1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Malou, Jules Édouard Xavier

MALOU, JULES ÉDOUARD XAVIER (1810–1886), Belgian statesman, one of the leaders of the clerical party, was born at Ypres on the 19th of October 1810. He was a civil servant in the department of justice when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies by his native constituency in 1841, and was for some time governor of the province of Antwerp. He was minister of finance in the coalition ministry of J. B. Nothomb in 1844, and formed with B. T. de Theux a Catholic cabinet in 1846, which was overthrown in the Liberal victory of 1847. Malou then became a member of the senate, and his party only regained ascendancy in 1870. The extreme clerical ministry of Baron d’Anethan retired in December 1871 after serious rioting in Brussels, and Malou was the real, though not the nominal, head of the more moderate clerical administrations of de Theux and Aspremont-Lynden (1870–1878). He was wise enough to disavow the noisy sympathy of Belgian Ultramontane politicians with the German victims of the Kulturkampf, and, retaining in his own hands the portfolio of finance, he subordinated his clerical policy to a useful administration in commercial matters, including a development of the railway system. It was only after the fall of the ministry in 1878 that he adopted a frankly clerical policy, and when he became chief of a new government in June 1884 he proceeded to undo the educational compromise of his predecessors in the Frère-Orban ministry. His legislation in favour of the Catholic schools caused rioting in Brussels, and in October the king demanded the retirement of MM. Jacobs and Woeste, the members of the cabinet against whom popular indignation was chiefly directed. Malou followed them into retirement, and died at Woluwe Saint Lambert, in Brabant, on the 11th of July 1886. He was a financier of great knowledge and experience, and his works (of which a long list is given in Koninck’s Bibliographie nationale de Belgique) include three series (1874–1880) of memoirs on financial questions, edited by him for the Chamber of Deputies, besides pamphlets on railroad proposals, mining and other practical questions. His brother Jean Baptiste Malou (1809–1864) was a well-known divine.