HARMEL, LÉON-PIERRE-LOUIS. - Catholic industrialist, implementer and promoter of social reforms, b. at Neuville-les-Wasigny (Ardenne) on 17 Feb. 1829, d. at Nice on 25 Nov. 1915. From 1854, taking over the management of the spinning mill that his father had founded in 1841 at Val-de-Jois near Reims, he sought to put into practice in his own industry those practical achievements that would impress upon the organization of the enterprise an associative and Christian character. Anticipating his time, he was convinced of the necessity of appealing, in the organization and assistance of the factory, to the spirit of initiative and cooperation of the workers rather than to authority and paternalism.
He experimented in his own industry at Val-de-Bois with a “Family Allowance Fund,” a “Mutual Aid Fund,” a “Centre for Social Studies”; he established a “Factory Council” with broad consultative functions; he built a workers’ village in which a democratic cooperative-type organization ensured workers religious, intellectual, and material assistance, binding them to the work environment and awakening their sense of responsibility.
Deeply religious, he became a Franciscan tertiary in 1860 and founded a confraternity of voluntary victims for the conversion of the working world. He publicly expounded his ideas at numerous congresses of the Workers’ Union and, consistent with his fundamental principle—the good of the work through the worker—he strove in every way to prepare French workers for their responsibilities and duties.
He collaborated with the “Workers’ Catholic Circles,” founded by A. de Mun (v.), though he later polemicized with him, disapproving 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 current organizations of Catholic employers derive. He organized pilgrimages of French workers to Rome in 1887, 1889, and 1891 and cooperated in the diffusion in France of the social principles of the encyc. Rerum novarum (1891). In the industrial milieu of his time, some accepted his ideas as a bulwark against the spread of extremist movements, while many criticized his organizational system and his trust in workers’ initiative and collaboration. The vitality of his principles was recognized only later: after the Second World War they formed the basis of Catholic social policy in industry.
Works: Manuel d'une corporation chrétienne (2nd ed.), Tours 1879; La démocratie chrétienne (ibid. 1897); Catechismo del padrone (trans. Masson, 2nd ed., Siena 1897).