The "Faux Soir" was a spoof issue of the newspaper Le Soir published in German-occupied Belgium on 9 November 1943. It was produced by the Front de l'Indépendance, a faction in the Belgian Resistance, in a satirical style that ridiculed German propaganda. Though it resulted in significant repression, the Faux Soir'''s embodiment of zwanze, the characteristic folk humour of Brussels, made it an enduring symbol of the Resistance. The incident was the centerpiece for the 1954 film, Un Soir de Joie.
Background
The Belgian newspaper Le Soir had ceased to appear on 18 May 1940, a few days after the German invasion of Belgium. It was relaunched by collaborationist journalists such as Horace Van Offel and Raymond De Becker with the acceptance of the German occupier. The most famous author to publish in Le Soir during this time was doubtlessly Hergé with The Adventures of Tintin comic The Shooting Star (L'étoile mystérieuse), featuring his famous character Tintin. The paper's propagandist transformation led to its nickname Soir volé ("the stolen Le Soir"). Nonetheless it maintained a comfortable circulation of 300,000 (compared with just over 90,000 as of 2009 for the modern Soir).
The Front de l'Indépendance (FI) was a Belgian resistance movement founded in March 1941 by Dr. Albert Marteaux (a communist), Father André Roland, a Roman Catholic priest, and Fernand Demany, with the aim of uniting Belgian resistance fighters of various opinions and stances. By the end of the war the FI national committee would include representation from a large number of resistance organisations such as the Armée belge des partisans (PA), the Milices Patriotiques (MP) (Patriotic Militias), Wallonie indépendante (Independent Wallonia), the Rassemblement national de la jeunesse (National Rally of Youth) and the country's main parties and trade unions.
Through these various organisations, the FI ran sabotage operations, escape routes, a false document service, and circulated 250 different underground publications.
The Faux Soir project
The idea for Faux Soir came to Marc Aubrion on 19 October 1943 while he was editing an article planned for 11 November. The following day he shared his idea with René Noël, head of the press department of the FI in Brabant and Hainaut. The idea was to publish and distribute a fake issue of Le Soir on 11 November, which would be the 25th anniversary of the German defeat in World War I.
Noël was enthusiastic about the idea, and along with Aubrion, he quickly put in place the steps which would allow such a significant operation to be carried out within 21 days. The publication date was fixed for November 9. The 10th was a Wednesday, the day when Le Soir would be published on four pages. The difficulty of printing a single page seemed enough, and the release of Faux Soir was put forward by a day.
Problems abounded. Firstly, Aubrion and Noël rapidly realised that the project would go well beyond their initial estimate of a few hundred copies. They decided to limit the circulation to 100 copies per newsagent or kiosk, adding a banner to each pack of newspapers which explained that the small number of copies was due to a breakdown of Le Soir's machinery. Nonetheless even this limited distribution demanded a print run of 50,000 copies, assuming 500 kiosks to give Brussels reasonable coverage.
Added to the difficulty of printing the fake newspaper, which in particular presupposed obtaining almost non-existent large-format paper and using printing machinery which was all under surveillance, the paper would have to be distributed under the very nose of the occupier as well as short-circuiting the normal distribution channels of the real Le Soir.
Noël set out to find financial support. He quickly obtained it thanks to Andrée Grandjean ("Françoise"), a lawyer at the Court of Appeal and a key figure in publishing the clandestine newspaper Justice libre au Palais. She enlisted the help of businessman Alfred Fourcroy, who was also in charge of an escape network for allied pilots. 50,000 Belgian francs were advanced to cover printing costs.
The operation
Although the initial idea was to make Faux Soir a counter-propaganda pamphlet, it rapidly evolved into a parody. Faux Soir was to become a full expression of Brussels' zwanze humour, aiming to amuse Brussels, Belgium, and all European resistance sympathisers. While the articles were being written and edited, the practical problems were surmounted at a speed which can only be explained by the level of enthusiasm created by the project.
