At the Société des lettres, Jean-François Salles delivered an exciting conference on Tuesday 12 April.
History engulfs leading personalities every day, values of example and humanism, who deserve statues. Sometimes, by chance, a more curious and motivated soul comes to reveal them to the rest of men. This is what Jean-François Salles did by publishing, last November, in the editions of L’Ours de granit, Peter Maurin called it the Green Revolution. The author gave an exciting conference on Tuesday, April 12, at the Consular House in Mende.
We knew the administrator of the Society of Letters, a teacher in physical education and sports. We have known him for a long time as an outstanding photographer in Lozère, author of several images and reference works. He had hidden his talents as a historical investigator and writer. No doubt the fact that Pierre Maurin (1877-1949), a native of Oultet on the northern slope of Mont Lozère, went through the Saint-Privat college, in Mende, from 1891, was an element triggering for Jean-François Salles. They have the Lasallian culture in common. It was still necessary to carry out the investigation and return it to the Lozériens who know nothing about this exceptional layman, the eldest of a family of 24 children, who had a horror of war and weapons, and who was the first to recommend “a green and sustainable revolution, the only way to avoid the Red Revolution”. When Peter died in New York in 1949, from Times, in the United States, at The Osservatore Romano, in Italy, everyone devoted their headlines to the disappearance of this holy man while The Cross of Lozère made only an obituary mention of it, but that the Société des Lettres did not forget it in its bulletin.
Americans in Lozère
Born into a family of modest farmers, he was briefly a teacher in Paris before embarking in 1909 across the Atlantic from where he never returned. After two years as a farmer in Canada, he was a lumberjack, a miner in the United States, teaching in Chicago in 1917. But soon this Saint Francis of modern times arrived in New York to put himself at the service of the poorest. His meeting with the American journalist Dorothy Day, who soon converted to Catholicism, made him her mentor. She will become one of the four major American figures of the 20th century in the process of being beatified by Pope Francis. The rest of the life of this humanist duo then continues to implement the Catholic Worker Movement, with the newspaper of the same name which draws up to 250,000 copies, to the houses of hospitality throughout the country and the world which host and feed thousands of poor (today there are 249, in America, Africa, Europe, Australia), on farms that bear the name of Peter Maurin…
As long as he could, the remarkable orator accustomed to New York parks multiplied his trips and conferences across the United States, advocating reasonable agriculture that respects nature. More than eighty books, theses, documentaries have been devoted to him across the Atlantic, all in English. There was nothing in France and in French, while several Americans came to Oultet to see his birthplace in the depths of Lozère, sometimes guided by Jean-François Salles.
An edifying conference of great interest to bring back, in a news marked by productivism, selfishness, overexploitation of the soil, the memory of a Lozère precursor unknown here. For that, another Lozère was needed. It is now done.
–
