Léon Harmel
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Léon Harmel

Entrepreneur as Catholic Social Reformer

Joan L. Coffey

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eBook - ePub

Léon Harmel

Entrepreneur as Catholic Social Reformer

Joan L. Coffey

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About This Book

Léon Harmel is a penetrating study of the French industrialist who from 1870 to 1914 advanced social Catholic and Christian democratic movements by improving factory conditions and empowering workers. Joan Coffey's fascinating new book represents the first major study of Léon Harmel in English.

Harmel's model factory at Val-des-Bois demonstrated that mutual accord and respect were possible between labor and management. Harmel turned his profitable spinning mill into a Christian corporation. His ethical business practices captured the attention of Pope Leo XIII and inspired his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Harmel also encouraged his workers to make pilgrimages to Rome. The collaboration of Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel laid the foundation of enterprises that collectively became known as Christian democracy.

Drawing on extensive archival sources, including the Vatican Archives, Joan Coffey's work skillfully analyzes the personal relationship between Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel. Léon Harmel also offers a timely reminder of the power of personal ethics and provides a refreshing antidote to today's business climate.

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Year
2003
ISBN
9780268159207
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CHAPTER ONE

Family History and Legacy

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Neither cleric, priest, nor layman
Can from women turn away
If he does not wish to stray,
Sinfully from the good Lord; . . .
—The Virtues of Women1
THE FAMILY HISTORY AND PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY OF LÉON HARMEL predisposed him to success as an entrepreneur and also to dedicate his life to the service of others. It is important then to understand why the Harmel family settled in the Suippe River valley of northern France and how the successes and failures of early business attempts often were tied to national political events, as well as to the entrepreneurial acumen of the Harmel patriarchs, who frequently weathered seemingly overwhelming odds to keep their factory going. Resilience in times of economic adversity and entrepreneurial creativity were just two family traits passed on to Harmel, who, after taking over the spinning mill in 1854, successfully ran the business until forced to abandon the enterprise during World War I. Equally significant to Harmel’s personal development was the family legacy in the area of social reform. Grandparents and parents, brothers and sisters, spouses and children all had a hand in making Léon Harmel the person he was, none more influential than those who nurtured him in his early years. Those who shaped Léon’s character and values enabled him to embrace life with boundless confidence and enthusiasm. Likewise, his atttitudes toward clergy, women, and workers, all of whom played key roles in his philosophy and life agenda, largely were formed by early life experiences.

