Adolphe Max Surrendered Brussels, but Never His Judgement

On 20 August 1914, the German army entered Brussels, and no shots were fired. Mayor Adolphe Max (1869–1939), a Liberal, deliberately left the capital undefended to prevent a massacre. The German occupation of Brussels lasted from 20 August 1914 until November 1918. Max's surrender was not submission: five weeks later the Germans arrested him for defying them.

The white cloth comes from the city hall. Someone found it there in a hurry, and city clerk Maurice Vauthier now carries it as a flag. It is Thursday morning, 20 August 1914. Mayor Adolphe Max and two aldermen, Steens and Jacqmain, walk out to meet the German vanguard on the Leuven road. Max is 44. He is a lawyer, a former journalist and mayor of Brussels since 1909. Facing the German officers, he refuses to speak German. Then he makes a request that sounds almost naive: he wants to send a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been the city's guest in 1910.

The telegram changes nothing. In the early afternoon, Max stands on Place Dailly in Schaerbeek. A German general offers his hand. Max leaves it hanging: « Je ne puis accepter de vous serrer la main » (I cannot accept shaking your hand). Then the march begins. For hours, soldiers, wagons and guns move through the streets in step, singing. Along the route the cafés are shut, on the mayor's orders. Brussels watches, and says nothing.

Brussels, 19 August 1914: a capital left undefended

On 19 August 1914, Mayor Adolphe Max dismantled the defence of Brussels: he had the trenches filled in, the barricades torn down and the Civic Guard sent home. The Civic Guard (Garde civique) was an armed citizens' militia that kept public order. A single shot from a window could be enough to trigger German reprisals. Armed resistance was hopeless anyway. The Belgian army had already fallen back on the fortress of Antwerp. The capital stood alone against one of the strongest armies in the world. That same day, Max had posters put up across the city. He asked the people of Brussels not to use violence and not to lose faith. And he made a promise: as long as he was alive and free, he would defend the rights and dignity of his fellow citizens with all his strength.

Andenne and Leuven, August 1914: the fate of other towns

On 20 August 1914, the very day German troops entered Brussels, some two hundred civilians died at their hands in Andenne. Tamines followed two days later, then Dinant. From 25 August, the centre of Leuven (Louvain) went up in flames. On that Thursday, Adolphe Max could not know what awaited Leuven. The reader does. No one can prove what would have happened in Brussels without his choice. What is certain is that the capital gave the occupier no pretext at all.

The German soldiers were not fairy-tale monsters. Many sincerely believed that civilians were shooting at them from houses, the so-called francs-tireurs, or irregular snipers. Historians John Horne and Alan Kramer showed that this threat was largely imaginary. Yet the army turned that fear into a system: whole communities paid for a suspicion.

Adolphe Max fights back with posters and agreements

Adolphe Max resisted the German occupiers not with weapons, but with posters, agreements and refusals. On 20 August, he concluded an agreement with the German command on the passage and quartering of the troops. From then on, he held the occupier to its own word. The demands were heavy from the start. For the first day alone, the army required 18,000 kilos of bread and 10,000 kilos of meat, and the city was ordered to pay a war levy of 50 million francs. Max had it put on record that he gave way only under duress. On 24 August, he secured an agreement that requisitions had to be paid for within eight days. Max chose his battles carefully. The Belgian flag and the Brussels flag kept flying from the city hall. When the occupier wanted him to ban the Belgian tricolour from the city's windows, he refused to issue that ban himself.

The arrest of Adolphe Max on 26 September 1914

Adolphe Max was arrested on 26 September 1914 because he had suspended payment of the war levy. The German administration had broken its word first, by suspending payment of the requisition vouchers. Max answered in kind: no promise kept, no money paid. The German military governor then had a notice posted. According to that notice, Max had failed to meet his obligations and was now held in "honourable detention" in a fortress. That fortress was first Namur, then Glatz in Silesia, where he spent a year in solitary confinement. Celle and Goslar followed. On 13 November 1918, two days after the Armistice, Max left Goslar without permission. On 17 November, Brussels welcomed him as a hero. He remained mayor until his death in 1939.

