Belgium: Peace of Exhaustion

After five weeks of violence and turmoil, most Belgians returned to work last week. In industrial Tournai, railroad workers gathered for one last rousing community sing of the Internationale and then docilely went back to their jobs. In the grimy Borinage mining district, the big wheels at the pit heads resumed hauling elevators to and from the pits.

Predictably excepted were the zealous followers of Labor Leader André Renard. After a harangue from Renard, 600 of his workers rioted through the streets of Liège. Renard’s intransigence kept the big steel plants closed, but other Liège strikers deserted him. Streetcars ran and coal mines were operating. Furthermore, Renard had antagonized most of his fellow Socialists. At week’s end even he gave up, bowed to a union leaders’ vote to end the strike.

The strike had cost 300 injured, three dead. The cost to the Belgian economy had been $150 million irrevocably lost, with an additional $80 million recoverable if factories worked overtime to make up for lost production. In general, Belgians were bone-weary, and grateful that things had not turned out worse. Expectation was that tenacious Premier Gaston Eyskens would bull his troublesome Loi Unique through Parliament, then quickly call for a snap election. Although Socialists allowed privately that they had no hope of winning the election, they were content with the indirect assurances given by Social Christian (Catholic) Boss Théo Lefevre that Premier Eyskens would not be allowed to succeed himself. “We are casting about for new faces,” said Lefevre. Hope was that the next government would conveniently forget to implement the Loi Unique, thus permit Socialists and Catholics to patch over the ugly cleavages opened during the past five weeks. If there was any consolation, it was that the smoldering antagonisms between Walloon and Fleming, Catholic and anti-Catholic, royalist and republican, had spent themselves in inconclusive exhaustion.