 He openly condemned the collaboration with the Germans (Activism), and became the personification of the resistance in Flanders.Although he, in 1916, had said that the fight for the Flemish rights had to be continued after the war, he himself did not get involved with it anymore.After the war he became Minister of Colonies (1918–1924), and on 27 September 1926, he succeeded Fernand Hautain as governor of the National Bank of Belgium and together with Paul van Zeeland, he led this institute for many years in a dynamic but autocratic and self-opinioned way.