Julien Lahaut Was Belgium’s Working-Class Communist Leader

It was 9:15 p.m. one August night in Seraing, Belgium. Géraldine Noël called her husband to the front door. Two strangers had arrived and were asking after him. Julien Lahaut stepped forward. Five shots were fired without warning. The president of the Communist Party of Belgium (PCB) had been assassinated. “Noss’ Julien” (“Our Julien”), as he was known to the workers of Liège, had led an extraordinary sixty-five years, through all the great struggles of the first half of the twentieth century. His one imperative: an unshakeable loyalty to his class. It would take another sixty-five years to find out who had ordered his assassination. But it was soon clear that Lahaut was not murdered by chance, or by just anyone.

Julien Lahaut was born in 1884 in Seraing, an industrial suburb of Liège in Wallonia, southern Belgium. A son of the working class, Julien was involved from an early age in the country’s great class struggles, such as the strikes to demand universal suffrage. His father, a boilermaker, was a pioneer in the local socialist section of the Iron City, as Seraing was nicknamed. At the age of fourteen, Julien left school, like all working-class children, and was hired by Cockerill, a huge steel company and at the time the flagship of Belgian industry. The whole economic life of the region revolved around this firm. However, working conditions there were precarious.

Lahaut joined the trade union movement at a young age. He was at the forefront of the metalworkers’ strike in 1902 — and was sacked in retaliation. He later found work…