The young Belgian Léon Degrelle, later in his career the most decorated officer of all the 450,000 non-Germans in the Waffen-SS, founded the Rexist party and created this red-white-black flag suggesting “Christ the King [“rex” in Latin]” .
This powerful fascist movement enthralled the young, the workers and college students, and attracted both major Belgian groups, the Dutch speakers (the Flemings), and the French speakers (the Walloons).
The famous French journalist Robert Brasillach traveled to Brussels to see him in 1936, and wrote up his overwhelming impressions
DEGRELLE – FOREVER YOUNG
For those who have had the privilege at the Barnes Review office of seeing any of the 30 historical videos the exiled Léon Degrelle created in the 1990s in Málaga, Spain, there you see not just words someone wrote on paper.
(I did this video in 2005 for The Barnes Review.)
There you experience a supreme orator, a man of flesh and blood, with unique fire and wit, one who reminisces on the history which he himself saw and helped to make in the twentieth century.
Through celluloid, and now DVDs and videos online, this man will now exist forever. An idealist gazes straight at the camera and thus upon us forty years later. At 75 years young he lived just as he had at 25 — with energy, hope, love, joy and enthusiasm. This was a speaker who, even sitting on his sofa, had to “conduct” his own words just as he did his speeches to 30,000 cheering followers in the Sports Palace of Brussels — with the grand arm and hand gesticulations of a maestro conducting his orchestra.
Below is an article about Léon Degrelle from 1936, when the fiery Walloon was not just young in spirit but quite literally young in age, just 30. But in any room, as the visitor testifies below, and before any group, he was always the youngest man there in his sheer love of life and in the ideals of the modern Christian knight.
This article was composed by the great French novelist, poet, journalist and film critic Robert Brasillach (1909-1945). (His name is pronounced “Brah-zee-yahk.”)
But such an article deserves first an “appréciation,” as the French say, of Robert Brasillach himself, who in his own way embodied the young France in the 1930s and 1940s just as much as Léon Degrelle incarnated the young Belgium.
In his nationalist newspaper Je Suis Partout [“I Am Everywhere”] of June 20, 1936, Robert Brasillach described a one-hour visit in Brussels with Léon Degrelle.
Just three weeks before, on May 23, 1936, coming out of seeming electoral nowhere, he and 20 other Rexists had ascended from the despised ranks of the people in triumph into the stodgy, corrupt Belgian Parliament with 11.5% of the vote on their very first outing. It was a sensation, and it was all due to Degrelle.
(His successor in 1943 at the newspaper “I am Everywhere” was Pierre-Antoine Cousteau — the brother of Jacques Cousteau of ‘The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” the internationally famous underwater explorer, undersea filmmaker and crusader for clean oceans.)
After the Normandy invasion of 1944, truth-tellers such as Robert Brasillach sadly lived very dangerously. In the months-long and bloody hysteria of France’s “Liberation,” a vicious and violent purge of all pro-German Fenchmen, the writer Brasillach himself was arrested, put on a one-day trial in January 1945, then literally shot “for treason” by a firing squad on February 6, 1945. After all, he had written pro-German, anti-Jewish and anti-bolshevik articles — such a crime.
On of the cartoons by Brasillach’s paper during the war mocked the egotistical Charles de Gaulle, here depicted as paying the thuggish Stalin a visit and being introduced by a Soviet guard to Stalin — by way of two puns on his name — as “His Excellency, Comrade foolish- goy Goldwash.” Nationalist Frenchmen were absoluty appalled and disgusted that Charles de Gaulle joined the Allies, of all sides, and made nice with their buddy, the mass-murdering bolshevik Joseph Stalin. De Gaulle was a nobleman, a compassionate conservative, a towering man who stood 6’5″ (195 cm), an ardent and genuine French patriot, a war hero, and a fierce anti-communist — he had helped save Poland from Trotsky’s surging Red Army in 1920. Yet his ego pushed him to be on the eventual winner’s side.
Protests rained before and after Brasillach’s judicial murder from a whole galaxy of French literary and cultural giants and coming from all political persuasions: the famous existentialist Albert Camus, playwrights Jean Cocteau and Jean Anouilh, and the member of the illustrious Académie française and future Nobel Laureate for Literature (1952), François Mauriac.
