[3][2] Robert Maurice Georges Devos was born during the First World War at Oostrozebeke, a small town then at the heart of the flax industry, and a short distance to the north of Kortrijk in West Flanders.
[1] He had been born into a Roman Catholic family, and in 1937/38 he was appointed to a teaching job at the St Joseph Episcopal College, a secondary school in Mouscron,[4] some 20 miles to the south of his birth-town.
During the public career of Robert Devos in the second half of the twentieth century, the town's cultural-religious and linguistic differences would continue to provide a challenging backdrop for politics in the region that still finds itself at the western end of Belgium's Franco-Flemish language frontier.
[1][9] The constitutional reforms implemented in December 1970 provided for the creation of a "Cultural Council for the French Cultural Community ("Cultuurraad voor de Franse Cultuurgemeenschap" / "Conseil culturel de la Communauté française"), which exercised certain responsibilities and powers in the fields of language, arts and education, in that part of Belgium classified as primarily French-speaking.
Special arrangements were made for the German-speaking communities in the east of Belgium, which were given a fair measure of autonomy, albeit still within the otherwise French-speaking Wallonia area.
Special arrangements were also made for the Brussels region, to take account of the stark linguistic differences between adjacent and closely connected quarters of the city.
It was instead simply transferred from Flemish-speaking West Flanders to French-speaking Hainaut, in a move which Robert Devos, as municipal mayor, bitterly opposed, with the backing of many of his Mouscron fellow-citizens.