Pierre Hubermont and Constant Malva: the context of proletarian literature in Wallonia

Pierre Hubermont and Constant Malva: the context of proletarian literature in Wallonia

Robert Steuckers 

Pierre Hubermont (1903-1989), whose real name was Joseph Jumeau, came from a family of miners and fierce socialist activists: his father headed the ‘Fédération syndicale du Borinage’ (trade union federation of the Borinage, a mining region where the Picard dialect is spoken), and his brother quickly became the Belgian national president of the ‘Jeunes Gardes socialistes’ (Young Socialist Guard). Pierre Hubermont attended school until the age of 15, then became a labourer and mason's assistant. He published his first writings at the age of 17, in 1920, in the newspaper L'Avenir du Borinage. Over time, he got to know Charles Plisnier, Constant Malva, Francis André (the peasant poet), Albert Ayguesparse and the communist writer Augustin Habaru. 

At the age of 27, in 1930, he published the book that still makes him famous today, despite all his subsequent setbacks: Treize hommes dans la mine (Thirteen Men in the Mine). In the same year, the success of this work about the tragedy of miners trapped in an accident underground and showing solidarity despite their different nationalities earned him an invitation to the “Kharkov Congress”, an international conference of proletarian and revolutionary writers. Hubermont was therefore labelled a communist sympathiser.

In 1940, however, he did not sign the manifesto of thirteen intellectuals in favour of Belgian neutrality, but the attitude of Henri De Man, the undisputed intellectual leader of Belgian socialism and president of the POB (Parti Ouvrier Belge), who declared after the collapse of France that the future lay in the 'German form of socialism (national) form of socialism‘, caused him to change his mind: from then on, following his president, he would be a servant of the ’New Order". During the second German occupation, Hubermont managed the “Cercles Culturels Wallons” (CCW), which advocated for a specific working-class culture, that of the Borinage and the Sambre-et-Meuse region (Mons, Charleroi, Liège), as a Western expression of an industrial culture linked to the former medieval Germanic imperial space. For Hubermont, the neo-imperial Europeanism of the “New Order” was a partial and reasonable realisation of his proletarian internationalism. These activities earned him a prison sentence between 1944 and 1950. He did not engage in any political activity after the war, except during the very violent strikes of the winter of 1960-61, when he supported the ‘Mouvement Populaire Wallon’ (MPW) of the red and revolutionary leader André Renard, writing articles under the pseudonym René Lapierre. But this interlude, although widely commented on, had little impact in Wallonia.

Between 1979 and 1982, he frequented the traditionalist circle of the dissident surrealist Marc Eemans, where I had the pleasure of meeting him.

Constant Malva (1903-1969), whose real name was Alphonse Bourlard, was from Borinage, like Hubermont. He was one of the many refugees from Hainaut who fled to France during the First World War, which explains why he never obtained his primary school certificate. Returning from exile in 1919, he went down into the mines and experienced the hardships of this tenacious and proud people of his native Borinage. 

In 1923, he joined Ward Van Overstraete's Communist Party, but was expelled in 1928 for ‘Trotskyist deviationism’. He then joined the ‘Revolutionary Socialist Party’, before declaring himself an ‘independent revolutionary’ in 1936. His first writings date from 1932, the year when violent strikes shook the coalfields of Roman Belgium. He frequented the left-wing surrealists of Hainaut, led by Achille Chavée, a lawyer, follower of Breton's surrealism and volunteer communist fighter in the International Brigades, where he distinguished himself by participating in the Stalinist repression of Iberian anarchists. From 1941 onwards, Chavée was a member of the Resistance and between 1945 and 1955 he led the ‘Belgian-Soviet Friendship Association’; in 1961, however, he joined Renard's MWP, as did Hubermont.

Malva became increasingly sceptical about this revolutionary unrest and is reported to have said that ‘the situation was ripe for regime change, but the people were not’.  His disappointed hopes for a liberating and salvific left, then for a “new European order”, his bitterness at the human failings of the Belgian left, his hatred of trade union bureaucracies and the long period of poverty after his release from prison made Malva a completely disillusioned man: this is understandable.