Peter Maurin's Green Revolution

Peter Maurin’s Green Revolution Francis J. Sicius I am a peasant,” Peter Maurin used to declare, “ I have roots.” Peter Maurin, from outer appearance seemed to be a simple man, but he had profound ideas about the world in which he lived. Although he died in 1949, his vision and critique of society and community continue to resonate in the contemporary world. Maurin was born in 1877 in the small hamlet of Oultet in the Province of Languedoc in France. His home was twenty-five kilometers from the cathedral town of Mende, which housed a black Madonna, the devotional focus of the community for centuries. Oultet, which sits atop a mountain that rises above the Lot River, is today home to approximately twenty-five families, eighteen of which have the last name Maurin. At the foot of the mountain is a church and in the yard leading up to the entrance is a cemetery where the remains of generations of the Maurin family rest. The family continues to this day farming the land surrounding Oultet. Peter Maurin certainly had, as he said, “roots.” But when Maurin spoke of his ancestry he was referring to more than family and land. Maurin also possessed deep intellectual roots whose seeds germinated when he entered the Christian Brothers monastery as a young boy. As a member of this religious order, Maurin learned techniques of pedagogy that would remain a distinctive characteristic for the rest of his life. The Christian Brothers also gave him a firm grounding in theology that would serve as the intellectual bedrock for his ever evolving ideas of society and community. After nine years, Maurin left the order and immersed himself in the intellectual ferment of turn-of-the-century Paris. There, a great struggle raged between those who believed a new more harmonious order, void of class conflict, could emerge if capital and land were put under the control of the true producers of wealth, the workers, and if capitalists as well as those institutions that gave them comfort, such as the Catholic Church, could be eliminated. In opposition to this argument stood those who saw the Catholic Church as providing the social cement that could unite a community being torn asunder by the centripetal forces of the new industrial revolution. Maurin was attracted to the latter. He joined a group of young social activists who marched under the banner of Le Sillon (the furrow). Led by Marc Sangnier, this movement of young Catholic intellectuals and activists had become an important voice in French social and political thought in turn-of-the-century France. Le Sillon 1 “ traced its inspiration to the publication in January 1894 of a literary monthly entitled and addressed to the Younger Generation. The editors characterized their era as one in which the “older generation [i.e the socialists] had destroyed traditional beliefs leaving behind only confusion.” Urging a new renaissance, the magazine called on the younger generation to put aside “all sterile agitation and gather, modest but resolute , humble but confident, like the grain which lies in the winter furrow and ripens in silence the summer harvest which is to follow.”1 Shortly after reading this challenge , Sangnier was moved to organize a series of student meetings to discuss social problems and what actions young people could take to alleviate them. At the first meeting, Sangnier declared, “We should form a common soul and prepare ourselves together in a vigil of arms for a life dedicated to the people and to Christ.”2 Born in 1873 in Paris, Sangnier grew up around families much like his own, wealthy and devoutly Catholic. At twenty-three, Sangnier was a bulky figure with a large head, blue eyes, and a drooping blond mustache. What was remarkable about him was his capacity for inspiring a fanatical devotion in almost everyone with whom he came into contact. Apparently Maurin came under his spell for a while, and in the early 1900s he dedicated five years of his life to attending Sillon meetings and selling their periodical on the street. The inherent power that emerges from fervently 2 U.S. Catholic Historian 1. Charles Breunig, “The Sillon of Marc Sangnier...