Henri de Man

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Henri De Man (Flemish name Hendrik de Man) (1885 - 1953) was one of the leading Belgian socialist theoreticians of his period, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war. He was a Flemish burgher who received training in Germany.

[edit] World War I and the interwar period

A politically active socialist, he nevertheless supported the Allied cause in World War I. After the war, he taught sociology for a time at the University of Washington, then moved to Weimar Germany where he wrote and studied on the development of modern socialism and society.

Returning to Belgium, he became Vice President of the Parti ouvrier belge (POB, Belgian Workers' party). Upon the death of Emile Vandervelde in 1938, he assumed its presidency.

His views on socialism were controversial. His revision of Marxism greatly affected Mussolini. His promotion of the idea of "planisme", or planning, was widely influential in the early 1930s.

[edit] Collaboration

De Man was an advisor to King Leopold, and his mother Queen-Mother Elisabeth. After the capitulation of the Belgian Army in 1940, he issued a manifesto to POB's members, welcoming the German occupation: "For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance."

Convicted of treason in absentia after the war, he fled to Switzerland. He died in 1953 in a collision with a train.

His nephew, the literary theorist Paul de Man, became famous in the United States as a leading proponent of "deconstructionism", but after his death in 1983 was exposed as having written antisemitic articles in the wartime Nazi-controlled Belgian press.