Emmanuel Mounier
French philosopher, theologian, teacher and essayist
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Through Post-war
Biography
Mounier was the guiding spirit in the French personalist movement, and founder and director of Esprit, the magazine which was the organ of the movement. He was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne. In 1929, when he was only twenty-four, he came under the influence of the French writer Charles Péguy, to whom he ascribed the inspiration of the personalist movement. Mounier's personalism became a main influence of the non-conformists of the 1930s.
Peter Maurin used to say wherever he went, "There is a man in France called Emmanuel Mounier. He wrote a book called The Personalist Manifesto. You should read that book."
He taught at the Lycée du Parc at Lyon and at the Lycee Français Jean Monnet at Brussels.
Although Mounier was critical of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, he has been criticized by the historian Tony Judt, among others, for his failure to condemn the excesses of Stalinism in the postwar period.
In 1939, Mounier commented in a restrained manner on the newly elected Pope Pius XII remaining silent on the Italian invasion of Albania. Thus, Mounier has contributed to the debate about Pope Pius XII's controversial stance on the Holocaust.