Collaboration
De Man was an adviser to King Leopold, and his mother Queen-Mother Elisabeth. After the capitulation of the Belgian Army in 1940, he issued a manifesto to POB's members, welcoming the German occupation as a field of neutralist action during the war: "For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance."
He was involved in setting up an umbrella trade union, the Unie van Hand-en Geestesarbeiders/Union des Travailleurs Manuels et Intellectuels (UHAG/UTMI) which would unify the existing trade unions and moreover aim at the integration of manual and intellectual workers.
Nevertheless, he eventually was mistrusted both by Flemish Nazi collaborators (for his 'Belgicism') and by the Nazi authorities, who forbade him to give anymore public speeches around Easter 1941. Seeing he had lost his grip on events, he went into self-imposed exile in an Alpine cottage in La Clusaz, in the Haute Savoie region of France. After Liberation, he crossed the border to Switzerland.
He was convicted in absentia of treason after the war. He died in 1953, together with his wife, in a collision with a train.
His nephew, the literary theorist Paul de Man, became famous in the United States as a leading proponent of "deconstructionism", but after his death in 1983 was found to have written articles in the wartime Nazi-controlled press that discussed antisemitic themes.
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