Jan Frans Willems (Boechout 1793 – Gent 1846) was schooled in the town of Lier by Georg Bergmann, a German who, serving in the Dutch army, had been taken prisoner by the French revolutionary troops and paroled. Bergmann taught him languages and their literatures, accustomed him to Enlightenment ideals and imparted his loyalty to the House of Orange to him. When in 1807 Willems’s father was dismissed from the civil service by the Napoleonic authorities for lacking fluency in French, the 14-year-old youth responded with a poem vehemently indicting the French administration.

Although Willems also successfully wrote a prize poem (in Netherlandic) in praise of Napoleon, he greeted the restoration of the House of Orange, which now, under its rule, united the former United Provinces (“Holland”) and the Southern Netherlands and restored to the people their native Netherlandic (Dutch/Flemish^*) language.

Although fully fluent in French, Willems constituted himself as the foremost advocate of Netherlandic in the southern provinces. In a successful 1815 play he ridiculed the use of French loanwords, and in 1818 his poetical pamphlet Aen de Belgen/Aux Belges, in its annotated French version, amounted to a loyalist manifesto in favour of a pro-Netherlandic language policy. When such a policy came into effect in 1819, Willems turned to philological work and wrote the first literary history of his part of the country: Verhandeling over de Nederduytsche tael- en letterkunde, opzigtelyk de Zuydelyke provintien der Nederlanden (1819-24; “Treatise of the Netherlandic language and literature, specifically of the southern provinces of the Netherlands”). By this time he had become the main (and indeed almost the only) conduit between the literati in both halves of the (only superficially) United Netherlands, North and South. Bilderdijk, De Vries, Immerzeel and others became close friends.

Willems saw literature as the major tool for restoring and consolidating the Dutch-Flemish union and as a result worked to bring medieval texts (antedating the split, as a result of the Reformation wars, between North and South) back to light; he was made a member of the Royal Commission for the Publication of Historical Sources (1826), himself undertaking the edition of two major medieval chronicles, the Gestes of Brabant and the Rhyming Chronicle of Jan van Heelu. As in other countries, such philological retrievals were intended to lay the foundation for a national literature.

In the late 1820s the process of Dutch-Flemish unification foundered, leading to the Belgian secession of 1830. Willems was one of the very few to take a stance against the secessionists (an alliance of pro-French liberals and anti-Orangist Catholics). He argued his defence of the United Kingdom in polemical articles and in his De la langue belgique.

After 1830 Willems, while not being dismissed from the civil service, was demoted from his Antwerp position to a provincial town with a lower wage. Although most of his library was left behind, he continued his literary work and published his landmark presentation, in modernized language, of the long-lost Flemish version of the Reynard the Fox fable (1834). In its preface he emphasized his loyalty to the language and to what had now become a subsidiary Flemish cause within the Belgian state.  Eventually, Willems was promoted to a position in Gent, where he gathered several outstanding scholars and intellectuals around him. It was the start of a new network, of which he became the internationally acclaimed leader. With Jan-Baptist David he founded the Maetschappy tot bevordering der Nederduitsche Tael- en Letterkunde, and from 1837 until his death in 1846 he edited its periodical, the Belgisch museum voor de Nederduitsche tael- en letterkunde en de geschiedenis des vaderlands (“Belgian museum for Netherlandic language and literature and for the fatherland’s history”). Through networks like these Willems succeeded in imposing an official Flemish spelling which maintained a close similarity to the one officially used in Holland, thus preventing a linguistic divergence between the separated halves of the Netherlandic language area.

Meanwhile, his long-standing preoccupation with the collection of Flemish balladry and his philological work gained him international fame, in particular among Germanists from the Grimm school; Franz Josef Mone, Grimm himself (who spoke warm words commemorating Willems at the 1846 Germanists’ Congress in Frankfurt) and August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who developed a keen interest in Flemish affairs and who visited him a few times (together with Hoffmann, Willems edited a manuscript in 1837, Elnonensia).

Willems, who lived through French, United-Netherlandic and Belgian constitutional regimes, always looked for social acceptance of the Dutch language within the prevailing state system; his opportunism even allowed him to define, on a few occasions shortly before his death, Flemish nationalism in terms of religion and morality, mainly because he knew that the cause of Flemish in Belgium could not do without clergy support. His death in 1846 meant that the Flemish Movement, by now an established presence, no longer spoke with a single voice; a division occurred along liberal-secularist vs conservative-Catholic lines, both of which claimed (as many other groups have done since) the successorship of Willems as the “father of the Flemish Movement”.