Pope Leo spotlights a pioneer of Catholic social doctrine

Léon Harmel was born in 1829 in La Neuville-lès-Wasigny, in the Ardennes region of France, and died in Nice in 1915. He was a leading figure in 19th-century French entrepreneurship. The textile industrialist left a mark on his era through the innovative organization of his factory in Val-des-Bois, near Reims. There, he sought to reconcile industrial efficiency, employer responsibility, and the principles of social Catholicism.

After inheriting his father’s factory, Harmel developed a set of initiatives in the 1860s to benefit working families. These included schools, assistance programs, insurance, and various forms of collective organization. Unwilling to settle for a merely paternalistic approach, he wanted to make workers into active participants in the company’s life rather than simple beneficiaries of an employer’s largesse.

Harmel was a devout believer and member of the Secular Franciscan Order (formerly known as the Franciscan Third Order). He believed that the issue of workers’ rights couldn’t be resolved by economic liberalism alone, nor by class warfare. In 1883, he established a factory council designed to involve workers in the administration and collective life of the factory.

This institution foreshadowed the works councils that would emerge decades later. It also laid the foundations for social and trade union dialogue that would be integrated into labor law in the following century.

Harmel was a close friend of Pope Leo XIII, and he began organizing pilgrimages to Rome for French workers in 1885. These trips helped communicate the aspirations of the working world directly to the supreme pontiff. Harmel’s experience fueled the reflections that accompanied the rise of the Church’s social doctrine.

This was particularly true regarding the relationship between capital, labor, and the organization of work. He is thus considered one of the inspirers of the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which traced a path for the Catholic Church to develop a new approach to the situation and rights of workers.

“Léon Harmel is the name that came to mind when I heard Leo XIV explain why he’d chosen this name, in continuity with Leo XIII, the pope of Rerum Novarum and of the Church’s social doctrine,” explains Ubaldo Casotto, the exhibition’s creator, in a video broadcast on the Rimini Meeting’s social networks.

The exhibition aims to help visitors discover this vision of a company as a place for the integral promotion of the human person.

The display opens with a video featuring period images, followed by panels presenting Harmel’s innovations. A loom built by students offers a concrete reminder of his industrial world. The final section is dedicated to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas, presented as the Rerum Novarum of the 21st century.

At the beginning of his pontificate, the Pontiff explained to the cardinals that he chose his name to align himself with the legacy of Leo XIII, knowing his own papacy would be marked by a new industrial revolution: artificial intelligence.