How ironic that Mauriac had been the spiritual mentor of the provisional president of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle who confirmed his death sentence and truly never lived down the disgrace of that brutal decision.
Since then, Brasillach, by his very death, has brought shame on the French left and become a martyr to the right. In October 2001, the leftist Le Point magazine mourned the damage to the Left’s image from ending the forthright life of this, as they admitted, “gentle fascist.” A rueful De Gaulle later conceded that Brasillach “possessed a phenomenally high level of culture” — that included studies of the works of the great American film director John Ford.
With gallantry, wit and style, the 36-year-old Brasillach even called out to his firing squad the order to shoot after two soldiers had become too nervous to even tie his hands properly at the post:
“Courage! And — aside from this, of course — Vive la France!”
Brasillach’s life went on through his writings and the tributes of his friends, and new ones are always born to admire this genius and martyr.
Brasillach’s brother-in-law was Maurice Bardèche, a great writer who, undeterred by Brasillach’s judicial murder, became as early as 1946 the world’s first great debunker of the “Holocaust” and the Nuremberg trials. Dying in 1998, he was buried under the same tombstone as Brasillach.
Bardèche wrote the first major postwar revisionist work, Nuremberg ou la Terre promise, (“Nuremberg, or The Promised Land”) debunking the Nuremberg “War Crimes Trials,” declaring they were a judicial travesty, and labelling them as a victory only for the vengeful Jews.
Bardéche wrote brilliantly that as American GIs entered Germany to conque anjd occuüpy it, they wanted to believe, and they NEEDED to believe, in the truthfulness of the “Holocaust” just so they could sleep at night after witnessing in a devastated Germany 1) what America and its allies had done to bomb German civilians 1940-45 ….
and 2) what the Allies were doing after the war, 1945-47, to starve, steal from, rape, beat, torture, and also mentally abuse the surrendered civilians of Germany.
This is what Thomas Goodrich calls “The Hellstorm” (Hellstorm-goodrich)
(Margi and I did six voices for the film documentary version of this.) 
Maurice Bardèche, who lived to be 91, is buried with his wife, who was Brasillach’s sister and died in 2005 at age 95.
Brasillach’s lawyer was Jacques Isorni, who later also defended the blue-eyed Marshal Philippe Pétain (photo — a patriot who was also sentenced to death, though de Gaulle commuted it to life in prison):
The logo of Pétain regime, with its capital at Vichy, was “work, family and fatherland”
Isorni wrote:
“For us, the literature of Brasillach was like a radiant morning, the first fervor of life, the early day’s full hopes and the friendships that would last for all time. It was he who so marvelously painted, with his elongated and supple turns of phrase, our awakening to life — and the ecstasy of the young experiencing the riches of human existence.
“It was he who expressed our tastes, our anguish, our struggles and our first disillusionments as men. He was our youth; he was certainly mine. He symbolized the youth of our whole generation and, condemned or acquitted tomorrow or in a half-century, it was by [Brasillach] and perhaps by him alone that the mindseet of our youth will be transmitted down to our children. It is through him that the patrimony of our twenties and thirties has a chance to survive.”
And so, of course, the great, eternally young poet Brasillach recognized the qualities of equally great, equally and eternally young Rexist who was Léon Degrelle. He expressed this profoundly kindred spirit in the article below, composed for Je Suis Partout in the form of a letter to a female friend, „Angèle.“
It starts off with his very French answer to her question as why Brasillach, a Parisian, was up in the Brussels of Léon Degrelle:
Partly, he concedes, it was for the Belgian beer [JdN: very powerful stuff, enriched with natural fruit syrups flavors — a delight Americans do not yet know]; more pressingly, the café workers in Paris are on strike. How can a man write?
The main reason, though was this: Brasillach heard that Degrelle was a phenomenal human being, and he had to check it out.
Visite à Léon Degrelle
June 30, 1936, Je Suis Partout, Paris
You knew already, my dear Angèle, that I spent the week in Belgium since the Parisian café workers have walked out on strike. It was not, though, as you seem to insinuate, for my immoderate love of the beers of Belgium – although, yes, they are excellent. . . .
