Paul Bureau

Paul Émile Bureau

Paul Émile Bureau (5 October 1865 – 7 June 1923) was a French jurist and sociologist. Bureau was a disciple of Frédéric Le Play, adhering at first to the Social Science school led by Henri de Tourville, from which he later withdrew. He was interested in perfecting its method, treating social facts objectively on the condition that their character as psychological facts was respected. To the social factors considered by Tourville (geography, work), Bureau added worldview, thus avoiding sociological determinism and emphasizing the role of individual initiative in social development. Against Émile Durkheim, he refused to attribute to collective consciousness a reality anterior and superior to individual life. He prolonged the influence of Gabriel Tarde and prepared the way for Henri Bergson. For Bureau, sociology as a science was both necessary and insufficient. He proposed the necessity of the ordering of institutions from the point of view of the reform of morals, in a period in which the reconstruction of morality was sought by rationalism and positivism.

Biography

Paul Bureau was born in Elbeuf on 5 October 1865, at his parents' home, 28 Barrière street. His father, Louis Émile Bureau (1830–1898), who ran a large novelty shop there (5 employees), was around 35 years old at the time; his mother, Eugénie Caruette (1832–1907), had no profession and was almost 33. They were married in Dieppe on 17 April 1860. The two witnesses to the birth were friends, one aged 72, who lived in Dieppe, and the other, a 43-year-old gunsmith, who also lived in Barrière street.

He had only one older sister, Marie, who later entered the congregation of the Daughters of Charity. Suffering from pronounced scoliosis from the age of 2 ½, he bravely endured the various pieces of equipment designed to straighten his spine. He was often kept lying down; at school, he was later given a special desk to keep him upright instead. When he was about 10, his parents left Elbeuf and moved to Rouen. It has been written that Émile Bureau went bankrupt, but it seems more likely that it was the buyer of his Elbeuf shop who went bankrupt.

His disability did not prevent Bureau from studying, and doing so with increasing brilliance, paid for by his family, who must have been fairly well off. He enrolled at the famous Join-Lambert institution, a Catholic school in Rouen whose boarding facilities were located in Bois-Guillaume at the time. He obtained a baccalauréat in literature, but also a baccalauréat in science on his own initiative. He went on to study law at the University of Caen (Rouen was not yet a university town at the time), then from 1886 onwards at the Free Faculty of Law in Paris, where he was awarded two prizes (civil law and administrative law) in 1890, the same year he obtained his doctorate in law.

Thomas Moran, Chicago World's Fair (c. 1894)

He was exempted from military service "on the grounds of physical unfitness", as he was still suffering from his "scoliosis syphosis".

However, he travelled a great deal: in 1889, he set off to perfect his English and study educational practices across the Channel. Later, he embarked for the United States and visited the Universal Exhibition in Chicago (1893). He travelled to Belgium, Italy, Germany (where he had learnt the language), Norway and Tunisia.

At the age of 25, he joined the Dieppe Bar, no doubt because his family had moved there in the meantime: his father had become a marl quarry contractor. He rarely pleaded, but remained a member of the Bar until his death. He was elected to the Bar Council three times, most recently in 1913.

In 1896 Bureau married Marie Ernestine Bastard (1870–1943). The couple lived in Paris, where Bureau taught, but returned frequently to Dieppe, where they owned the villa Les Semailles, which was built according to his plans (and still exists) at 24 Rouen street (now Gambetta avenue).

Bureau taught at the Catholic Institute of Paris, founded in 1875 (at the Free Faculty of Law). Following the usual pattern, he was first a lecturer from 1891, then a substitute professor (at least from 1893), assistant professor in 1896 and full professor in 1902. In 1899, however, he signed a book as "Professor of Public International Law at the Catholic Institute of Paris". He taught there until his death. He also gave lectures at the École des Hautes Études Sociales from 1900, at the request of Alfred Croiset, a member of the Institute and Dean of the Paris Faculty of Letters. Later, in 1921 and 1922, the Sorbonne allowed him to give a free course in social sciences. He also took part in the first popular universities.

The author of numerous publications and a teacher who gave many courses, Paul Bureau was also an active lecturer before World War I, particularly in the Seine-Maritime region, in Dieppe, Rouen, Le Havre and Elbeuf, where he was invited by Abbé Charles Alleaume, superior of the Fénelon School, to give a talk on trade union issues.

