Léon Degrelle, founder and leader of Rex

Léon Degrelle (1906-1994) grew up in an ultra-conservative Catholic family. He first gained notoriety as a journalist writing for publications owned by the Christus-Rex Publisher. After failing to get the Catholic Party to adopt more reactionary policies, early in 1936 Degrelle left it to create a new party, Rex, which ran in the May 1936 elections. Rexist ideology combined Belgian traditionalism, which promoted religious values to guide policy, and authoritarianism. Degrelle’s timing was perfect as growing discontent caused by the economic crisis led to his party winning 21 seats in parliament.

Degrelle himself did not stand as a candidate, and this gave him the freedom to use his newspaper Le Pays Réel to launch ferocious attacks on the government. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave him a powerful propaganda weapon. Along with the rest of Belgium’s right wing press, Degrelle’s paper focussed its attention on the so-called Red Terror, the wave of revolutionary and anti-clerical violence that swept the Republican zone in the first months of the war. The Catholic press sided with the rebels and spread the line that Franco was leading a crusade to defend Catholicism against communism. The Belgian Church also expressed a vehement anti-communism, although it also repeatedly warned against the dangers of the authoritarianism represented by Rex.

In July 1936, Degrelle launched his slogan, “Rex or Moscow”. The revolution that was engulfing Spain could have been avoided, he claimed, if the country’s elites had concerned themselves with providing justice and social equilibrium. Degrelle not only highlighted the fear of revolution; he also presented it as a very real possibility for Belgium and blamed Catholic and liberal elites for committing the same sins as their Spanish counterparts.

Degrelle used the Spanish Civil War as a propaganda tool to bolster his political position, exploit his anti-elite discourse, and try to create an unstable situation that could create an opportunity for him to take power. However, his political star began to wane after he lost a by election in Brussels in April 1937, although the outbreak of World War II gave him another opportunity. He organized a Walloon unit of the SS that took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union and was decorated by Hitler himself.  After the war ended a court martial sentenced him to death and he fled to Franco’s Spain where he was granted citizenship under the name León José de Ramírez Reina. He lived in Spain until his death in Malaga in 1994 at the age of 87.