Folens, Albert Joseph Marcel (1916–2003) Flemish nationalist and educational publisher, was born 15 October 1916 in Bissegem, west Flanders (latterly part of the municipality of Kortrijk, formerly Courtrai) to a devoutly catholic Flemish‐speaking family. (Folens recalled saying many rosaries for the victory of Franco during the Spanish civil war.) After attending a catholic boarding school, Folens entered the novitiate of the De La Salle Brothers but left in 1939 before taking his final vows. He retained a lifelong commitment to catholicism and a fascination with the lives of the saints; in later life he liked to engage in religious arguments with Jehovah’s Witnesses who called to his door, and he honed his linguistic skills by comparing missals in different languages. (Folens became fluent in Latin, German and Russian as well as French and English.)
According to one account, Folens was one of a group of Flemish novices who left in protest over the order’s teaching Flemish children through French. He spoke of his commitment to Flemish identity as deriving from childhood love for the famous historical novel The lion of Flanders (1838; English translation 1855, 1881) by the pioneering Flemish novelist Hendrik Conscience (1812–83), though he may have meant this as a symbolic rather than literal statement. (During the early‐twentieth‐century Gaelic revival, Conscience’s development of Flemish as a literary idiom was sometimes held up as a role model for Irish writers; Flemish nationalists in turn saw Ireland – a west European catholic country that had succeeded in seceding from an established state – as an inspiration.)
Folens’s departure from the novitiate led to a permanent breach with his devoutly catholic family. He was an active member of the Flemish nationalist tendency which developed fascist affinities in the interwar period and after the German occupation of Belgium in 1940 advocated collaboration with the Third Reich in the hope of achieving a Flemish state. The Nazis encouraged such hopes, while playing off Flemish and Walloon collaborators against one another. In 1941 Folens joined the Flemish legion, a volunteer formation recruited to fight against the USSR on the eastern front and incorporated into the SS. According to Folens, he was sent to the eastern front after training but did not see combat because he was invalided out after suffering a stomach ulcer. The Folens family claimed (after his death) that he never formally joined the SS because its oath of allegiance contradicted the oath to the Belgian king which he had taken as a teacher and that he never had the tattoo stating his blood‐group, possessed by all SS recruits.
Folens returned to Brussels where he met his future wife Juliette in March 1942; they married in April 1943 and had two daughters and a son. According to his own later account, whenever he sought a teaching position he found state schools would not employ him because of his De La Salle training, while catholic schools would not have him because he had left the order. His Irish Times obituary claimed he earned his living for the remainder of the war by ‘private translating and newspaper reviewing’. In 2007 it was revealed that the private translation had been carried out for the SD, the security service of the SS; his family denied allegations that he acted as interpreter when prisoners were being interrogated (which led to his being listed in the 1947 central registry of war criminals and security suspects) and claimed he merely compiled digests of news from the Flemish press (i.e. ‘newspaper reviewing’). This certainly involved connections to official press censorship, though Folens always denied his activities constituted police work.
At the end of the war Folens was captured by British forces in Germany, repatriated to Belgium, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He later insisted that this was only for collaboration, not participation in specific war crimes. Juliette was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment but paroled after six months. (Folens subsequently claimed he had been sentenced to death.) After thirty‐one months Folens escaped from custody under circumstances which are unclear. He claimed to have done so without outside assistance, but it has been suggested that this in fact represented a general trend whereby the catholic church and western intelligence facilitated the escape and expatriation of collaborators, now seen as possible anti‐communist assets, with the acquiescence of a Belgian government which regarded the emigration of potentially troublesome nationalists with satisfaction. After six months’ hiding with people whom he described as ‘vegetarian hippies living a Franciscan lifestyle’, but who appear to have been Trappist monks, he escaped from Belgium to the Netherlands (via the Trappist abbey at Achtel, located on the border, part of an escape line for fleeing collaborators). Folens came to Ireland in October 1948 on a false passport and was subsequently joined by his wife. He was one of several Flemish nationalist collaborators to settle in Ireland; their motives may have included a degree of ideological attraction, difficulties in accessing the alternative escape route to South America via Spain, and awareness that Ireland had no extradition arrangements with Belgium. (The Irish authorities refused to extradite Flemish collaborators because their offences were political.) According to a comment posted on the Photopol blog by Alexander Colen (another Flemish collaborator) who settled in Ireland, Folens subsequently secured the reduction of his sentence to the three years which he had served, had his Belgian passport restored, and was able to travel freely to Belgium.
