HARMEL, LÉON-PIERRE-LOUIS. - Catholic industrialist, implementer and advocate of social reforms, b. at Neuville-les-Wesigny (Ardennes) on 17 Feb. 1829, d. at Nice on 25 Nov. 1915. From 1854, on taking over the management of the spinning mill that his father had founded in 1841 at Val-de-Bois, near Reims, he sought to bring about in his own industry those practical achievements that would impress upon the organization of the enterprise an associative and Christian character. Anticipating his times, he was convinced of the need to appeal, in the organization and the welfare work of the factory, to the spirit of initiative and cooperation of the workers, rather than to authority and paternalism.
In his own industry at Val-de-Bois he experimented with a "Family Allowances Fund," a "Mutual Aid Fund," a "Center for Social Studies"; he implemented the "Factory Council" with broad consultative functions; he built a workers' village in which a democratic organization of the cooperative type ensured the workers religious, intellectual and material assistance, bringing them into harmony with the working environment and awakening their sense of responsibility.
Profoundly religious, he was a Franciscan tertiary from 1860 and founded a confraternity of voluntary victims for the conversion of the working world. He publicly set out his ideas at numerous congresses of the Workers' Union and, consistent with his fundamental principle — the good of the worker through the worker — he strove in every way to prepare French workers for their responsibilities and their tasks.
He collaborated with the "Work of Catholic Workers' Circles," founded by A. de Mun (v.), with whom however he later polemicized, not approving of its pronounced paternalism and seeking to steer the work toward more democratic ideas. He gave life to the important "Catholic Association of Industrialists of the North," from which all present-day organizations of Catholic employers derive. He organized pilgrimages of French workers to Rome in 1887, 1889 and 1891 and cooperated in spreading in France the social principles of the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). In the industrial milieu of his time some accepted his ideas as a bulwark against the spread of extremist movements, while quite a few criticized his organizational system and his trust in the initiative and collaboration of the workers. The vitality of his principles was recognized only later: after the Second World War they lie at the basis of the Catholic social policy of the enterprise.
Works: Manuel d'une corporation chrétienne (2nd ed., Tours 1879); La démocratie chrétienne (ibid. 1897); Catechismo del padrone (trans. Masson, 2nd ed., Siena 1897).
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Francesca Duchini