ROOTS

Léon-Pierre-Louis Harmel was born on February 17, 1829, at Neuvilleles-Wasigny, a town in the French Ardennes not far from the Belgian border, in the house of his maternal uncle. Naming the baby Léon curiously seemed to foretell the future: it was also Pope Leo XIII’s given name, a fact that the pope delighted in.2 Destiny also seemed apparent when the second son in a family of eight children ultimately assumed the role of patriarch in the Harmel family and, thereby, became heir to a business and to a legacy initiated by his paternal grandfather and developed by his father.
The grandfather, Jacques Harmel (1763–1824), worked as a blacksmith in the Belgian Ardennes as a young man, but when revolutionary armies destroyed the family forge in 1793, he looked for greater security by changing occupations and relocating. He became interested in the textile business, specifically the wool industry, and in 1810 constructed, near Sainte-Cécile in the Belgian Ardennes, one of the first mechanized (steam-powered) spinning operations in the French empire. The business flourished for a time, with a putting-out system that encompassed neighboring villages, but the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte’s empire in 1815 meant that Belgium was once again master of its own house and, consequently, subject to the douane, or customs duty. The reimposition of the tax financially ruined Jacques;3 all of his savings were tied up in the factory.4
Undaunted, Jacques Harmel packed up his wife and five surviving children (nine were born to the couple) and crossed the border into France where he established a workshop at Signy-l’Abbaye in the French Ardennes. He tried for two years to make a go of it single-handedly, but as debts mounted and the business faltered, he summoned home from schooling in Reims his two older sons, Jacques-Joseph and Hubert, to help. Jacques-Joseph, the younger of the two but the more inclined to business, inherited the family enterprise at age twenty-five.5
Jacques-Joseph Harmel (1795–1884), Léon’s father, “incarnated the industrial bourgeois in full ascension.”6 He was a workaholic and an entrepreneur. Tireless when it came to putting in hours at the family business, he lived at home and accepted no remuneration until he married in 1824, the year of his father’s death. When one venture stumbled, he went on to the next with a resilience that was astounding. The family and the business relocated several more times in the region of the French Ardennes before settling in 1841 on the outskirts of Warmériville. His wife and life partner, Alexandrine Tranchart de Rethel, struck by the beauty and peacefulness of the chosen site along the Suippe River, named the new family spinning mill “Val-des-Bois,”7 or Wooded Valley.
This last relocation was permanent, and the enterprise eventually was successful but not before the Harmel family once again experienced anxious times. The wool industry was new to Warmériville, a village of approximately 1,134 inhabitants at the time the Harmels were constructing their steam-powered factory along the Suippe. The cost of construction, coupled with the fact that Jacques-Joseph was dedicated to having the latest equipment in the factory, resulted in considerable debt. There were particular problems associated with the Revolution of 1848, which disrupted trade and commerce throughout France as revolutionary embers flared in February, simmered in March, April, and May, and reignited in June before finally being extinguished in Paris that same month.8
While Jacques-Joseph worked at the factory, often collapsing among the balls of wool at night for a few hours of sleep, Alexandrine gave birth to eight children in eight years (three died before the age of one year), managed the bustling household with efficiency and joy, and on occasion traveled to Reims to see to bills and debts. She counted every sou and was not above personal sacrifice. In an era when every proper haute bourgois (and the Tranchart family were members of the upper middle class, of the bonne bourgeoisie) donned a chapeau before stepping outside, Alexandrine gave up buying hats.9 Her participation in the day-to-day affairs of the mill was not that unusual for wives whose husbands owned textile enterprises in northern France during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In fact, women often took over the financial duties of these firms, tending to accounts and balancing the books.10 In addition to acting as a partner in the business, Alexandrine shared her husband’s deep religious faith and no doubt encouraged him when he began the process of turning Val-des-Bois into a Christian factory.
In some ways, Jacques-Joseph was not unique in his ardent religiosity. As a middle-class male (although not as distanced from the artisan class as other members of the middle class since his father originally was a blacksmith), he would have been more likely to be a practicing Catholic than someone who worked with his hands for a living. That the family originated in Belgium also increased the likelihood of religious practice; nineteenth-century Belgian men of all classes went to church more frequently than did French men of the era.11 It is not surprising then that Jacques-Joseph was disturbed by the irreligion and immorality of the workers at his new factory in the French Ardennes.
He moved from dismay to concrete action by attempting to re-Christianize his workers at first by personal example. The lackluster response to this initial overture led Jacques-Joseph to attempt a more vigorous and systematic course of action. Soon he established institutions and associations that demonstrated his concern for the spiritual and material conditions of the workers at the Harmel factory. For example, in 1842 he created a savings bank for the workers, and in 1846 he organized a relief fund to provide material assistance during illness by guaranteeing to the worker half of his or her salary, free medical care, and, if the worst arose, a Christian burial. To buttress the family unit, he paid wages collectively and personally; as the head of each worker household went into Harmel’s office to pick up the family paycheck, Jacques-Joseph bantered with the worker about his children and other personal matters. To provide his workers and their families with wholesome entertainment and informal education, he enlisted his three sons—Jules, Léon, and Ernest—to organize a musical society and give instruction on Sunday. The workers reciprocated by awarding him the sobriquet le bon père,11 or the good father.
To what extent Jacques-Joseph Harmel’s social program at Val-des-Bois was inspired by reform begun earlier in the century by concerned Catholics is hard to know, but the effort made at the factory to mitigate the effects of the industrial revolution certainly falls within the framework of social Catholicism. In offering his workers an array of benefits outside of but including traditional Christian charity, he joined others in recognizing a new kind of poverty, pauperism—poverty so pervasive that “large sections of society were degraded and deprived of tolerable conditions of livelihood and of a tolerable life in common with others.”13 His programs at Val also indicated an awareness of the new class stratification brought about by the industrial revolution, one that defined the classes not only by economic disparity but also by religious observance; the French working class, as demonstrated by the Harmel workers, were neglecting if not out and out abandoning religious practice.
