Le Cardinal Mercier Protège Belgique (Cardinal Mercier Protecting Belgium), Charles Dominique Fouqueray

Exhibition Label: "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard In 1914 the German army attempted to invade France through neutral Belgium. Following the exile of King Albert I and his government, Cardinal Desiré Joseph Mercier (1851-1926) effectively became the wartime resistance leader for occupied Belgium. Through a series of open letters, which were subsequently picked up and published by Allied and neutral newspapers, Mercier criticized the German occupation force and came to embody the Belgian resistance to the occupying power. As a result, he sometimes became the focus of Allied propaganda during the War. While ordinarily Mercier could have expected to be arrested and perhaps shot for his subversive views-regardless of his position as a cardinal-his unusually high profile and popularity among German Catholics ensured his continuing liberty, aside from a brief period of arrest in January 1915.