OK that did it. Thanks! I guess I didn't understand the meaning of this "deshift"-value.
It's Belgian-Dutch. There is no such keymap available in the distribution. But as I said, I inspected the keymap-file gtk3_sym_nl.vkm (which is documented) and found no apparent error in the key mapping. I also played around with the shift modifier value a bit, but to no effect. For example the number 1 is defined as "1 7 0 0", which is correct according to the table. Also, the shifted keys ("!", in this example) work exactly as they should.
Number keys not working on azerty