Free inquiry: the principle behind Adolphe Max's defiance

Free inquiry is the principle that you accept no authority without testing it critically yourself, and that you form your judgement independently. Read through that secular humanist principle, Adolphe Max's surrender was a form of resistance. He handed over the city, but never his judgement. Max studied law at the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB), which wrote free inquiry into its statutes in 1894. In November 1909, a few weeks before Max became mayor, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré summed up that principle at the same university: "Thinking must never submit itself." Max applied that idea to power. He accepted German superiority as a fact, but never as a right. An army could force him to open the city, but not to call it just.

There is a humanist choice in this as well. Max put real human lives above an abstract idea of honour. A heroic defence would have looked fine in the history books, but civilians would have paid for it with their lives. Compassion outweighed the grand gesture.

Why Adolphe Max is no simple hero

Adolphe Max is no simple hero, because his first posters asked the people of Brussels to obey the occupier. He even pledged to guarantee the safety of the German troops billeted in the city. Read those posters alone and you see a compliant mayor. The difference lies in what he refused: to put his signature under injustice. Later, too, Max remained a man rather than a statue. In the Flemish Movement, he was seen as a mayor with little sympathy for Flemish demands in the capital. And as early as 1914, his face appeared on commemorative medals. The man became a symbol, and symbols deserve critical scrutiny too.

From Brussels 1914 to Melitopol 2022: mayors under occupation

Adolphe Max and Ivan Fedorov, mayor of the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, are more than a century apart, yet they faced a similar choice. In March 2022, Russian troops abducted Fedorov after he refused to cooperate with the occupiers. This is a parallel, not an equation: the circumstances are very different. What both stories show is that resistance does not always begin with weapons. Sometimes it begins with a mayor who stays, signs what he must and refuses what he may not. That kind of courage is quieter, but it is not smaller.

When is going along the sensible choice, and when does it become complicity? Adolphe Max did not draw that line at the city gate, but at his conscience. Where would you draw it?

Frequently asked questions about Adolphe Max and occupied Brussels

Was the surrender of Brussels in 1914 an act of resistance?

Read through a secular humanist lens: yes, Mayor Adolphe Max surrendered Brussels on 20 August 1914 to avoid civilian deaths but never submitted his judgement to the occupier. That is an interpretation. The established facts are that Brussels was occupied without a fight and that Max was arrested five weeks later.

Who was Adolphe Max?

Adolphe Max (1869–1939) was a Belgian Liberal politician and mayor of Brussels from 1909 to 1939. He became a symbol of civic resistance during the First World War. The German occupiers held him prisoner from September 1914 to November 1918, at Glatz, Celle and Goslar, among other places.

Why was Brussels not defended in 1914?

Brussels was not defended because the Belgian army had withdrawn to Antwerp, and the city had no chance of military defence. On 19 August 1914, Mayor Adolphe Max had trenches filled in, barricades removed and the Civic Guard sent home to avoid clashes between German troops and civilians.

How did Adolphe Max resist the German occupation?

Adolphe Max resisted with posters, agreements and refusals rather than weapons. He held the German command to the agreement of 20 August 1914, protested against requisitions and refused to issue a ban on the Belgian tricolour himself.

Why was Adolphe Max arrested?

Adolphe Max was arrested on 26 September 1914 because he had suspended payment of the German war levy. He did so after the German authorities had themselves suspended payment of requisition vouchers. He did not return to Brussels until November 1918.

What is free inquiry, and how does it relate to Adolphe Max?

Free inquiry (libre examen) is the principle that you accept no authority without testing it critically yourself. It has been part of the statutes of the Free University of Brussels since 1894, where Adolphe Max studied law. In this column's secular humanist reading, it explains how Max accepted German power as a fact but never as a right.