In 1905, Fernand Portal, a Lazarist, and Lucien Laberthonnière, an Oratorian, joined forces with lay people such as Paul Bureau, Victor Giraud and Édouard Le Roy to form a Society for Religious Studies, which included a philosophy section led by Laberthonnière and a section on the union of the Christian Churches, led by Portal.

He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by decree on 20 September 1920, following a report by the Minister of Hygiene. The Minister stated that Paul Bureau "had been at the forefront of efforts to raise the birth rate in France and had redoubled his efforts during the war". The Minister also certified that "the investigation has shown that Mr Bureau's moral character allows him to be admitted to the Order of the Legion of Honour". The award was presented in Paris on 6 March 1921 by the man he himself had chosen (as was customary): his friend Henry Jandon, Officer of the Legion of Honour.

In the 1920s, Bureau lived at 83 Cherche-Midi street in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. But the preface to his last book, published in 1923, shortly before his death, was written in Dieppe, at his villa Les Semailles. He had remained very attached to the town. It is signed 30 September 1922. No doubt feeling that his end was near, he retraced and explained his career as a jurist and sociologist, from 1885 and his studies in Rouen.

Paul Bureau died at his home in Paris on 7 June 1923, aged just 57. His funeral was held in the chapel of the Catholic Institute and he was buried on 11 June 1923 in the Montrouge cemetery.

At the time of his death, a large number of obituaries appeared in the regional and national press. Nothing in L'Elbeuvien. However, another Elbeuvian newspaper, L'Impartial, wrote: "Not long ago, Mr Paul Bureau came here to give a remarkable lecture under the auspices of the Cercle Montalembert. Profoundly Christian, but very free in his judgements about people, he said boldly and straightforwardly what he believed to be right". Among the many judgements made in these articles, the following is particularly noteworthy: "an upright soul to the point of stiffness, an energetic heart to the point of harshness" (...) moral education, the raising of the birth rate and religious peace have all lost one of their staunchest defenders in him".

A street in Rouen bears his name. The centenary of his death was celebrated at Elbeuf town hall in 2023, in the presence of some of his descendants and Elbeuf mayor Djoudé Mérabet.

Private life

Paul Bureau married Marie Ernestine "Thérèse" Bastard (1870–1943), aged 31, on 18 March 1896 in Prissé-la-Charrière (Deux-Sèvres), the daughter of Louis Joseph "Maxime" Émé Bastard (1821–1907), a retired frigate captain and Officer of the Legion of Honour, and Marie-Thérèse Le Roux de Bretagne (1844–1925). The couple had ten children, but two of them died in infancy: Jean (1896–1981), Élisabeth (1897–1993), Jacques (1899–1899), Marie Monique Eugénie (1900–1971), Monique (1901–1911), Bernard (1903–1977), Félix (1905–1972), Robert (1907–1983), Édith (1909–1995) and Rémy (1912–1972).

Thought

Paul Bureau became a disciple of Le Play, following a decisive meeting with Abbé Henri de Tourville and Edmond Demolins, who had founded the journal La science sociale in 1886. In 1893, he published a remarkable study on the decline in income. Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882), engineer, economist and sociologist, was the founder of the "social economy". His method was based on case studies and highly detailed monographs. Based on field surveys and interviews, he described lifestyles (housing, family status, income) and behaviour in great detail. Similarly, Bureau constantly showed a taste for real-life experience and on-the-spot investigation, whether in his analysis of the Elbeuf strikes, English situations or the study of Norwegian peasants, The Peasant of the Fjords (1906).

"This engaging and complex personality became involved with pugnacity (a trait of his gruff character)" in the major debates of the Third Republic: relations between employers and workers and the trade union question, the separation of Church and State, the expulsion of religious congregations, the fight against falling birth rates and depopulation. One of his biographers described him as a "Catholic Alceste", in reference to Molière's Misanthrope.

Bust of Le Play, by L. Rousseau (1879)

A commited Catholic, he never ceased to engage in dialogue with other religions, particularly at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. He stood by the Dreyfusards, criticising conservative circles that allowed anti-Semitism to develop, and was one of the two hundred or so signatories who declared themselves Dreyfusards to the Catholic Committee for the Defence of the Law. He also supported the creation of the Human Rights League, even though it was very anti-clerical. This earned him many very violent attacks from Catholic periodicals. On the other hand, he fought fiercely with socialist circles and even more so with freethought. While he did not consider the separation of Church and State to be a catastrophe, he was indignant at the expulsion of congregations. He strongly opposed Monsignor Baudrillart at the time of the modernist crisis in 1907.

