Félix Dehau

Félix-Étienne Dehau (1846–1934), Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, was a scion of a bourgeois family of Lille, France, an art collector, a patron of schools, orphanages and churches, and for 62 years, from 1872 to 1934, mayor of the commune of Bouvines.

Between 1870 and 1888 the couple had eight children, Pierre, Félicie, Claire, Madeleine, Marthe, Élisabeth, Henriette and Jean.

In 1903, he purchased land in Belgium to rehouse members of a religious order made homeless by the 1901 Law of Associations.

These were displaced again by the First World War, and in 1925 Chevetogne Abbey was established on the site.

[1] Sixty years before, at the age of eight, he had performed as a page in a historical pageant to mark the rebuilding of what is now Lille Cathedral.