De historische ambachten en het corporatismedebat in België van de jaren 1930-1940

Samenvatting

The Historical Craft Guilds and the Corporatism Debate in Belgium: 1930-1940

‘Corporatism’ was the answer of the Belgian Catholic world to the economic and political crisis of the 1930s. Plans were made for an authoritarian corporatist regime as an alternative to democracy, while other groups strived for corporatist reforms in the context of parliamentary democracy.

There was a lively debate on corporatism, but the ‘really existing corporatism’ in the Belgian past played no major role in this debate and was not often used as an example. For most Catholic thinkers, the corporatism of the Middle Ages was just a general positive point of reference. Some thinkers and ideologists integrated the corporatist past in their corporatist ideology. The far-right Catholic, André Frantzen (Revue de l’Ordre Corporatif), constructed a non-democratic Belgian corporatist past, which the French Revolution had put to an end. This historical pedigree legitimated the authoritarian corporatist project of André Frantzen’s group for an authoritarian regime change in the 1930s.

The socialist leader Hendrik de Man, on the contrary, constructed an historical continuity between the corporatism of the Middle Ages, which according to De Man, had a democratic and socialist character. De Man used historical corporatism to gain support for corporatism within the socialist labour movement, which (as a general rule) rejected corporatism since it was anti-democratic and would profit capitalism as the examples of the time in Italy, Portugal, Austria, and Germany showed.

Professional historians were not convinced that historical corporatism could be an example for the present. Historians such as E. Lousse were – as a general rule – critical of the corporatism of the past and there was a consensus among historians that the corporatist system was outdated when the French Revolution had put an end to corporatist institutions. Many historians, however, questioned the role of capitalism in historical corporatism; at this point, there was a link with the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crisis of capitalism.