René-Gabriel van den Hout

[1] He spent three years studying at the Leo XIII Seminary and the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven.

Van den Hout was ordained to the priesthood in Mechelen on 24 September 1916 and was appointed to the staff of the Institut Saint-Louis in Brussels.

Influenced by Charles Maurras and sympathetic to Italian fascism and Spanish nationalism, he opposed German Nazism and Belgian Rexism.

[1] In the summer of 1940 van den Hout was a refugee in France, where he became chaplain to General Henri Denis's staff.

He was involved in fruitless plans to found an international review and to forge a Mediterranean "Eurafrican" alliance as a counterweight to the Nazism that then seemed victorious in northern Europe.