The First World War’s Impact on Belgian Model of Justice (1914-1940)

As a postdoctoral researcher, Mélanie Bost studies the legacy of the First World War on the Belgian judiciary system. The general aim is to measure whether the new patriotic paradigm, the new central importance given to the security of the State and the influence of the military institutions, but also the important transformations of the interwar period that are: democratisation, socialist participation, nationalisation, parliamentarian crisis, new political threats, and so on – deeply affect (or not) the work of the justice actors and their relations with the populations. The research focuses on the judicial treatment of some “at-risk groups” – “incivics” and political dissidents, German or German-speaking populations, new Belgians (from East cantons) and a larger group composed of populations with a problematic identity and suspects from a patriotic point of view: aliens, refugees, prostitutes, etc. The idea is to observe how the different actors of the justice administration (police officers, magistrates, security officers, etc.) integrate/discriminate against those groups and, further, to analyse the role they play in the relation between State and individuals. In the first phase of her project, M. Bost investigates the functioning of the military security, as a judicial policy and a counter-espionage service, from its foundation in 1915 until its official suppression in 1929.