Mounier, Emmanuel (1905–1950)

French Catholic thinker and writer, leading proponent of ‘personalism’ in the inter-war years and founder of the journal L'Esprit, which continues today to provide an influential forum for progressive Catholic thought and debate in France. Through personalism he sought to create a doctrinal basis for breaking the traditional identification of French Catholicism with the political right and, more especially, for challenging the ascendancy achieved by Charles Maurras's reactionary and xenophobic nationalism. His ideas also had some impact on the then Papal Nuncio in Paris, later Pope John XXIII. A supporter of the Spanish republican cause, later imprisoned under the Vichy regime, Mounier was closely associated with the post-war worker-priest movement and the progressive Catholic organizations set up for young farmers, young workers, and students. Two decades after his premature death this younger generation's success in creating the secular, and combatively socialist, French Confederation of Democratic Labour (CFDT) out of the quiescent Catholic union movement, would serve as a lasting testimony to the influence of Mounier's ideas.

Born in Grenoble, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Mounier was an admirer of the earlier left-wing Catholic novelist and playwright, Charles Péguy. By the late 1920s he had come to advocate decentralized political institutions and cooperative forms of economic management.