Auguste Buisseret

Auguste Buisseret (born August 18, 1888 in Beauraing , Namur province ; † April 15, 1965 in Liège , Liège province ) was a Belgian politician of the Parti Libéral (PRL) and for several years a senator , several ministers and five years mayor of Liège.

Life

Lawyer and local politician in Liège

After attending school, Buisseret studied law at the University of Liège and graduated with a doctorate in law . After being admitted to the bar, he worked as a lawyer in a law firm in Paris which, among others, represented the writer and later Nobel laureate in literature Anatole France in a lawsuit against his publisher . After returning to Belgium in 1911, he established himself as a lawyer in Liège.

At that time he was already involved in various Walloon organizations such as the Ligue des Lycéens wallons and the Gardes wallonnes . In 1912 he was elected a member of the Walloon Assembly and was a member of it until 1923, when he resigned his mandate there together with Jules Destrée . In 1922 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine La Barricade , the organ of the Walloon League of Action in Liège, and held this position until 1937. During this time, the magazine attracted a great deal of attention with its articles and caricatures on Belgian neutrality policy .

Within the Parti Libéral in Liège he advocated decentralization and was elected a member of the Liège City Council in 1930 , to which he belonged until his death in 1965. After he was alderman for finance and industry from 1934 to 1937 , he was alderman for fine arts between 1937 and 1939 and in this role bought numerous paintings by Paul Gauguin , Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso for the Liège museums , which were made during the later occupation of Belgium were classified as " decadent " by the German Wehrmacht in World War II .

Senator, Resistance to Fascism and World War II

In 1939 he was elected a member of the Belgian Senate to represent Liège. Because of his critical stance and views against the fascist movement of the Rexists led by Léon Degrelle , he was arrested again and again after the invasion of German troops in 1940 and was under constant surveillance until 1943. Nonetheless, Buissert, who became a member of the Wallonie libre movement in 1942 , acted as a lawyer in trials for patriots and resistance fighters .

After the security situation became more and more threatening for him, he went into exile in London in 1943 , where he was legal advisor to various ministries of the Belgian government-in-exile there , headed by Hubert Pierlot .

Minister and Mayor of Liege in the post-war period

After the end of the Second World War he accepted his mandate as senator again and was a member of the Senate until 1961.

In 1945 he was appointed Minister for Public Education in Prime Minister Achille Van Acker's cabinet and held this office until March 13, 1946. In this role he was responsible for founding the Théâtre national de Belgique in Brussels and the youth service.

After only 18 days in government of Paul-Henri Spaak , he was appointed Minister of the Interior by Prime Minister Van Acker on March 31, 1946. He also held this office in the subsequent government of Prime Minister Camille Huysmans until March 20, 1947, during which time he was responsible for the law establishing the Council of State as an advisory and judicial body within the executive power in Belgium.

After Buisseret was Vice President of the Senate between 1947 and 1949, he was appointed Minister of Public Works by Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens on August 11, 1949 and held the office until June 8, 1950.

Prime Minister Van Acker then appointed him Minister for the Colonies on April 23, 1954, and Buisseret held this position until the end of Van Acker's tenure on June 26, 1958. During his ministerial tenure, the Université officielle du Congo et du Rwanda was founded in 1954. Urundi in Elisabethville . His efforts to reorganize the colonial administration failed due to resistance from the conservative opposition .

After leaving the government, he succeeded Paul Gruselin as mayor of Liège in 1958 and held the office of mayor for five years until his resignation for health reasons and his replacement by Maurice Destenay in 1963.

Although he stood up for the interests of the Walloon Region within the Parti Libéral and became a member of the Mouvement Libéral Wallon in 1962 , he was a staunch advocate of the unity of Belgium and Belgian federalism .

Memberships

• Auguste Buisseret was a member of the Freemasons Association .

Web links

• Biography In: Cent Wallons du siècle , Institut Jules Destrée, Charleroi 1995.
• Belgian Ministeries (rulers.org)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Piet van Brabant: Vrijmetselarij in Nederland & Vlaanderen. Houtekiet, Antwerp-Amsterdam 2003 ISBN 90-5240-714-2 .