LORIN, HENRI. — French Catholic sociologist, born in 1858, died in Paris on 19 November 1914. He devoted himself to the Work of Catholic Workers’ Circles, founded after the war of 1870–71 under the impulse of the Comte de Mun and the Marquis de la Tour du Pin; he subsequently extended his collaboration to the International Catholic Union for Economic and Social Studies and to the International Association for the Legal Protection of Workers. Particularly noteworthy was his contribution to the firm establishment of the «Semaines sociales de France». For a certain period (1905–13), he was almost its embodiment, as president and principal speaker.
He combined spiritual vigour, logical power, firmness of conviction, boldness of outlook, and at the same time a kind of enthusiasm, warmth, and healthy optimism that uplifted the whole soul. He undertook to publish his essays relatively late; they remained rather fragmentary. Among other things, he insisted on the importance of fraternity in the Catholic doctrine of society; on the profession as a natural grouping, at once organized and assigned its proper place among institutions; on democracy within the profession itself; and on the dynamism of the trade-union idea. His method is scientific in its procedure, because, before judging and reforming facts, they must be known with perfect objectivity in the means of observation; and it is Catholic in its inspiration, because there would be no point in knowing facts if they were not then to be judged and, after judgment, rectified through appropriate action in conformity with Christianity.
Of L. V. especially the Comptes rendus of the Semaines sociales (Paris, 1905 ff.); Le mouvement syndical ouvrier et catholiques sociaux (there, 1903); L'organisation professionnelle et le code du travail. Études sur les principes du catholicisme social (there, 1907); L'idée individualiste et l'idée chrétienne. Étude sur le fondement du droit chrétien (there, 1910). Several selected pages in the Anthologie du catholicisme social en France (by J. Megret and P. Badin [there, 1948], pp. 141–50).