Jan Coucke and Pieter Goethals information

Jan Coucke (c. 1812 – 16 November 1860) and Pieter Goethals (c. 1826 – 16 November 1860) were two Flemings who were sentenced to death for murder in 1860 at a time Belgium was legally only French-speaking, though the majority of the citizens spoke Dutch, and only the official language was acknowledged by the Courts of Justice. They became an example as well as an exponent of how the French-speaking bourgeoisie (from Wallonia but also from Flanders) treated their Flemish fellow-citizens, of whom the language – if not its speakers – was considered inferior by the elite. Later on, the real perpetrators confessed to the murder, which in 1873 led to a debate in parliament that ended in the Coremans Act, one of the first laws to recognize Dutch as an official language in Belgium, allowing the Flemish to use their own language at Flemish courts, though not yet in Brussels.^[1]