While social Catholicism found expression in Belgium, Italy, and Germany, it flowered most profusely and extensively in France, where it began shortly after the onset of industrialization.14 Its early years, when it at times cross-pollinated with pre-Marxist socialism, were its most creative. But a certain weeding out had to take place. If social Catholicism was to become part of the social teaching of the Catholic Church, it had to manifest a certain doctrinal orthodoxy, and individuals unprepared to commit to a Church whose ideas did not match their own or who were unwilling to wait for change in some distant future parted ways with institutional Christianity. In terms of political periodization, the era of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830)15 and the July Monarchy (1830–1848)16 most closely matches this time.
Beginning in 1822, the Society of St. Joseph ministered to the workers of Paris and, in so doing, called attention to the needs of the industrial poor. Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1864) championed the efforts of the Society of St. Joseph and fashioned an ideology for what would be known as social Catholicism by decrying the demoralizing effects of the French Revolution, with its breakup of the trade guilds, and advocating the return of artisanal associations as a solution for contemporary worker atomism. Lamennais is considered the founder of social Catholicism in France, just as he is recognized as the man most responsible for suggesting to Catholics interested in social reform that their chief advocate resided in Rome and not among the national episcopacy. Henceforward, social Catholics were identified with ultramontanism, or adherence to Roman policy, while those more comfortable with the status quo clung to the notion of a national church, or Gallicanism. When Lamennais felt his ideas could no longer be reconciled with the social teaching of the Catholic Church, he left the Church to become a socialist.17
Other reformers contributed to social Catholicism too. Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853) founded the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which had as its express purpose the ministry of the urban poor. Philippe Buchez (1796–1865), who was convinced philosophically that Christianity was the appropriate response to contemporary ills because it emphasized the brotherhood of mankind, pointedly refused to become a practicing Catholic because that would lessen his credibility as intermediary between Catholics and socialists. Even Charles Fourier (1772–1837) can be given some credit for influencing social Catholicism as he stressed societal “harmony.”18 Certain other aspects of his ideology, such as the dismantling of the traditional family, kept the Fourierists and social Catholics respectfully distanced, however.
Just as the Revolution of 1848 disrupted national political life by bringing down the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–1848) and putting into place, albeit ever so briefly, the Second Republic (1848–1852),19 and just as it wreaked havoc with commercial enterprises like that of the Harmel factory, it also initiated a period of sobering reassessment within the ranks of social Catholics. For many, flirtation with socialism ended on the barricades in 1848. Those Catholics who had identified themselves as democrats or republicans or Christian socialists in the years from 1830 to 1848 became disillusioned with the shortcomings of both church and state in 1848.20 They would have to wait until later in the nineteenth century and the appearance of a new generation of reformers such as Léon Harmel to rekindle dreams. In the meantime, most social Catholics became dedicated monarchists who did not support the current occupant of the French throne, Napoléon III (r. 1852–1870),21 but instead held out hope of a Bourbon restoration. As so-called Legitimists, they envisioned a new alliance of Throne and Altar as a means to implement their social program.22
From 1852 to 1870, the period of the Second Empire, the Harmel family, as bona fide social Catholics, were ultramontane and Legitimist. Léon in particular looked to the pope as a partner in all his endeavors on behalf of the French workers. And since the pope resided in Rome, center of religious cosmology for Catholics, ultramontanism was not only something to support intellectually, but to feel physically, emotionally, and spiritually when visiting the papal city. The Harmels positively thrived on being in Rome. Walking its streets and smelling its air were tactile and emotional experiences that exhilarated, especially when their visits typically included a papal audience. In 1860, for example, Léon accompanied his seventy-year-old father to Rome, where the men had a private audience with Pius IX. Jacques-Joseph had been ill, and Léon wondered as they set out from Val if the excursion to Rome would prove foolhardy. To his delight, his father appeared rejuvenated by the Roman sojourn, adding to the sacredness of the city in the eyes of father and son. Perhaps because his father seemed to recover in Rome, Léon disclosed that the visit had been inspirational for him. It was then and there that he decided to organize pilgrimages to Rome.23 That the idea for the worker pilgrimages came to him while in Rome in 1860, years in advance of their occurrence, was in keeping with the notion that religious centers are loci of revelation.24 Rome would retain its sacredness for Léon Harmel; it was here that he was energized and inspired.
Léon’s commitment to the Bourbon pretender25 and to the throne of France was considerably more fragile than his commitment to the occupant of the Chair of St. Peter. He became one of the first to shake off the Legitimist chains once Leo XIII endorsed the republican form of government for the French in 1892. Nevertheless, as ardent Catholics living not too far from Reims, Léon and his family gravitated quite naturally to Legitimism. Reims was the geographic center and symbolic capital of Legitimism. According to tradition, when Clovis (466–511), king of the Franks, converted to Christianity, holy oil descended from heaven in a vial to be used at his baptismal ceremony. Because of the miracle, the holy oil was reserved for rightful kings of France; their legitimacy was tied to a miracle and a ceremonial anointment at Reims. Beginning in the twelfth century with Louis VIII, kings of France were anointed at their coronation ceremonies with a mixture of sacred chrism and holy oil from the vial.26 During the Hundred Years’ War, for example, Joan of Arc (1412–1431) escorted the Valois claimant to the throne of France from the Loire Valley to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims for his coronation and anointment. She persisted in calling him “dauphin” rather than “king” until the moment of legitimization,27 but once duly crowned and anointed at Reims, Joan, as well as most other French men and women, recognized Char...

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