Nor was it to deposit in their banks my capital, of which I have none.
I will tell you some day about the whole trip, but first I must respond to to the slightly anxious question you posed: “Did you see Léon Degrelle!?”
I recognize well the charming illogic of your heart and mind: you love the [leftist] Front Populaire, and you gladly raise at tea time with your girlfriends your revolutionary little fist — a petite and delicious fist — but you are susceptible to fascination with all great leaders of men, and the latest of these chieftains seemingly does not displease you.
Well, be reassured, my dear Angèle, I saw the man of whom you spoke with your fascinated horror. I would hesitate somewhat to describe him to you because we French are fairly maladroit when speaking of things Belgian, and I would fear to speak in error.
I had read in [Degrelle’s] newspaper Rex a mischievous account he gave of an interview he had granted to a Parisian journalist with one of the big papers. Believe me, after Degrelle nailed him for his distortions and lies, I would like very much not to be that journalist.
So, anyway, I did see the famous Léon Degrelle, and on the exact day he attained his 30th birthday, on June 15th. This young leader, to tell the truth, does not seem to be very much over 25. And one must first admit that, presented with this vigorous lad, surrounded by other lads just as young, one cannot fight off a fairly bitter melancholy for us „oldies.“
People thought they could denigrate Rex by calling it « a boys movement. » Today, I actually see all around Léon Degrelle men from every age groups, but the youthfulness to be found in them all is what counts, the youth of the spirit.
Still, the Rexist core is literally young folks. It is also the physical animation of its leaders which communicates itself to the whole movement. Alas, my dear Angèle, when will we in France ever have such a « boys movement»?
To other and older observers, perhaps the modest offices of Rex might seem unimpressive, such as the office of their daily newspaper Le Pays Réel [« The Real Country »] where I am going shortly to get, first, some of their brochures – and, second, a Rexist insignia with which I will soon stupefy all passersby in Paris.
May 30, 1936 front page: “The King has received Léon Degrelle/the audience went on for an hour and ten minutes”/ (upper right) “Stolen elections — The Liberal Party can count on its old voters …and even the dead”/”Editor LÉON DEGRELLE”)
I have already seen these sorts of student hangouts — messy, lively, where jokes and good humor are king. And then you remind yourself that these mere students have hundreds of thousands of men and women who are behind them, and that they are listened to – that they might be the dawn of a grand new thing, and that in any case we have so much to learn from them.
I see coming toward me now an agile young man, in good health, and whose eyes shine joyfully from his full face. He speaks to me in a voice designed for haranguing the crowds, voluminous but natural. I do not yet know what he is going to say or what it will all mean, but he breathes the sheer joy of life, the love of life, and at the same time a desire to improve this life, and make it better for all men, and to fight for a better world–and these are traits to admire before he even opens his mouth.
I do not believe, my dear Angèle, that there are any great leaders who lack powerful animal energy and physical radiance.
I do not know if Léon Degrelle has other qualities, but he certainly has these. There are other traits a leader needs, just as visible by the way, and they are just as instinctive.
“I am not a political theoretician,“ he says forcefully. “Politics is something you have to feel; it is an instinct. If one lacks this instinct, it is useless to search for it. But of course one must also work hard; one must make every effort every day. We have been making ourselves known for several years now. The sweetness of summer does not come in one day.”
How much this phrase fits him! He has a seasonal view of politics, a grand sense of the winds that are blowing. He sniffs the air currents like a carnal man. It has been with this sense of people and their moods that Léon Degrelle has touched so many spirits in Belgium, and even beyond its frontiers. He has crystallized in his “Rex” not ideas but tendencies of the human spirit.
Tendencies, yes, but then they are translated into details in a much more precise manner than one might expect. It is because he distrusts abstractions that he fleshes out the details and Rex is having success in the real world. It is of suchlike details that our daily life consists, and not of generalities. Women, my dear Angèle, can appreciate that.