In his book La crise morale des temps nouveaux, he denounced the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and the working class, collective dishonesty (in elections, in parliament, in the unions), the cowardice of the laity, Catholics and priests, the excesses of young people, etc. He dismissed both "the children of the new spirit" and "the children of tradition" (who had learned nothing and understood nothing). The historian Henri Hauser pointed out, however, that such evils can be observed in every era. This book caused quite a stir and was condemned in Paris, but also in Rome.

His book Le Contrat de Travail. Le Rôle des Syndicats Professionnels (1902) is devoted to the strikes that took place in Elbeuf in 1900 in the textile and stearin factories of Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf. Using the method of Le Play, he made a detailed study of local working life (wages, housing, families) and the methods of action used by the workers and bosses. He deplored the absence of protective collective labour contracts and the lack of legal organisation of the unions, compared with the English Trade Unions.

Comparing the situation in England and France, he describes at length the strikes of 1900, which he experienced at close quarters. He sought to demonstrate that the absence of strong trade union organisation led to spontaneous and anarchic demands that came to nothing. Instead, he advocated the role of responsible "English-style" unions, capable of channelling and structuring movements and responding to expectations, while limiting the duration of production stoppages. Similarly, bosses who made separate arrangements with their workers without worrying about the repercussions on their colleagues led to a proliferation of "piecemeal" strikes (around forty in all). For Bureau, this lack of workers' or employers' cohesion was the result of a lack of "economic education" and led to an increase in social conflicts that could have been avoided.

Portrait of Thomas Robert Malthus by John Linnell (1834)

Bureau did not postulate his religious positions in his analyses. His "structural" probity led him to denounce anything that might appear to be an artifice, a compromise, when tackling the great debates of the Third Republic. Breaking away from the Manichaeisms of his time, and convinced of the complexity of the societal issues present in these debates, he endeavoured to highlight the conflicts and impasses into which life could lead anyone. For him, such questions had to be approached from above, as the only way to ensure coherence in the actions that mark our journey. This conviction is expressed in his Introduction to the Sociological Method: "Every human life is the lived translation of a conscious or unseen metaphysics".

It was not enough for him to place religion as the surest foundation of morality, thereby opposing "free thinkers who, the better to found the purely human constitution of society, refuse to consider religious sentiment as a social factor". He also denounced what he saw as the manipulation of religion by "Catholics who have too often become the defenders of a libertarian, anarchic individualism that destroys social life". He also felt it necessary to state loud and clear what was at the root of his struggles: in a public session at the Sorbonne, in the presence of President Raymond Poincaré, at the inaugural meeting of the French League for Moral Education, he affirmed his Catholic faith and his submission to the dogmas and authority of the Church, stating: "It seemed to me that I did not have the right to see with such complacency what could divide us and to forget with such ease what could unite us". This statement was very much in line with his main theme, "What good is apparent security compared with a step towards the truth?"

Bureau, who set an example by having fathered ten children himself — which was very rare at the time in the intellectual circles of the Parisian middle class — devoted the rest of his life to defending the birth rate and the family. France, marked by a strong Malthusianism since the end of the eighteenth century, which had caused it to lose its primacy in Europe, recorded more deaths than births in certain years. The slaughter of young men during the First World War further accentuated this decline, in the face of a German empire that was, on the contrary, booming demographically. People began to talk of depopulation, of a disaster comparable to that of Sedan, and even of national suicide. Bureau chaired the association Pour la Vie (For Life), a "league for the recovery of the French birth rate", whose offices were located at the 6th arrondissement of Paris, in the 1920s. He was also director of the journal Pour la Vie, published by his association.

A member of the Higher Council for the Birth Rate, he was also general rapporteur at the National Congress of Birth Rate organised in Nancy in September 1919 and again rapporteur at the National Congress of Birth Rate, organised in Rouen by the local Chamber of Commerce from 23 to 26 September 1920, under the chairmanship of the Minister of Commerce and Industry. A friend of Marc Sangnier, Bureau was also President of the League for the Promotion of Public Morality, Vice-President of the League for Moral Education and a member of the Board of Directors of the Union of Franco-American households.

