LÉON HARMEL, THE PROPHECY OF AN ENTERPRISE

The French industrialist Léon Harmel (1829–1915) is recognized by historians as the first to have anticipated and put into practice the teachings of the social doctrine of the Church. In the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution, Harmel found the condition of workers and their families intolerable, describing the poverty he witnessed as “the horrible wound that devours society.”

Well before Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), he introduced into his factory innovations that were unimaginable for the time. A friend of the pontiff, from 1885 onwards he organized workers’ pilgrimages to Rome (the one in 1891 was attended by 20,000 people). Experiences such as Harmel’s, and that of nineteenth-century social Catholicism more broadly, document a movement already underway, one that found in the encyclical a multiplier of energy and intelligence.

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Exhibition produced by Fondazione Meeting per l’amicizia fra i popoli ETS

Exhibition promoted by Fondazione Costruiamo il Futuro e Compagnia delle Opere

Curated by Ubaldo Casotto, journalist and scientific director of Fondazione Costruiamo il Futuro; Francesco Cassese, Change Management Consultant

Supported by Intesa Sanpaolo, Ars Aedificandi