Leaving the War Popular Violence and Judicial Repression of ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour in Belgium (1918–1921)

After four years of occupation, Belgium emerged ruined at the end of the Great War. The King returned from Yser, leading the army and acclaimed by the population. In contrast, the government and the exiles came back discreetly and the absence of the dead was felt strongly. Part of the population felt itself to be the victim of the occupation and sought revenge: shop windows were broken and houses sacked, men were molested and women's heads shaven. Manufacturers who had closed their businesses sought the severe repression of those who had pursued their activities. Journalists who had stopped writing called for harsh treatment of the newspapers that submitted to German censorship. A fraction of the population stigmatised those who profited from the occupation and demanded justice. In 1918, Belgium was already confronted with problems that most European countries only discovered at the end of the Second World War. How does one move on from a war of occupation? How does one reconstruct a state weakened by occupation? How does one handle collective vengeance and respond to calls for justice? This article will study successively the wave of ‘popular’ violence accompanying the country's liberation in November and December 1918 and the state's answer through the judiciary repression of collaboration with the enemy conducted between 1919 and 1921, mainly by military and civil tribunals.     

Sequence Analysis of Grip and Manipulation During Tool Using Tasks: a New Method to Analyze Hand Use Strategies and Examine Human Specificities

Different factors may have coevolved with hand dexterity such as bipedalism, brain enlargement, language, and the production and use of stone technology. Prehistoric stone tools are thus probably one of the key elements to examine the origin and evolution of these essential functions during human evolution. To gain a better understanding of the variability of traces resulting from use found on stone tools or on the body of the user, to better infer past archaeological tools, and to assess what the tool-using human hand specificities are, it is essential to investigate and describe tool manipulation itself. Studies investigated this question but either focused on static finger postures during grasping, or involved complex kinematic model of the coordination of the fingers necessitating the pose of many markers on the hand excluding the application of the method on non-human species. Here, we propose a new method to describe and quantify the dynamic strategies of tool grip and manipulation without the need of markers. We tested this method on five human subjects who had to make bamboo points using flint flakes. Time-based sequence analysis allowed identifying and describing both consistency and variation among users and types of use depending on the observed variable (e.g., hand contact areas, repositioning). The method proved to be efficient and, to our knowledge, is the only available method to describe and quantify with such detailed level grip and manipulation as dynamic process in both human and non-human primates without high technical constraint.