THE RISE AND FALL OF THE REXIST PARTY
- Staff Writer
- 2 hours ago
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American Catholics in 2025 do not suffer from a lack of opinions; they suffer from a lack of a usable political form. The electorate is offered, on one side, a liberalism that frequently treats the moral law as an embarrassment and the family as at best a burden and at worst something to be snuffed out. On the other, a right-of-center coalition that can speak fluently about national interest while often remaining thin on the questions of social order. Many Catholics, sensing that neither party gives them an adequate instrument, begin to ask an older and more poignant question: what would a truly Catholic political movement look like, not merely as a set of “values,” but as a platform that could discipline the state and reorient a people?
It is precisely here that history becomes a tutor—and a warning. The temptation is to assume that moral seriousness requires political maximalism: that because the age is decadent and the parliaments are venal, the cure must be sweeping and the remedy must be purified authority. Belgium offers a particularly instructive case of the Catholic attempt: the Rexist Party, a movement born from a Catholic milieu and bolstered in the language of the Church and the Crusades (Christus Rex), which rose rapidly by denouncing corruption, promising social solidarity, and presenting itself as an instrument of moral restoration—only to align itself with the losing side, militarily speaking, of the Second World War and collapse into discredit.
To tell the story of Rexism is to examine how a Catholic-populist insurgency could plausibly attract ordinary believers, how it attempted to convert spiritual capital into political power, and how some of the very vices it attempted to punish consumed it from within. For American Catholics searching for a political platform, it is all too important to identify which longings are legitimate, which strategies are perennial, and which paths, however promising at first blush, terminate in moral and national ruin, and to learn from them going forward.
Rexism emerged from a predicament common to much of interwar Europe: the acute exhaustion of parliamentary bargaining, the disorientation of mass society, and a pervasive sense, especially among religious traditionalists and war-marked constituencies, that the public order had become morally thin. Belgium was not immune to the fractures intensified by the Great Depression. There was discontent in the petty bourgeoisie and among the underemployed, anxieties about social disorder, and a widening suspicion that political parties had become self-protective machines rather than organs of national service. Within that climate, the attraction of renewal movements was not, in the first instance, a fascination with brutality against the perpetrators of the system, but rather a hunger for coherence.
Rexism’s first strength, then, was not simply that it attacked enemies, but that it articulated what many Belgians—especially Catholics—felt was missing from parliamentary life. It spoke in a register of moral indictment—corruption, decadence, spiritual drift—and it did so while presenting itself as resolutely Belgian and Catholic. The party’s very name derived from Christus Rex (“Christ the King”), a Catholic journal and publishing enterprise from which the movement drew both identity and early networks. The symbolism mattered. In an era when many Catholic voters feared either socialist secularization or liberal moral indifference, Rexism positioned itself as a combative, disciplined counter-proposal preaching national unity, social hierarchy reconciled by corporative organization, and the restoration of public life to explicitly Catholic moral ends.
Yet the Belgian Catholic world was not monolithic. The mainstream Catholic Party, dominant in many periods, was itself internally plural, balancing conservative interests, social Catholic currents, and the pragmatic compromises of governing. Degrelle’s innovation was to paint that measured Catholic politics as complicity. The Catholic Party, he argued, had grown too moderate, too managerial, too resigned to the liberal frame. Rexism thus began as a revolt within a Catholic political universe in an attempt to seize Catholic moral energy for a more radical reconfiguration of the state.
The founder and face of Rexism was the journalist Léon Degrelle (1906–1994), whose charisma and rhetorical force were repeatedly noted by observers as essential to the party’s early momentum. It is difficult to tell the story of Rexism without emphasizing this personalism. Even when the party possessed cadres, publications, and slogans, it often functioned—especially in public imagination—as an extension of Degrelle’s persona: youthful, combative, morally severe, contemptuous of compromise.
In its first phase, Rexism targeted disappointed constituencies such as traditionalist Catholics, military veterans, and the financially downtrodden. The party’s early promise lay in an argument that combined moral severity with social critique. It rejected liberalism as decadent and opposed both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism, presenting corporatism as the alternative third-position: a social order in which classes would be organized into functional bodies and harmonized by a strong state, rather than set against one another in class war. This third way posture was a familiar interwar form, and it frequently drew on Catholic social language even when it moved beyond Catholic social teaching’s prudential constraints.
A key historiographical nuance matters here. Contemporary classification of fascism is often used as a moral shorthand, but the lived experience of early Rexism was not, for many participants, a simple rush into that governmental form. In its earliest period until around 1937, Rexism has been argued by some not to fit neatly as a fascist movement, but rather as a populist, authoritarian, conservative Catholic nationalism that sought power through democratic means and did not initially aim to abolish democratic institutions. That claim is debated, but it captures an important point about political psychology: the natural inclination of patriots to act on moral disgust or social rot is a powerful thing, and it will always be treated as unacceptable by the harbingers of such rot.