“This is what the right-wing parties in France, as in Belgium, have been unable to see,” he tells me. “They have a social program, of course, but they never apply it to real life. They don’t know at all about the life of the working people. The only class in society that has any political education, good or bad, is the working class; it is the only one that goes to meetings, reads the activist press, and that knows how to demand what it wants. The right-wing parties have excluded themselves from the people and their participation in political life. And without the masses, what can you do?”
But to win them over one must start by understanding them, I propose.
“Our movement is a popular one. One should never think that it is the socialists who do something for the workers. The 40-hour work week? It has existed for two years now in Fascist Italy. Next year [1937], in Hitler] Germany, they will take the workers on three-week cruises to the Canary islands of Spain, to the Azores, on special ocean liners designed just for them. ”
*** What Hitler did for the workers
In many factories throughout the western world in the 1930s, 12- to 16-hour work days, six long days a week, were the rule; going home meant returning to a loud, stiflingly hot, crowded, unhygienic slum apartment where sleep, privacy or other recreation – except drinking – were difficult to obtain.
Hitler’s « Strength Through Joy » (“Kraft durch Freude”) program began in 1933, the year the National Socialists came to power. It borrowed much from the Fascist Italian Dopo Lavoro («After Labor») movement, which however was only for after-hour leisure activities in order to refresh workers.
« Strength through Joy » also had activities during the work day – such as live music concerts, even by the Berlin Philharmonic and the like – and organized entire vacations. It also developed for worker budgets the Volkswagen, the «People’s Car.»
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(JdN: Of course, me being me, my first car at age 16 in the year 1970 was a Beetle (a white 1965 model) from Scott Volkswagen — https://www.scottvw.com/ — in East Providence, Rhode Island. 😉 )
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By 1939, an estimated 25 million Germans were participating in “Strength through Joy,” among them 135,000 volunteers. A fascinating relic of the KdF program was and is the gigantic “Prora” beach resort on the North Sea island of Rügen. This 20,000-vacationer site was built by the Third Reich 1936-39, although the war interrupted its completion.
Of course, politically correct websites inform us that, far from being a wonderful program for workers who had been kicked around all their lives, the evil “Nazis” brought workers to the beach, movies and sports facilities ONLY “to serve their aggressive military and racial policies. The resort, allegedly planned as a place where ‘German Workers’ might rest and relax, contributed above all to the preparation for war.” [sic: http://www.proradok.de/]
I guess today, after renovation as luxury vacation apartments, it no longer “prepares Germans for war.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora (But, ironically and proving the unlimited hypocrisy of the Allies and their puppets, it was the Soviet military, and that of its puppet, East Germany, then that of the US puppet, West Germany, that used it as a military base after the war.)
The KdF’s huge Volkswagen project was also interrupted when France and England declared war on Germany in September 1939.
However, postwar, Volkswagen honored all pre-war payments made for the car by workers (who had paid in $10 a week). Ford of Germany, before the war broke out, had aped the KdF car program and also took cash up front toward future cars. After the war, however, the U.S.-owned company reneged, declaring the payments they had received to be null and void.]
***
“It is the authoritarian regimes, Monsieur Brasillach, that are giving the workers holidays and vacations and making the worker feel tghat he has dignity. That is why the masses are coming to us now.”
And Degrelle starts to laugh, all of a sudden, with that youthful spirit that never leaves him. ”Ah! the communists! They are furious! They cannot hold any [well-attended] meetings; they come instead to march and protest ours.
“The red flag? That’s what OUR flag is!
“The Front Populaire? There is only one true one in Belgium, Le Front Populaire Rex.
“The workers’ song “The Internationale”? It is we who sing it, though with other words.
“Strikes? We demand exactly what the workers demand. [Now that we are in Parliament] I will introduce a bill for a 10% increase in wages — but without demagoguery. At the same time a bill must be introduced that wages can go up only when factory income also does.
Becoming more serious, he adds:
“The important thing is the spirit with which we do everything. After a catastrophe in our mines, our king, Albert, asked a worker: “What do you want?” He replied: ‘We want to be respected.’ Respect! Voilà l’essentiel.
“This is what the right-wing, conservative parties do not comprehend, neither yours in France nor ours.”
