Imagining the 'bon patron catholique'. Industrial entrepreneurs in Belgium and Northern France, and their apostolate of the factory (1870-1914)

This article highlights how during the last decades of the 19th century in the border-transcending industrial region of Belgium and Northern France a discourse community was created, subscribing to a more or less coherent normative framework on good Catholic employership. This model advocated the voluntary acceptance by entrepreneurs of an active social responsibility for the moral and material well-being of their workforce. In this article the main features of this imagined bon patron catholique are reconstructed. The remarkable involvement of the Jesuit Order in promoting and intellectually underpinning the entrepreneurial “apostolate of the factory” is demonstrated. Although the neologism “familialism” was sometimes used, this model has predominantly been labelled as paternalist and conservative. The intellectual and entrepreneurial elite that propagated it during the last decades of the 19th century only reluctantly embraced the emancipatory turn in Catholic social teachings initiated by Rerum novarum (1891). Nonetheless the model proved to be a durable component of multi-layered social Catholicism throughout the 20th century.status: publishe