Rexism’s peak electoral moment came quickly. In the 1936 election it won 21 of 202 seats in the Chamber of Deputies—about 11.4–11.5% of the vote—along with a notable Senate presence, making it a significant parliamentary force.¹ But even at its height, it was not a mass party in the way of certain continental counterparts. Its support was uneven and highly localized; it performed far better in particular French-speaking regions than elsewhere, and it failed to establish deep traction outside Wallonia and Brussels.
This matters for understanding Rexism’s trajectory. Movements that cannot broaden their social base often face a choice: moderate to grow, or radicalize to preserve intensity. The first course risks dilution, while the second risks isolation but can intensify internal cohesion. In Rexism’s case, the arc bent toward doubling down, especially as the movement encountered resistance from the very Catholic establishment whose moral vocabulary it had borrowed.
Rexism framed itself as a Catholic awakening. It advocated “moral renewal” through the dominance of the Catholic Church in public life and through corporatist restructuring of society.² This is precisely why the Belgian episcopal reaction proved decisive. The Church’s leadership did not treat Rexism as merely another party among many. It saw it as a spiritual danger because it sought to fuse Catholic identity with what the clergy decided was too revolutionary a political movement.
Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey, the leader of the Belgian Church, condemned Rexism as “a danger to the country and the Church.” The significance is twofold. First, it shows that the Church’s opposition was not only political but also moral-theological. The concern was that Rexism’s political method and spirit threatened Christian moral order itself. Second, the condemnation undermined Rexism’s attempt to monopolize Catholic legitimacy. A movement that had hoped to shame mainstream Catholic politicians as half-hearted now found itself confronted by the Church’s own hierarchy.
In practical terms, this ecclesial rejection helped accelerate Rexism’s decline before the war. After its electoral high point, Rexism was on the decline by 1938. That decline did not end the movement, but it narrowed its options and increased the temptation to seek relevance through external patronage—above all, through Germany after 1940.
The temptation is to assume that moral seriousness requires political maximalism: that because the age is decadent and the parliaments are venal, the cure must be sweeping and the remedy must be purified authority.
Even in the mid-1930s Rexism took inspiration from models abroad. It was initially modeled on Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism before drawing closer to German National Socialism. In the interwar period, fascism was less a single blueprint than a family resemblance: a set of movements that exalted national rebirth, discipline, hierarchy, and a politics of mobilization against the consequences of liberal, even Bolshevik decadence. For a movement like Rex, the magnetism of successful foreign examples was intense.
The shift toward the German model proved fateful, however. It severed Rexism from any plausible claim to be merely a Catholic authoritarian reform movement within Belgian constitutional life. It recast the movement’s identity around collaboration with an occupying power and around participation in a wider racial-imperial project. That transformation was both ideological and organizational: it changed what kinds of men joined, what kinds of acts were tolerated, and what kinds of policies became thinkable.
After Germany occupied Belgium, Rex became, by many accounts, the most significant collaborationist group in French-speaking Belgium, parallel to the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV) in Flanders. Yet collaboration did not automatically produce German trust. According to an Oxford thesis record by Martin Conway, Degrelle publicly declared support for the Nazi cause in January 1941, thereby contributing to a decline in popular support while still failing to secure the recognition he sought from German authorities.³
This paradox helped drive Rexism toward ever more demonstrative acts of loyalty. A movement that had once competed in Belgian elections now sought to prove its indispensability to the occupier. The logic was grim but the less popular legitimacy Rex possessed, the more it needed external power, and the more it relied on external power, the more it forfeited popular legitimacy.
One of the most revealing dimensions of wartime Rexism was the creation of its paramilitary wing, the Formations de Combat (FC). Belgium’s WWII public-history project notes that in July 1940 Rex’s leadership decided to establish the FC, hoping it would become the militia of a future one-party state.⁴
The same source gives a sobering picture of membership and decline. It estimates roughly 4,000 members by the end of the first year of occupation, followed by rapid attrition through exclusions, resignations, and especially the drain created by the departure of volunteers for the Eastern Front in 1941. By late 1941 the total membership reportedly fell below a thousand, with many remaining groups consisting of the very young, the elderly, or the infirm, and with only a few cities maintaining larger units toward the end of the occupation.
That decline in disciplined manpower did not necessarily mean a decline in danger. Paramilitary formations can become more volatile as they shrink, growing less accountable, more desperate, and more prone to retaliatory violence. And the FC served as a first step for many toward armed collaboration, featuring front service, armed bands, and other violent roles in the occupation’s final phase.
If paramilitarism was one axis of Rexism’s wartime identity, the other was the Walloon Legion (Légion Wallonie). The Walloon Legion was created in 1941 as a unit of volunteers recruited among French-speaking Belgian collaborationists to fight on the Eastern Front, first within the Wehrmacht and later in the Waffen-SS. The Legion was conceived by Rex as a means to demonstrate loyalty at a time when the German authorities had largely ignored Degrelle’s movement. The Legion’s origin story illustrates Rexism’s transformation. On the one hand, it was framed as anti-communist crusade—an ideologically powerful motif in Catholic and conservative circles across Europe. On the other hand, it functioned as political theater: a sacrificial offering meant to purchase influence. Degrelle himself enlisted as a private as a publicity stunt to boost recruitment, signaling how intimately the military project was tied to his personal politics.
