He devoted his life to the well-being of his workers, materially, culturally, and spiritually, and rightly earned their admiration and respect.

Léon Harmel: Pioneer of the Just Wage

by Christopher O. Blum

You could call the nineteenth century stupid, but hardly dull. At its birth, it was the stage for Napoleon’s antics and for the heroism of the captains of wooden ships; at its death, the old Europe itself was giving way before the hard, cold era of aluminum, centralized planning, and the IRS. Sure, it was an age that liked its gauzy paintings and dolled-up houses, but this Victorian sentimentality can be understood as a kind of by-product, a clinging to comforting certainties amidst seismic changes. “To live is to change,” Newman once said, “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Of the many innovations of the nineteenth century, the least equivocal were in engineering, the most in the arts and philosophy. Thanks to Michael Faraday, among others, we have electric lights. Thanks to Beethoven and Nietzsche, among others, we have rock music and deconstructionism. Much harder to think through are the century’s innovations in the world of human organization and social life. In the wake of World War II, it was common for Catholics to view the nineteenth-century nation-state as a kind of political heresy. Today, however, some pine for the good old days of nationalism, seeing it as at least preferable to the etherized dreams and painful mandates of the world-planners.

Buried deep within that confusing world of nineteenth-century political and economic organization is a man who, when remembered at all, is filed away as a conservative or a reactionary—and perhaps with some cause—but who by temperament and achievement should be lauded as a healthy innovator. He was the modern re-inventor of the family wage, Léon Harmel, owner of the woolen mill at Val-des-Bois.

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