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L'Abbe Pierre:
Voice of the Voiceless
By Rene Wadlow
L'Abbe Pierre, champion of the
homeless and world citizen, died 22 January 2007 in Paris at
94 years old. He was born in 1912 and named Henri Groues. He
was brought up in Lyon in a bourgeois family and educated in
Catholic schools. His father was active in helping the poor directly
and in Catholic social efforts. As a 15-year old student on his
way to Rome for Easter with his school, they stopped at Assisi,
where Henri had a mystical experience alone on the mountain side
and was ever afterwards influenced by the image of Francis of
Assisi helping the poor. At the end of his secondary school studies,
he entered a Franciscan order and spent seven years in a monastery
in very demanding conditions - long hours of prayer in the middle
of the night, hard physical work and serious philosophical study.
His health which was always delicate broke under the strain,
and he left monastic life for that of a regular parish priest
in Grenoble in the French Alps.
Shortly afterwards the Second World War started, and France was
occupied by German troops. Henri Groues helped people to flee
into Switzerland through mountain passes. The mountainous area
where he was living became a center for the armed resistance
to the German occupation, and Henri became an active member,
continuing to help people cross the frontier into Switzerland
and editing a clandestine news bulletin. During his Resistance
activities, he changed his name and identity papers often. One
assumed name was l'Abbe Pierre by which he became known in the
Resistance - a name which he kept after the war.
During his Resistance activities, he was arrested by the Germans,
escaped from jail, made his way through Spain to North Africa
where General De Gaulle had set up his Free French government
in Algiers. In Algiers, l'Abbe Pierre met De Gaulle and many
of the men who were going to play key roles in post-war French
politics. His dynamism, social conscience and interest in world
politics were noted. In 1945, l'Abbe Pierre was asked to run
for Parliament in a newly-formed Catholic party which needed
Catholics who had not been compromised by cooperation with the
Vichy government. In 1945, he was elected to the first French
Parliament and started to play an active political role pushing
for socially progressive legislation. He along with Andre Philippe,
a Protestant and Socialist he had met in Algiers were the first
to introduce legislation to recognize conscientious objection
to military service, legislation that did not come into being
in France until much later.
He also realized that peace and justice had to be organized at
a world level. He became an active world citizen, among the early
champions of Garry Davis in Paris in 1948 where the UN General
Assembly was held and where world citizenship as an organized
world movement started. L'Abbe Pierre was also elected as the
chairman of the international world federalist movement which
had its founding congress in Switzerland in 1947. He always remained
an active world citizen and that is how we worked together in
the mid-1960s in efforts to end the war in Vietnam.
As a member of Parliament but without a family, he had enough
funds to help in social activities linked to the reconstruction
of France. He bought a large, rundown house outside of Paris
and started to create a youth center. In his youth, he had been
a boy scout leader and organizer of work camps. Thus, he brought
young people to the house to help restore in. In 1949, a neighbour
brought to l'Abbe Pierre a man, recently released from prison,
who had just tried to kill himself. L'Abbe Pierre said, "Rather
than kill yourself, come and help me build." Thus was born
the Compagnons d'Emmaus, a movement for the poor to help those
even poorer and in greater need than themselves.
The house of l'Abbe Pierre became a home for men who had not
adjusted to peacetime society. They earned their livelihood at
the start by picking rags and other objects from the city dumps,
fixing and selling. After a while, people started giving them
broken objects to fix and sell, but the "rag pickers"
were the first popular image of the compagnons.
Then in the very cold winter of 1954, l'Abbe Pierre, who had
resigned from Parliament to work full time with the homeless,
received national attention. He was asked to participate in a
very popular radio quiz show. It was just the day after a mother
and her child who were living on the Paris streets had died of
cold. After answering a few quiz questions, l'Abbe Pierre used
the possibility of being on radio to give an impassioned plea
for all those living on the street and in shacks. His appeal
became the first shot in what was called "l'insurrection
de la bonte" the insurrection of goodness. Food, blankets
and money flooded in. The Parliament which a few weeks before
had refused to vote funds for social housing outside areas destroyed
by the war, was suddenly pressured to vote funds for social housing.
With the money sent to him directly by people; l'Abbe Pierre
started building houses in which those who were to live in them
participated in the building. L'Abbe Pierre's philosophy was
that people should not just be helped but that they should participate
and also help those who were weaker and less fortunate than themselves.
Groups of the Compagnons d'Emmaus spread from the Paris area
to all parts of France. Today there are over 100 communities,
some 10,000 housing units and a number of off-shoots. The Compagnons
have created national groups in some 40 countries, always working
with the poorest, especially in the field of social housing.
Shortly after 1954, Africans living in France came to l'Abbe
Pierre and asked that something similar needed to be done in
their countries. Thus IRAM was born, one of the first organizations
to promote popular participation in development, development
efforts based on the expressed needs of people and on the training
of leaders chosen by the village itself. L'IRAM began work in
the mid-1950s in North Africa and then in sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, IRAM is considered a leader in promoting rural development
under local leadership.
L'Abbe Pierre had the advantage of looking like the role he was
to play. He had been given a long dark fire-fighter's cape by
a fireman during his 1954 campaign, which along with a dark beret
and a disorderly beard made him recognizable everywhere and a
favourite of photographers. From his days in Parliament and from
the Resistance movement, he had kept friends who took on important
political roles, in particular Robert Buron, often a government
minister who had followed l'Abbe Pierre into the world citizen
movement. He also kept good contacts in the press and his appeals
for the poor were well publicized.
Although he spoke from the heart, he also had a political organizer's
mind. We came to know each other in 1964-1965. I had recently
returned from working in Africa and was teaching on development
issues in Geneva, Switzerland. It was a time of growing awareness
of the dangers of the war in Vietnam, and there was a hope on
the part of some of us that Buddhists could be a "Third
Force" in Vietnam. L'Abbe Pierre came to see me in Geneva
along with other persons from Sweden who shared the same hopes.
We were seeking contacts with different Vietnamese factions to
see what was possible. L'Abbe Pierre worked with us and put both
his intelligence and his network of contacts into the effort.
The effort, as we know, failed, but l'Abbe Pierre had great confidence
in what he called "The Eternal which is Love" so that
no action is a failure if it is done with the right motivation.
There will be a rarely-organized ceremony of "national honors"
for l'Abbe Pierre in the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris on 26
January, but it is in the continuing actions of associations
and individuals working with the poor, the voiceless, and for
solidarity at a world level that his spirit will continue.
Rene Wadlow is the editor of the online journal of world politics
www.transnational-perspectives.org and an NGO representative
to the United Nations, Geneva.
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Articles Archive By Rene Wadlow L'Abbe Pierre, champion of the
homeless and world citizen, died 22 January 2007 in Paris at
94 years old. He was born in 1912 and named Henri Groues. He
was brought up in Lyon in a bourgeois family and educated in
Catholic schools. His father was active in helping the poor directly
and in Catholic social efforts. As a 15-year old student on his
way to Rome for Easter with his school, they stopped at Assisi,
where Henri had a mystical experience alone on the mountain side
and was ever afterwards influenced by the image of Francis of
Assisi helping the poor. At the end of his secondary school studies,
he entered a Franciscan order and spent seven years in a monastery
in very demanding conditions - long hours of prayer in the middle
of the night, hard physical work and serious philosophical study.
His health which was always delicate broke under the strain,
and he left monastic life for that of a regular parish priest
in Grenoble in the French Alps. Home Page | AWC Goals | AWC Branches | Archives Resolution 2010 | Human Manifesto | AWC History United Nations | AWC Staff | Join Online Today | Worldometers Contact Us |