Léon Degrelle has begun pacing up and down in his office. He feels anger against all this incomprehension by the old men of the right and the men of the left–against all these old formulas, against everything that is irritating so many young people in every country at the same time. Pell-mell, he explains to me his projects, in which obne sees a curious wedding of modern corporatism and Christian principles.
*** Corporatism
Coming from the Italian word corporativismo, this was an anti-capitalist doctrine endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in 1899 and by Pope Pius XI in 1931, as well as by Mussolini, by Hitler, by many modern East Asian governments, and, one modern Russian observer states, by Vladimir Putin. It means that companies should answer both to the nation and its leader and also to powerful professional associations of the different occupations and businesses – to the organizations representing the steelmakers, writers, clergy, the farmers – to groups similar to the old medieval guilds, and not be any longer at the mercy of international stockholders.
***
[Degrelle] wants to create a social service for women to join, sending young middle-class girls, during the day, to help sick people and assist women in childbirth.
He wants all workers to enjoy their work.
Maybe some specialists would debate him on certain of his economic principles. I am not a specialist; and I didn’t come to argue with him, any more than I would debate (and would I have the right to?) the specifically Belgian politics of Léon Degrelle.
He is, by the way, a Flemish-rights supporter in Flanders, a Walloon-supporter in French-speaking Wallonia.
***Belgium, an artificial and recent country
It was created by the will of England in the 1830 as a bastion of crypto-Freemasonic control (Freemasonry being headquartered in England) for its location bordering both France and Germany, countries the Rothschilds have long seen as potentially antisemitic threats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium)
The country is entirely Catholic, except for now 5% muslim migrants) and yet is severely divided into 60% Dutch- and 38% French-speakers, having, naturellement, very different psychologies, cultures and languages. The Flemings in the north are more in the way of being stern, punctual and Teutonic/Germanic; the Walloons, more in the south, are considered as fun-loving, laid-back, and Latin (and, the frustrated Flemings say, not too fond of hard work).
(Almost 1% actually speak German, seen here in blue, and, of course, after both world wars, the hypocritical Allies gave these Germans, totally against their will, to Belgium, ignoring Woodrow Wilson’s sacrosanct 1917 principle that the Allies were fighting for “the self-determination of all peoples.”)
One Flemish reader of TBR and former member of the Flemish Waffen-SS knows well the truth of what Brasillach wrote about Degrelle reaching out as a Walloon, and very effectively, to the Flemings. He wrote to me how as a Flemish boy, along with his father, he passed out leaflets and sold newspapers in the Flemish language for Léon Degrelle.
***
Who knows if these politics will not save Belgium?
But all that concerns me right now is the newspaper that he hands me, today’s issue of the Le Pays Réel:
“Workers of all classes, unite!” I read in the headline [a modification of the marxist “Workers of all nations, unite!”]
This is the direct, new vocabulary of this party of the youth. One can think whatever one wants of it, but one feels close to them.
And there is this: the Léon Degrelle revolution is a moral revolution. It is not like any other organization. Léon Degrelle wants to rekindle the higher feelings: the love of king and country; helping the Belgian family; giving happiness, as much as he can, to the worker at his lathe. That is exactly what Mussolini and Salazar [fascist dictator in Portugal] have done. It’s not surprising that he raises all around him such high expectations, and also triggers so much hatred.
We speak then of la France, of its culture–towards which he recognizes so great a debt–of its men, of the desire that any civilized person must feel to see our own country emerge from its worn-out formulas and dangerous illusions.
I see clearly that our parties, whatever they are, have nothing important to say to this young man, who is so direct and forceful. “There is only one party on the right that knows what it wants in your country,” he tells me.“It is Action française . And he adds: “Naturally, we have all read Maurras.”
*** Charles Maurras (1868-1952)
Maurras was a member of the French Academy, and was by far the greatest “far-right” thinker in France in his time, and head of “French Action.” His “Camelots of the King” were tough-as-nails street vendors of his newspaper. He coined the phrase “internal foreigners” to refer to French Freemasons, Jews and Calvinists. (An agnostic, Maurras considered Calvinists primarily as political allies of the Jews; in France, historically, Calvinists and Jews often have been in league against the common Catholic enemy.)]