The Folenses lived in rented rooms, first in Dún Laoghaire, later in Walkinstown, while he sought work as a commercial translator. His first job was translating business correspondence for a bicycle factory in Clones; he later worked for Kanturk Creamery. Folens received the H.Dip.Ed. from UCD in 1951 (his earlier teaching qualifications were not recognised in Ireland), then taught in Dublin at Fairview Christian Brothers’ School, at Clonliffe College, and at Coláiste Mhuire, Parnell Square, where he taught French through Irish, which he had learned with the assistance of Donncha Ó Céileachair (qv) (with whom he collaborated on the textbook Nuachúrsa Fraincise, which was published by Sáirséal agus Dill). He was known to pupils as ‘Froggy’. Although a sympathetic former student thought his command of Irish was less fluent than he claimed and that he really ‘taught French through French’, Folens was a natural teacher; Alan Dukes, the future Fine Gael leader, who was one of his pupils, recalled his lessons as lively and imparting a sense of French culture. He always showed considerable personal charm, wit and erudition; in his later business dealings with schools it was said that ‘the nuns loved him’ (Ir. Times, 20 Sept. 2003). He became a naturalised Irish citizen and developed a (somewhat romanticised) love for Ireland. In later life Folens persuaded himself that he was a descendant of eighteenth‐century Irish ‘Wild Geese’ who had settled in Flanders.
Folens wrote short stories and articles for Flemish magazines. In 1958 he published an Irish‐language pamphlet, Aiséirí Flondrais (the resurrection of Flanders), which a former pupil claims was written in English and translated by Ó Ceilechair. The title implicitly equates Flemish nationalism with its Irish counterpart by recalling Arthur Griffith’s (qv) Resurrection of Hungary (1904), a suggestion extended by such devices as claiming that the standard Flemish First World War soldier’s memorial design was based on a Celtic cross and originally devised by an Irishman. The book combines a vague account of Folens’s wartime and post‐war experiences with a defence of Flemish nationalist collaboration with the Germans as a response to anti‐Flemish discrimination and the historic attempts of the French‐speaking Walloon elite to extinguish Flemish culture. (Folens admits the German occupiers committed atrocities but states that he and most Flemish nationalists became disillusioned with them, while alleging that the misdeeds of the Belgian government against the Flemings were of equal gravity.) The post‐war punishment of collaborators is presented as a continuation of this oppression, assisted by communist hostility to the devoutly catholic Flemings; Folens claims small fry like himself were made to pay for the crimes of the great. The view that post‐war trials had been excessively punitive and represented victors’ justice (which became popular in certain circles during the Cold War in the 1950s) lies behind Folens’s reckless self‐description in a Flemish publication as ‘a war criminal honoris causa’ (quoted in Leach, 171). In 1987 he described the Nuremberg trials as ‘the greatest judicial scandal of the twentieth century’ (Ir. Independent, 20 Jan. 2007).
In 1957 Albert and Juliette Folens began printing school notes in their garage on a hired Roneo machine and writing to schools offering them for sale. This met with immediate success; a gap in the market had been identified. In 1960 Folens gave up teaching to devote himself full‐time to the publishing business, having formed the Folens Educational Publishing Company. After several house moves the family acquired a purpose‐built home‐cum‐factory at Scholarstown Road in south Dublin. By 1966 this was too small to accommodate the business, which moved to the Naas Road and subsequently to Tallaght. In addition to the notes (many, such as Folens’ French course (1958–60, and later editions), written by Folens himself; in other cases Folens encouraged teachers to write the texts), the firm also published copybooks, children’s magazines in Irish and English and texts on current affairs. Although some commentators complained that the notes encouraged rote learning and teaching to the test, they were clearly laid out and attractively designed, and many of those who passed through the Irish educational system in the 1960s and 1970s would have had fond memories of Folens books and magazines. The firm’s logo was a bee with a honeycomb; Folens interpreted its message as ‘we are always as busy as bees, but if you hurt us we sting’. This pugnacious comment may be explicable by Albert Folens’s tough negotiating style as a businessman (he was distrustful of trade unions and successfully sued the Department of Education after it withdrew from the planned publication of a twelve‐volume Irish‐language encyclopaedia) and by his family’s later recollection that the business had encountered some difficulties through xenophobia. In 2009 Folens was one of Ireland’s leading educational booksellers, moving into interactive media.
Albert Folens gradually moved into retirement from 1978. He appears to have retained sympathy for Irish republicanism; on his death a dissident republican organisation called him a ‘big‐hearted benefactor of Irish republican prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s’, claiming many prisoners’ children had benefited from his generosity (Independent (London), 4 Jan. 2007). In 1984 the Folenses were held hostage by armed robbers who broke into their home and forced them to pay a ransom.
When interviewed by the journalist Senan Molony in 1987 about his wartime activities (for a never‐published newspaper article), Folens claimed to have been inspired by anti‐communism rather than Nazism, but as his exchanges with Molony grew more heated his answers echoed wartime Nazi claims that they were defending European civilisation against American cosmopolitanism as well as Bolshevism. Folens claimed the Americans, by insisting on unconditional German surrender in the Second World War, created a ‘vacuum’ in central Europe which was filled by the Soviet empire; hence the Americans deserved Russian missiles on New York. He called Franklin D. Roosevelt a secret Jew – ‘a sick man with a sick mind’ and accused Molony of working for the Jews and the Americans.
In 2001 Folens suffered a stroke and moved to the Dargle Valley Nursing Home, Enniskerry, where he died 9 September 2003. According to his granddaughter, shortly before his final stroke he wrote the words ‘Saol fada agus bás in Éireann’.