PICCOLI FRATELLI DI MARIA (FRATELLI MARISTI DELLE SCUOLE). — A male lay institute whose purpose is the instruction and education of youth in boarding schools and schools, founded by the ven. Champagnat (v.) in 1817.
Under the reign first of Louis XVIII and then of Charles X, the Brothers, whom the people called Bleur because of the color of their first habit, and later Marists because of the special devotion that the new Institute professed toward Mary Most Holy, became increasingly established. After the school at La Valla, schools were founded at Marlhes, St-Saveur, Bourg Argentat, and elsewhere in the Loire region, and the formation center was transferred from La Valla to l'Hermitage, about 3 km from St-Chamond. During the anticlerical and revolutionary unrest of 1850, when religious abandoned their clerical habit and went into hiding, Champagnat instead carried out the clothing ceremony for the postulants and ordered that every morning the Salve Regina be sung, a practice that still opens the day of the Marist Brothers today. But as early as 1831 the Institute crossed the borders of the Loire and established itself in the Dauphiné; in 1836 in Burgundy, in 1838 in the north of France and in other departments. In June 1840, at Champagnat’s death, the P. F. di M. numbered 280 in 47 houses, with 7,000 pupils.
Under his immediate successor, Brother Francis (1840–60), the Institute achieved such development that it absorbed similar institutions, such as the Brothers of Christian Instruction (1842) and the Brothers of Vivier (1844). After the Falloux Law of 1850, official recognition of the Institute was deemed indispensable; this was obtained that same year by decree of the President of the Republic. In 1858 the general administration was transferred from l'Hermitage to the new headquarters at St-Genis-Laval in the suburbs of Lyon. Brother Francis also deserves credit for having collected and printed in 1853 the Guide to the Schools, the pedagogical and didactic code sketched out by Champagnat. Rome issued the decree of praise on 9 December 1859 and definitive approval on 9 January 1863. After this the Institute continued its expansion throughout the world despite the persecutions in Mexico and those of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which no fewer than 172 P. F. di M. fell.
Such vigorous development was due to the methods introduced by Champagnat, namely: a) a spiritual teaching method, habituating children to the thought of God’s presence and to maternal love for Mary; b) a pedagogical method that creates fraternity between teachers and pupils, making the school a large family from which punitive corporal measures were absolutely banished from the outset. The fusion of the methods then in existence into the simultaneous-mutual method, the adoption for reading of the phonetic system in place of the syllabic system (1828), the introduction of singing lessons as a subject of instruction, the preventive method and the activist method of « formation-action », used in the formation of the Brothers for their educational mission, were genuine innovations due to Champagnat. Another characteristic feature of the Marist Brothers is the development among them of the missionary spirit. It may be said that this zeal initially kept Marist Fathers and Brothers united, to such an extent that they set out together for Oceania as early as 1836. Brother Hyacinthe was the Institute’s first martyr (1847). The missions in Oceania were followed by those in the Cape Colony (1867), the foundation at Sydney (1873), those of New Caledonia and New Zealand (1876), Samoa and Fiji (1888), and above all China (1891), where four Marist Brothers were killed in Peking in 1900, five in Nantchang in 1906, and the last was killed by the communists on 21 April 1951. The missions of the Belgian Congo, Madagascar, Ceylon, Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the more recent ones in the Philippines, Malaysia, Mozambique, and Japan are also flourishing. The Institute is now divided into 31 provinces, with 719 schools or colleges, and numbers 12,728 members, including those in formation, with 220,000 pupils.