The Legion’s relationship to Nazi racial ideology was also revealing. The Walloon unit was initially kept within the Wehrmacht because Nazi racial theorists did not consider Walloons sufficiently Germanic for the Waffen-SS. Later, the unit was incorporated into the Waffen-SS after Himmler declared Walloons to be Germanic.
The record of Eastern Front service also contributed to Rexism’s radicalization. The Walloon Legion’s narrative emphasizes persistent casualties and operational difficulties. As violence became routinized abroad, violence at home became easier to justify.
The occupation years created a spiral dynamic. Collaboration produced resistance, resistance produced fear, fear produced retaliation, and retaliation produced deeper hatred and further resistance. The Conway thesis record describes how, after the creation of the Walloon Legion, closer links between Rex and German authorities emerged, and many Rexists were appointed to positions of public responsibility by the Wehrmacht administrators. But those positions did not stabilize Rexism into a respectable governing class. Instead, they placed the movement at the center of popular resentment and made Rexists targets for resistance attacks.
One of the darkest episodes illustrating this pattern is the Courcelles massacre in August 1944, in which twenty-seven civilians were killed in separate instances by a Rexist-associated militia in retaliation for resistance activity.
By the war’s final phase, Rexism had become politically ruined. The Conway thesis record describes it by 1944 as a “beleaguered marginal grouping” increasingly resorting to violence. In September 1944, many Rexists fled with the retreating Germans into the Reich. By the war’s end, Rex was essentially discredited and then banned following the entrance of Allied forces.
Degrelle’s postwar trajectory compounded the movement’s infamy. Degrelle was sentenced to death by the Belgian justice system for high treason. He managed to escape to Spain, which was led by the government of Francisco Franco. Degrelle obtained Spanish citizenship in 1954, which gave him legal protection from extradition and prosecution.
From Spain, Degrelle published numerous books. He died in 1994. That afterlife matters because it shaped how Rex would be remembered, principally as a project whose leader never accepted political defeat.
The natural inclination of patriots to act on moral disgust or social rot is a powerful thing, and it will always be treated as unacceptable by the harbingers of such rot.
A Catholic historian—or a Catholic-minded political theorist—cannot avoid the central interpretive tension: Rexism’s early language drew from genuine Catholic concerns regarding the moral order, social solidarity, and resistance to both revolutionary Marxism and atomizing liberalism, yet it transmuted those concerns into a politics that ultimately brought on the Church’s own restraints and culminated in collaboration with the German regime.
In that sense, Rexism’s story is instructive beyond Belgium. It shows how a movement can begin with a critique that many ordinary people find reasonable and yet, through a sequence of ill-calculated decisions, become trapped in a logic of escalating dependency and escalating brutality.
Rexism’s arc is therefore a kind of negative model for political Catholics. It begins with recognizably Catholic grievances, and it promises a remedy that seems, at first glance, completely desirable. It ends by demonstrating that the hunger for renewal can, if not done strategically, be exploited. A Catholic politics worthy of the name must therefore be more exacting. It must reject the liberal superstition that procedure alone can secure justice, but it must also reject the revolutionary superstition that justice can be secured by a party that exempts itself from any restraint at all.
The call to action for American Catholics is not necessarily to hunt for a ready-made third way costume in Europe’s interwar wardrobe. It is the original creation of a third-position platform that is unashamedly Catholic in its ends—family, worship, the common good, the protection of the weak, the right ordering of economy to human flourishing—while rigorously rejecting the shortcuts that have doomed predecessors.
If Rexism teaches anything across the Atlantic, it is that Catholics are capable of real political energy and that such energy, without discipline, can be commandeered by men who promise restoration and fail to deliver. The task now is to harness the legitimate Catholic critique of liberal decay into a principled, patient, institution-building politics: one that can fight, certainly, but that refuses to become what it hates; one that can govern, but remembers that the City of Man is never the City of God.
¹ Richard Bonney, Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: the Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936–1939, International Academic Publishers; Bern; 2009 ISBN 978-3-03911-904-2; pp. 175–176
² William Brustein, "The Political Geography of Belgian Fascism: The Case of Rexism", American Sociological Review. 53 (1): 69–80. doi:10.2307/2095733. JSTOR 2095733.
³ Conway, M. 1989. “The Rexist Movement in Belgium, 1940-1944.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
⁴ Conway, Martin, Marc Efratas, Alain Dantoing, and José Gotovitch. Degrelle : Les Années de Collaboration : 1940-1944 : Le Rexisme de Guerre. Ottignies: Quorum, 1994.