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The Bolshevik in Dinner Jacket. Rival principles, like rival callers, have walked in & out of Spaak's life at top speed. He was born (1899) of a notable and nonconformist Belgian family who felt, in the words of a friend, that they were born to lead Belgium. His maternal grandfather, Paul Janson, and his uncle, Paul Emile Janson, were great Liberal leaders; his father was a well-known playwright; his mother, a Socialist, was the first woman to sit in Belgium's Parliament. At 75, white-haired, good-humored Senator Spaak listens proudly to the speeches of her son, to whom she refers as "the Minister."
"Paul-Henri was," says Marie Spaak, "the easiest of my children to handle, so sweet and affectionate. He still is. When he takes me to dinner he comes hunting for me in the Senate, asking everyone, 'Avez-vous vu Maman?'''
In school, Paul-Henri was erratically brilliant. Once, when he flunked an exam, he forestalled punishment by declaring: "I have already administered to myself the full flow of reproach which a boy in my situation usually gets from Papa and Maman" Spaak's culture is essentially French, and his early heroes were French. He was particularly keen on Napoleon until, in his own words, he "became aware that it was compromising for a politician to admire Napoleon too much."
During World War I, aged 17, he tried to enlist in the Belgian army, was caught by the Germans and interned. After the war, he took a law degree, successfully defended union leaders and Socialists. "He wins juries by sheer weight," said one Brussels judge. "They think such a big man can't be wrong." By 1933 he had become the leader of Socialism's extreme left wing, chiefly because there he found more opportunities than anywhere else. Said he: "It is not sufficient to be right, we also want to be victorious ... As for the majority, to hell with it."
Once he led a crowd of Socialist partisans in a raid against Brussels' conservative Nation Belge and with his own walking stick smashed one of the paper's windows. The Nation Bege protected the window with an iron screen (which is still in place and known as the "Spaak grille"). But Belgians found it a little hard to take seriously a young radical who carried a walking stick. They called him "the Bolshevik in the dinner jacket."
"To Play a Bad Card . . ." "I felt I had something to do in politics," says Spaak of this period, "but all the doors were closed." In 1935, a door opened. Premier Paul van Zeeland asked him to enter the Cabinet as Minister of Transport, Posts & Telegraphs. Spaak accepted. Then, excitedly, he telephoned his mother: "Maman, if your telephone breaks down, complain directly to me. I'm the new Communications Minister." The next year he became Foreign Minister.
In his search for a form of security for Belgium, Spaak turned to the narrow solution of neutrality. It was perhaps the least sensible thing he ever did. He obtained from Germany, France and Britain promises that the Belgian frontiers would not be violated. He hoped that Belgium could be another Switzerland.