Paternalism and Christian Corporation in Transnational Perspective: French and Brazilian Experiences (1890s-1910s)

• In Event: The formation of social classes

Abstract

The impact of the Catholic Church and its social teachings on policy, labour and industrial relations in the 19th and 20th centuries has been studied extensively from many different approaches. Historiography has mostly focused on how Catholic social teachings embraced the wage-dependent population of modern industrialized society. Industrialists were accordingly urged to reflect on their religious identity, their specific role(s) in modernizing society and mainly on their duties towards their workforce. However, literature focus on the strategies that entrepreneurs developed to socially stabilize and support their workforce and scholars have hardly paid attention to the ways in which industrial paternalism dialogued with the social, political but also ecclesiastical context. Lastly, the principal literature is normally focused on Western Europe, and any attention was given to transnational exchanges and transfers.
This paper analyses the transnational connection between two historical processes of paternalism to demonstrate how Catholic militant industrialists reflected on their religious identity and how it shaped their companies. Both in French and Brazilian cases, the model of bon patron Catholique gave the direction to organize the companies and the labour organization (recreational, mutualities, unions, and so on). This paper indicates how this connection was build and mainly how influential the French Léon Harmel was to the Brazilian's acting of Carlos Alberto de Menezes in the late nineteenth century and beginning of the 20th century. The issue of transnational and global history has received considerable critical attention and this paper intends to present some methodological debates on the subject as well.

Author

• Deivison Amaral