Mounier, Emmanuel (1905-50). French thinker; the leading progressive Catholic intellectual of the 1930s and 1940s. Weaned on Bergson and Péguy, he abandoned academic philosophy in 1932 to direct the monthly review Esprit. His Personalism focused Catholic social doctrine on the human person as a whole, and facilitated Catholic participation in the Centre and Left of French politics. Under Vichy he published Esprit for a year and taught at Uriage until banned. Imprisoned for several months, he was subsequently decorated for his Resistance activities. Influential with Socialists and Christian Democrats, Mounier was an important participant in the intellectual debates of the post-war period, notably pioneering Catholic dialogue with Communists. Many of his views became commonplaces of modern Catholicism, but his Traité du caractère (1946) is still widely read, and Esprit remains an influential Left-Catholic review.
[Michael Kelly]
