Lost Opportunities

Extract

In a previous article, I pointed out that Frederic Ozanam, the great and saintly founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, had in the course of his lectures on Commercial Law at the University of Lyons in 1839 outlined a remarkable system of Christian social reforms. He had denounced the exploitation of the working classes, which he described as slavery, he called for a just wage, profit-sharing and even pensions—over fifty years before Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. And Ozanam was not the only French Catholic to be moved by the spectacle of working-class misery which grew in intensity with the development of the Industrial Revolution. Conservatives like Villeneuve-Bargemont and Charles de Coux had denounced the evil effects of industrialism, and Royahsts claimed that the plight of the workers was due to the Revolution which had made their exploitation possible by destroying the Guilds of the ancien regime. Other Catholics were influenced by the doctrines of the early Socialist thinkers, such as Saint-Simon and Fourrier. The most notable of these were the group of working men who, under the leadership of Buchez, founded a paper called l’Atelier, some of the pages of which make stimulating and startling reading even today. The vigorous and progressive spirit of this elite of French Catholic social thinkers is best rendered by the Abbe (afterwards Mgr) Maret, the friend and collaborator of Ozanam and Lacordaire, who (before Marx and Proudhon had given to the word ‘socialism’ its materialistic and atheistic connotation) wrote: ‘It is no use refuting the pseudo-socialists, let us become socialists ourselves’.