Emmanuel Mounier


Emmanuel Mounier was a French philosopher, theologian, teacher and essayist.

Biography

Mounier was the guiding spirit in the French personalist movement, and founder and director of Esprit, the magazine which was the organ of the movement. Mounier, who was the child of peasants, was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne. In 1929, when he was only twenty-four, he came under the influence of the French writer Charles Péguy, to whom he ascribed the inspiration of the personalist movement. Mounier's personalism became a main influence of the non-conformists of the 1930s.
Peter Maurin used to say wherever he went, "There is a man in France called Emmanuel Mounier. He wrote a book called The Personalist Manifesto. You should read that book."
He taught at the Lycée du Parc at Lyon and at the Lycee Français Jean Monnet at Brussels.
Although Mounier was critical of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, he has been criticized by the historian Tony Judt, among others, for his failure to condemn the excesses of Stalinism in the postwar period.
In 1939, Mounier commented in a restrained manner on the newly-elected Pope Pius XII remaining silent on the Italian invasion of Albania. Thus, Mounier has been attributed with indirectly originating the black legend about Pius XII's alleged silence on the Holocaust.

Works