The Éditions de la Toison d'Or were created in Brussels in 1941 by Edouard Didier, a printer, and his wife Lucienne, a notary's daughter and sculptor. In 1932, they had founded the movement Jeune Europe, for a federal and pacifist Europe. Lucienne, beautiful and charismatic, held a salon where personalities from all walks of life met: politicians and men of letters, Catholics, communists, rexists, socialists, Belgian, French and German.

Over the years, the importance they attached to Franco-German friendship, as well as, perhaps, a certain naivety [Cf. Dehan 1995: 218 and following] made them evolve towards collaborationist positions. In 1940, they were arrested on suspicion of intelligence with the enemy and imprisoned as hostages in France, but freed thanks to the intervention of their friend Otto Abetz, German ambassador in France. Lucienne continued to hold salons, both in Brussels and in Paris, where she received prominent personalities such as Henri De Man, Ernst Jünger and the Resistance writer Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, who would later intervene on their behalf after the war.

"The proposed publishing program ha[d] three points: the publishing of books, the publishing of a political-literary journal, and the exploration of young talent" (Fincoeur 1997:34), but the last two points would remain largely unheeded. As book publishers, though, they were rather productive. Still according to Fincoeur, between 1941 and September 1944, the Toison d'Or published 100 titles in 7 collections: mostly works of fiction plus a few historical and political essays. In principle, the historical and political essays were selected by De Becker, the works of fiction by the Didier couple. The busiest years were 1943 and 1944.

Our main interest here is in the Dutch and Flemish works that appear in the catalog. The German Ministry of Propaganda wished to reduce the predominant French influence in favor of a Germanic cultural influence. According to Simone Waslet, an employee of the publishing house, the publication of German and Scandinavian works (i.e., the collection “Lettres étrangères et flamandes”) was only a façade to satisfy the powers of the Occupation, Edouard Didier preferring to publish French titles [Dehan 1995:27].

In the course of its four years of activity, the publishing house finally published six titles translated from Dutch, all works of fiction:

Two other translations from Dutch were announced, but never published: Albert van Hoogenbemt, L'homme silencieux (announced in 1943 on the cover of Eeckels' essay below), and Victor Leemans, Introduction à la sociologie (announced in 1942 in Le Nouveau Journal).

Also worth mentioning is an essay on Dutch poetry, written by Guido Eeckels: Marginales. Notes on Dutch lyricism (1943). Guido Eeckels, a rexist journalist who was soon to become director of the collaborating publishing house De Lage Landen was also a shareholder of the Toison d'Or publishing house, and he undoubtedly influenced the decision to publish two books by Walschap (the first of which he prefaced): he was the author of the first important analysis of Walschap in French and at the beginning of the war he wrote the column "Lettres flamandes" for Le Nouveau Journal [Fincoeur 2004: passim]. In 1968 he translated another Walschap title, Célibat, for the Editions Universitaires françaises.

The presence of Multatuli, the only Dutch author, can perhaps be explained by the presence of a French-speaking Dutch author in the publishing house's collection. Indeed, Neel Doff, whose Jours de famine et de détresse was published by Editions de la Toison d'Or in 1943, and who had herself tried her hand at translating Multatuli, was a faithful supporter of his work. Additionally, the themes of Max Havelaar are similar to those favored by the publishing house: escape, war stories, historical novels, anti-clericalism, denunciation of the bourgeois order [Fincoeur 1997:38].

Among the other published authors, Filip de Pillecijn and Marcel Matthijs were nazi collaborators. The decision to publish their novels may have been motivated by the desire to create a 'collaborationist façade' as suggested above. The same can be assumed for Victor Leemans, whose essay will not be published: he was a Flemish nationalist who sympathized with the Germans.