Walloon Movement

The Walloon Movement is an umbrella term for all Belgian political movements that either assert the existence of a Walloon identity or defend French culture and language within Belgium. The movement began as a defence of the primacy of French but later gained political and socio-economic objectives. In French, the pejorative terms wallingantisme and wallingants are used to describe the movement and its activists.

The central theme of the Walloon Movement is the ideal of the French revolution and a love of French language and culture. This francophilia gave rise to the Walloon Movement and the Walloon militants' aim of growing closer to France and more distant from the Netherlands, as expressed in an anti-Benelux policy:

In fact, the Walloon Movement is the first (and virtually the only) organisation to warn public opinion against the implications of the Benelux policy and, as a counterbalancing or complementary force, to call for closer economic and cultural cooperation with France. […] When viewed as a modern version of Orangism, the pro-Benelux policy can be seen to promote certain Flemish interests. According to George Dotreppe, a member of the directory of "Wallonie Libre", the Benelux concept, created on English soil and orientated towards Great Britain and the United States, supports an Anglo-Saxon anti-French policy which in no way embraces the interest of Wallonia, a sister community of France.

"Rattachism", the French irredentist trend in the Walloon Movement, is a good example of this love for the French republic. This sentiment is notably expressed by Albert du Bois, who in his book "The Belgians or the French?", published in 1903, "denounces the subjection of the Walloons to the Flemings, who are merely the successors of the previous Dutch, Austrians and Spanish occupiers of Wallonia. The French soul of the Walloons must drive them to yearn for a return to "l'œuvre de Quatre-vingt-treize" [the invasion of the Southern Netherlands provinces by the French in 1793] and the destruction of the international agreements of 1814 and 1830. The same thesis is developed in the "Walloon's Catechism", widely distributed in the same year of 1903."

The Walloon Movement was a left wing movement from its beginning. Started in liberal left societies, it quickly became a rallying cry for a liberal-socialist coalition against the conservatives of the Catholic Party whose power base was in the Flemish-speaking provinces. During the interbellum between World War I and World War II, many of the Christian left joined the Walloon Movement, notably the Abbé Mahieu, an anticlerical Catholic priest. The movement was the focus of several attempts to create left-wing party, for example the Walloon Democratic and Socialist Rally (Rassemblement démocratique et socialiste wallon) created during World War II.

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