Flemish activists

Maurits Sabbe, born Maurice Charles Marie Guillaume Sabbe (Bruges, 9 February 1873 – Antwerp, 12 February 1938), was a Flemish man of letters and educator who became curator of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

Joseph Alphonse Marie English (Bruges, 5 August 1882 – Vinkem, 31 August 1918) was a Flemish draughtsman and painter.

Paul van Ostaijen (22 February 1896 – 18 March 1928) was a Belgian Dutch-language poet and writer.

Johan Michiel Dautzenberg (6 December 1808, in Heerlen – 4 February 1869, in Elsene) was a Belgian writer. Professionally he was successively secretary, clerk, teacher, private tutor, and bookkeeper.
He wrote poems on nature, songs, novels, poems concerning the Flemish movement. According to August Vermeylen, he was the first consciously Flemish writer. With his Beknopte prosodie der Nederduitsche taal (a study of Dutch prosody), he tried to convince his fellow poets to return to the classical metrics of poetry. His work shows a strong German literary influence, and he translated Loverkens by Hoffmann von Fallersleben.
His first collection, Gedichten (Poems), appeared in 1850, and the following year the first edition of his Beknopte Prosodia der Nederduitsche Taal. Many poems, songs, and literary studies followed, including an ode to miners. In 1857, he and some friends founded the educational journal De Toekomst (The Future).
He translated the Odes of Horace, which were published in 1923. A collection of his poems was published in 1869, after his death, by his son-in-law Frans de Cort as Verspreide en nagelaten gedichten.
Translations of fifty Horatian odes were rediscovered in 1910 and subsequently published. Later still, 70 letters stored in the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp, were published.

Emmanuel Hiel (30 May 1834 – 27 August 1899), was a Flemish-Dutch poet and prose writer.
Hiel was born at Sint-Gillis-bij-Dendermonde. During his life he held various jobs, from teacher and government official to journalist and bookseller, busily writing all the time both for the theatre and the magazines of North and South Netherlands. His last posts were those of librarian at the Industrial Museum and professor of declamation at the Conservatoire in Brussels.Hiel took an active and prominent part in the so-called Flemish movement in Belgium, and his name is constantly associated with those of Jan van Beers, Jan Frans Willems, and Peter Benoit. Benoit set some of Hiel's verses to music, notably in his oratorios Lucifer (performed in London at the Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere) and De Schelde ("The Scheldt"). The Dutch composer Richard Hol (of Utrecht) composed music for Hiel's Ode to Liberty, and van Gheluwe used Hiel's verses in his Songs for Big and Small Folk (second edition, much enlarged, 1879). That music greatly contributed the popularity of Hiel's writing in schools and among Belgian choral societies.Hiel also translated several foreign lyrics. His rendering of Tennyson's Dora was published in Antwerp around 1871. For the national festival of 1880 at Brussels, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence, Hiel composed two cantatas, Belgenland ("The Land of the Belgians") and Rer Belgenland ("Honour to Belgium"), which, set to music, were much appreciated.Hiel's efforts to counteract Walloon influences and bring about a rapprochement between the Netherlanders in the north and the Teutonic racial sympathizers across the Rhine made him very popular with both. A volume of his best poems was in 1874 the first in a collection of Dutch authors published in Leipzig, Germany.He died in 1899 at Schaerbeek.