A fellow of the French Eugenics Society, which aimed to regenerate the human species by improving moral, economic and environmental conditions, he was part of the French delegation at the 1st International Eugenics Conference in London in 1912.

During his lifetime, Paul Bureau had acquired a real reputation, not least because of the many intellectual polemics in which he was involved and the many associations in which he actively participated. During the interwar period, his writings were still often cited and still influenced the social Catholic movement. Nevertheless, it has to be said that he was soon criticised by sociologists. After 1945, his work suffered the same fate as that of the Leplaysian movement as a whole: oblivion, even contempt. Only supporters of Durkheim, with whom he had become somewhat closer towards the end of his life, continued to see him as "the best representative of Le Playsian social science".

See also

• Social Catholicism
• Society of Catholic Worker Circles
• Jacques Valdour

Works

Main article: Paul Bureau bibliography

He published numerous works on law and "political economy", a dozen of which have been digitised and republished by the National Library of France and Librairie Hachette. It is not possible to cite, or even find, all the articles (probably more than a hundred, perhaps even more) published by this tireless writer in a wide variety of journals. The Journal des finances regularly announced that it was published "with his collaboration". It contains many articles by Paul Bureau, as do several other newspapers. These articles were often reprinted and commented on in other newspapers. He also gave many lectures in Paris and the provinces.

References

Audren, Frédéric (2005). "Découvrir Paul Bureau et la science sociale," Les Études Sociales, No. 141, pp. 3–7.

Audren, Frédéric (2005). "Sociologie, action sociale et morale catholique chez Paul Bureau," Les Études Sociales, No. 141, pp. 9–88.

Barbier, Emmanuel (1908). Les Démocrates chrétiens et le modernisme. Nancy: E. Drioton/Paris: P. Lethielleux.

Barbier, Emmanuel (1923). Histoire du Catholicisme Libéral et du Catholicisme Social en France: du Concile du Vatican à l'avènement de S.S. Benoît XV: 1870-1914, Vol. 4. Bordeaux: Y. Cadoret.

Chaline, Nadine-Josette (1985). Des catholiques normands sous la Troisième République. Le Coteau: Éditions Horvath.

Cova, Anne (1997). Maternité et droits des femmes en France: XIXe-XXe siècles. Paris: Anthropos.

Davy, Georges (1950). Sociologues d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

De Luca Barrusse, Virginie (2009). "La revanche des familles nombreuses: les premiers jalons d’une politique familiale (1896-1939)," Revue d'histoire de la protection sociale, Vol. II, No. 1, pp. 47–63.

Gemähling, Paul (1923). "Paul Bureau," Revue d’économie politique, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, pp. 575–77.

Gwynn, Denis (1922). "The Problem of the French Birth-rate," The Dublin Review, Vol. CLXX, No. 340, pp. 63–77.

Largesse, Pierre (2016). "Paul Bureau (1865-1923), un Elbeuvien méconnu," Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire d’Elbeuf, No. 66, pp. 17–27.

Legrand, Georges (1927). Les grands courants de la Sociologie catholique à l'heure présente. Paris: Spes.

Lenoir, Remi (1999). "La question familiale: Familialisme d'Église, familialisme d'État," French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. XVII, No. 3/4, pp. 75–100.

Mclaren, Angus (1983). Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770–1920. New York: Holmes and Meier.

Méline, Pierre (1932). Paul Bureau. Paris: Bloud & Gay.

Robcis, Camille (2013). "Familialism and the Republican Social Contract." In: The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 17–60.

Roberts, Mary Louise (1994). Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Savoye, Antoine (1981). "Les continuateurs de Le Play au tournant du siècle," Revue française de sociologie, Vol. XXII, No. 3, pp. 315–44.

Savoye, Antoine; Bernard Kalaora (1989). Les Inventeurs oublies: Le Play et continuateus aux origines des sciences sociales. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.

Savoye, Antoine (2020). "Durkheim vu par les collectifs leplaysiens (1893–1926)," Durkheimian Studies / Études Durkheimiennes, Vol. XXIV, pp. 99–120.

Talmy, Robert (1962). Histoire du mouvement familial en France, 1896–1939. Paris: UNCAF.

External links

• Works by Paul Bureau at JSTOR
• Works by Paul Bureau at Gallica
• Works by Paul Bureau at Open Library