Maurras also denounced “Swiss ideas,” referring to both Calvinism, the product of John Calvin of Geneva – born, some say, as John Cohen — and to the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also hailing from Geneva, whose ideas inspired the bloody French Revolution. Maurras, like Brasillach, would be sentenced to death for “collaboration’ after 1944, but died after years in prison in 1952.
***
Degrelle then returns to his love of action, to his packed and immense public meetings, to his projects, which are glowing with his high hopes.
Why should I hide from you, my dear Angèle, that I left Léon Degrelle feeling a certain kind of bitterness.
The other week, I was in the Chamber of Deputies in the Belgian Parliament, in front of its fossils, both old and young.
There would perhaps be much to discuss, and a lot of points still remain obscure about his „Rexism,“ even after having read the books composed by its members who are young PhD’s.
I don’t want to judge anything based on a one-hour meeting. But books are not all there is in the world. This youthfulness, both moral and physical, this assembly of young people who seem almost to be playing at constructing a new world, and who, in fact, work relentlessly, speak, write, fight, are constantly on the streets and in the trains, stopping at the smallest villages, and sleeping two or three hours a day, but without ever abandoning their joy — all this–why shouldn’t I say it?—fills me with wonder and saddens me.
Of all the confused movements that agitate our France, could not finally some youthfulness emerge in our nation as well?
*** Élan
The concept and word élan are of course French, very French, and mean the kind of spiritedness, ardor, gaiety, and zest that Degrelle evinced.
But the French are also ice-cold logicians who want details when a different kind spirit comes over them, a „Cartesian“ spirit like that of their famous mathematician, Descartes, who developed the x and y axes in spatial geometry and decreed “I think, therefore I am” –i.e., the fact of my thinking things is the proof I am real.
***
I don’t know what Léon Degrelle will eventually do, and I am not a prophet as M. Blum is.
*** The prophecy of Blum
This is a very sarcastic reference to the Jewish, French, leftist politician Léon Blum and his infamous late-1932 „prophesy“ that Adolf Hitler, after an electoral setback his party suffered, was now “finished.”
Hitler’s NSDAP party had won a huge 38% of the vote in July 1932, but fell to 33% in November of that same year, while, ominously, the Communist Party of of Germany – the KPD – grew from 11% to 14%.
But just a few months later, soon after a huge new victory – 40% – in the province of Lippe, Reich President Hindenburg decided that Adolf Hitler was the only man who was not a scheming little political midget, and could actually save Germany from the Great Depression and from communism.
So the “Austrian corporal” came to power after all – and he founded the mighty Third Reich.
Blum’s November 1932 prophecy that Hitler was „washed-up“ proved embarrassingly false.
***
But believe me, my dear Angèle, it is quite moving to see Degrelle and his “boys.”
We stand on the threshold of something that is just starting up, though already it is threatened by so many powerful dangers. We see a new hope that is beginning to germinate, and Ma foi! [“My faith!” = hand on my heart], even though in the future we may not like everything about it, we rally have to admire it.
Robert Brasillach
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Swastikas draw by our friend, the artist and Barnes Review fellow author Pete Papaheraklis
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……See also
https://johndenugent.com/?s=degrelle
Btw, Degrelle had his ashes scatted on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s alpine home.
“Hitler for A Thousand Years!”
It was translated 2005-06 by me and Margi for The Barnes Review under the title “My Revolutionary Life”:
Youtube : Obersalzberg then and now:
If blocked in your country, try Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/148729969https://vimeo.com/148729969https://vimeo.com/148729969
Or the uncensored Bitchute:
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…..See Margi’s new article in the latest Barnes Review (Sept-Oct 2019) $10
https://barnesreview.org/product/the-barnes-review-september-october-2019/
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…….Donations needed and appreciated!
Things are very tight here, and we must drive soon (Wednesday) 374 miles (600 km) to Margi’s cancer clinic, the Mayo. (A separate blog is coming out shortly on this.)
I have taken my car (a 23-year-old Crown Vic) off the road for lack of insurance and re-registration money. I am cutting seven lawns a week.
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The risk is that my site will go down.
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