Pieter Frans van Kerckhoven (10 November 1818 in Antwerp – 1 August 1857 in Antwerp) was a Flemish writer and one of the leaders of the early Flemish movement. He was the son of a broker, and his well-off birth allowed him a decent education. After he had first been instructed in a private school, he passed through the Antwerp athenaeum together with his contemporary and friend Domien Sleeckx. Van Kerckhoven was in that period a tireless reader and spent almost his entire pocket money to buy books of the French traditional authors. During his youth, Van Kerckhoven was, just like the rest of its family, very religious. After Van Kerckhoven in 1836, graduated from the Antwerp athenaeum, he studied medicine in Italy, at the University of Bologna. In Italy, Van Kerckhoven witnessed the restless and rebellious Risorgimento. The confrontation with the liberal and anticlerical Risorgimento movement would determine his later progressive-liberal conviction. Van Kerckhoven evolved from a pious catholic to an enthusiastic and persuaded liberal. In spite of the personal change which Van Kerckhoven underwent in Italy, he remained, however, religious.
Van Kerckhoven obtained the degree of baccalaurean in medicine and philosophy, but in June 1838 he suddenly returned to Antwerp, without finishing his studies. It is commonly believed that in Bologna it became too warm under the feet of Van Kerckhoven, after compromising contacts with the clandestine Carbonari movement. In Antwerp he would continue his medical studies at the Elisabeth hospital, but he would give them up quite rapidly. During that training he got acquainted, as it happens, with the students Jan De Laet and Hendrik Conscience, who almost immediately recognized his artistic talent and introduced him to the romantic artist group of the city. Already rapidly Van Kerckhoven would turn out to be himself one the central characters of the Antwerp cultural scene. Beside his office career (first in the business of his father and later at the city administration) he was now very active as an artist, literature critic and as head editor of several illustrated magazines, among which the Noordstar and the Vlaemsche Rederyker. Van Kerckhoven was also a member of literary societes of a private character, such as De Hermans, Het Heilig Verbond en De Olijftak. As a novelist he was not as popular as Hendrik Conscience, but nevertheless he was quite successful as an author and enjoyed as a lot of appreciation as a literature critic.
Reciprocal envy and Van Kerckhovens strive to make the Flemish movement more liberal, led as from 1846 to a split with Hendrik Conscience, who saw more in the alignment of the Flemish movement to the catholic politicians. The conflict escalated fast and it became, in 1847, a bitter feud which was fought out in the Antwerp magazines De Roskam en De Schrobber. In the leaflet De Vlaemsche Beweging (1847), aimed against Conscience and his allies, Van Kerckhoven displayed his brio as a polemist.
In these years it went well for Van Kerckhoven as he became a city clerk and published with Ziel en lichaem (1848) and the novel Liefde (1851) the pinnacle of his literary oeuvre. Moreover, he tirelessly contributes to the Vlaemsche Rederyker, a literature-critical illustrated magazine, of which he had been head editor since 1847. In 1852, Van Kerckhoven was even raised to knight in the Leopold order. however at the beginning of 1857 he became seriously ill. He appeared to suffer from tuberculosis and died some months later, aged 38.

Jacob Lodewijk Gerard, Baron Walschap (Londerzeel-St. Jozef, 9 July 1898 – Antwerp, 25 October 1989), was a Belgian writer.

Karel Cornelia Constantijn Dillen (16 October 1925 – 27 April 2007) was a far-right Belgian politician and Flemish nationalist.

Henri (Hendrik) Conscience (3 December 1812 – 10 September 1883) was a Belgian author. He is considered the pioneer of Dutch-language literature in Flanders, writing at a time when Belgium was dominated by the French language among the upper classes, in literature and government. Conscience fought as a Belgian revolutionary in 1830 and was a notable writer in the Romanticist style popular in the early 19th century. He is best known for his romantic nationalist novel, The Lion of Flanders (1838), inspired by the victory of a Flemish peasant militia over French knights at the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs during the Franco-Flemish War.
Over the course of his career, he published over 100 novels and novellas and achieved considerable popularity. After his death, with the decline of romanticism, his works became less fashionable but are still considered as classics of Flemish literature.

Lieven Gevaert (28 May 1868 – 2 February 1935) was a Flemish industrialist. His father died when he was only three years old. He started his career in the company he founded together with his mother in 1889, which produced photographic paper according to traditional methods. In 1894, he founded the company Gevaert & Co, which in 1920, was transformed to N.V Gevaert Photo-producten, merged in 1964 with Agfa AG to become Gevaert-Agfa NV and later Agfa-Gevaert NV.
Already at an early age, he felt socially responsible and wanted to advance the status of Dutch in Belgium. His personal ideas were strongly influenced by the social encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and the writings of Lodewijk De Raet. He supported several Flemish initiatives as a manager, but stayed outside politics. His main objectives were the introduction of Dutch as a business language, and the foundation of a sound Dutch-speaking education as a means to establish a Flemish elite. In 1926, when the Vlaamsch Handelsverbond (Vlaams Economisch Verbond, VEV) was founded, Gevaert was its first chairman. Later, he founded the Sint-Lievenscollege in Antwerp, where he lived on Belgiëlei.