of the Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques at the Royal Academy of Belgium, later becoming a titular member in 1929 and director of the Classe in 1933. He was an opponent of King Leopold II's attempts to expand his constitutional powers through the creation of the Congo Free State in the period leading up to the Free State's annexation by Belgium in 1908. Vandervelde held the portfolio of Minister of Justice between 1918 and 1921 in which role he supported prison reform, measures against alcoholism, trade union rights and women's rights. In 1922, Vandervelde joined a group of socialist lawyers including Arthur Wauters, member of the Belgian Labour Party, Kurt Rosenfeld and Theodor Liebknecht, members of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. They travelled to Russia as a group of socialist lawyers where they defended members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the 1922 Moscow Trial of Socialist Revolutionaries. This resulted in his inclusion into a satirical poem "Mayakovsky Gallery" by the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. From 1925 to 1927, he held the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs where he contributed to the Locarno Pact. He subsequently held a position on the Council of Ministers (1935–36) and Minister of Public Health (1936–37) in the government of Paul Van Zeeland. In 1933, Vandervelde became the POB's first president but increasingly found his internationalism and reformism challenged by a new generation of Belgian socialists. During the Spanish Civil War, Vandervelde's desire to intervene to halt the growing threat of fascism was challenged by Henri de Man and Paul-Henri Spaak. His personal papers are held by the Institut Émile Vandervelde in Brussels. Works Les associations professionelles d'artisans et d'ouvriers en Belgique (1892) L'Evolution industrielle et le collectivisme (1896); English translation, Collectivism and Industrial Evolution (1901) Le question agraire en Belgique (1897) Le Socialisme en Belgique (1898), with Destrée L'Alcoolisme et les conditions de travail en Belgique (1899) Le propriété foncière en Belgique (1900) L'Exode rural et le retour aux champs (1903) Le Socialisme et l'agriculture (1906) Le Belgique et le Congo (1911) Three Aspects of The Russian Revolution (1918) (Archive.org) Le pays d'Israel : un marxiste en Palestine (1929) (sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de) Notes Further reading Janet Polasky, The Democratic Socialism of Emile Vandervelde: Between Reform and Revolution. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 1995. External links Emile Vandervelde Institut Emile Vandervelde 1866 births 1938 deaths People from Ixelles Belgian Labour Party