on September 5, 1940.