Élie Baussart

Élie Baussart (born December 16, 1887 in Couillet , Hainaut ; † December 30, 1965 in Loverval, Gerpinnes , Hainaut) was a Belgian writer , politician and Christian Democratic union functionary , who was best known for his work in the Mouvement Wallon , a movement who worked to strengthen the identity of Wallonia and the Walloons .

Life

Baussart attended the Jesuit school in Charleroi and interrupted his training to carry out trips. During this time he completed his training as an autodidact , where he continued his education in literature and linguistics . In 1909 he returned to the Charleroi Jesuit School as a teacher of French and history , teaching there until he retired in 1954.

During this period, the Catholic Baussart was committed to social issues and the promotion of intellectual freedom within the Christian Democratic movements and, together with Hubert Dewez, owned the Institute for Workers' Culture ( Institut de Culture ouvrière ). In his literary works and essays , Baussart advocated the defense of the Walloon region and the consideration of social issues.

At the Wallonia art exhibition organized by Jules Destrée in Charleroi in 1911 , he campaigned heavily for the rights of Wallonia for the Walloons, and to promote these goals he founded the magazine La Terre wallonne in 1919 , in which he developed his views on Wallonia, which were influenced by the Catholic Glauiben. where he rejected the dialogue between the popular movements in Flanders and Wallonia within the Belgian central state . At the same time, he advocated ideas such as regionalism , pacifism and democracy in his articles .

In 1921 Baussart was elected a member of the Walloon Assembly, and in this massively campaigned against the goals of unionists and anti-separatists, who in particular demanded an expansion of Flemish influence in Belgium through the Flemish Boerenbond led by Joris Helleputte . After 1929 and the introduction of regional monolingualism, he committed to federalism in Belgium. In the 1930s he campaigned - shaped by humanism - within the Walloon movement against fascism and for the defense of democratic freedoms and wrote essays such as Essai d'Initiation à la révolution anticapitaliste (1938).

After the occupation of Belgium by the German Wehrmacht in the part of the western campaign referred to in the case of Gelb in 1940, the further publication of his magazine La Terre Wallonne was prohibited. After the end of the Second World War he worked as a chronicler for the magazine Forces nouvelles, le Vieux Wallon wallonisant and an active member of the Union démocratique belge (UDB), which was dissolved in 1946 . In addition, he was involved in the organizations Rénovation wallonne and Congrès national wallon .

Web links

• Biography in Cent Wallons du siècle , Institut Jules Destrée, Charleroi, 1995