The censored and underground press of the two world wars now accessible via the Abraham online catalog

The Belgian War Press website, developed and managed by CegeSoma, provides online access to the clandestine press published in Belgium during the two world wars as well as to the censored press published in the country in 1914-1918. The press tolerated by the occupiers in 1940-1944 can be consulted in our reading room.

Access to this site is now made easier thanks to the online catalog Abraham of the Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheken. This tool lists in a freely searchable database the Belgian newspapers published between 1800 and 2020 and held in more than one hundred libraries and documentation centers in Flanders and Brussels. The database contains more than 11,000 newspaper titles. And 849 of these titles are now linked to The Belgian War Press.

This sub-directory, which lists all the newspapers available on The Belgian War Press website in alphabetical order, can be accessed here. Its conception allows to enrich the research tools already present on the CegeSoma website (on the origin and the multiple functionalities of The Belgian War Press website, see here). Each newspaper has a descriptive sheet containing some ten specific pieces of information. This information includes the different titles of the newspaper, the publishing organization, the place and dates of publication and its language. In addition, the record contains several keywords relating to the type of newspaper (e.g. communist press, underground press, etc.) and often the region where the newspaper is distributed. Finally, the "accessibility" category leads directly to the newspaper on The Belgian War Press site.

Perhaps most valuable of all, filters make it possible to pre-sort the 849 titles according to type of newspaper (more than thirty categories), language, place of preservation of the originals, year of publication and medium.

Abraham is therefore not only a new gateway to the press of the two world wars that can be consulted via The Belgian War Press, but also a complementary tool to the CegeSoma site.