PÉRIN, CHARLES-HENRY-XAVIER. - Economist, b. at Mons (Belgium) on 29 Aug. 1815, d. at Ghlin, near Mons, on 4 Apr. 1905. After practising law, he held the chair of economics at the Catholic University of Louvain from 1844 to 1881, which had been inaugurated ten years earlier by de Coux. He took an active part in the congresses of Catholic jurists and was the first Catholic economist.
From classical liberal economics he accepted the principle of freedom, but fought against its individualistic utilitarianism; he opposed the rising socialist school, fearing its power to absorb the human personality, and maintained that social progress should be founded upon “free popular associations” and the “protection of the higher classes through an intelligent and charitable patronage.” The keystone of progress was “the divine virtue, historically indefectible, of the Gospel and the Church.” Yet in the face of Rerum novarum his reservations and distrust of democracy vanished: while in 1890 he still proclaimed “ni libéraux, ni socialistes,” in his last book Premiers principes d'économie politique (1896) he echoed Leo’s teachings when he wrote: “We demand the solution of the labour question... from all the forces which the social organism offers us, from freedom and from public powers... If one is a socialist merely because one suppresses the freedom of evil and protects the weak by legal regulations against the injustice of the stronger, then Catholics are socialists...” (p. 40). He was the author and master of the democratic-Christian programme from its premises to long-range social reforms, and was no less convinced an advocate of short-term social reforms.
His principal works are: Les économistes, les socialistes et le christianisme (Paris 1849); De la richesse dans les sociétés chrétiennes (ibid. 1861, ’68, ’82); Les lois de la société chrétienne (ibid. 1875-76); Le socialisme chrétien (ibid. 1879); Les doctrines économiques depuis un siècle (ibid. 1880); Mélanges de politique et d'économie (ibid. 1883); L'Etat et l'Eglise dans la société internationale (Rapport au Congrès de Reims), in Revue catholique des institutions et du droit, 20 (1883), pp. 48-57; Du droit de propriété des personnes civiles, ibid., 2a serie, 3 (1889), pp. 313-322; Ni libéraux, ni socialistes (lettre), ibid., 2a serie, 5 (1890), pp. 463-70; L'ordre international (Paris 1888); L'économie politique d'après l'encyclique (ibid. 1891); Premiers principes d'économie politique (ibid. 1896).