Emmanuel Mounier

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 taken to task by the historian Tony Judt, among others, for his failure to respond critically to the excesses of Stalinism in the postwar period.

Mounier once commented, in a restrained manner, on the Pope's "silence" concerning the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi regime; thus, he is cited in the bibliography on Pope Pius XII as indirectly originating the "black legend" of Pius XII.

Works

• La pensée de Charles Péguy, Plon, coll. "Roseau d'Or", 1931.
• Révolution personnaliste et communautaire, Paris, Éd. Montaigne, 1934.
• De la propriété capitaliste à la propriété humaine, Desclée de Brouwer, coll. "Questions disputées", 1936.
• Manifeste au service du personnalisme, Éd. Montaigne, 1936.
• Pacifistes ou Bellicistes, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1939.
• L'affrontement chrétien, Neuchâtel, Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944.
• Montalembert (Morceaux choisis), Fribourg, L.U.F., coll. "Le Cri de la France", 1945 .
• Liberté sous conditions, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1946.
• Traité du caractère, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1946.
• Introduction aux existentialismes, Paris, Denoël, 1946.
• Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme ?, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1947.
• L'éveil de l'Afrique noire, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1948.
• La Petite Peur du XXe siècle, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1948.
• Feu la Chrétienté, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1950.
• Les certitudes difficiles, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1951.
• Mounier et sa génération. Lettres, carnets et inédits, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1956.