Marcel Légaut, the precursor

A university conference recently paid tribute to a somewhat erased figure in the French Catholic landscape of the 20th century. This is Marcel Légaut (1900-1990) who, long before others, sensed the need to return to the land.

The man came from far away, however: a Parisian and normal resident of rue d’Ulm, he decided, with his wife, after their marriage in 1940, to voluntarily go into exile in the Drôme countryside. In these dark years of the war and then the post-war, when the exodus of rural people towards the city began to herald another world.

His writings, dense and surprisingly little politically engaged, are inhabited by a vibrant spiritual quest around the figure of Christ. Because for him, Jesus is indeed, through his incarnation, a universal link between this poor rural world which, from Palestine to Drôme, forms the same humans, rooted, capable of working the land, attentive to others, and capable of God. “I thought I was a man,” admits Légaut. I was just a cerebral person. »

While teaching his discipline in Lyon, the mathematics teacher became a shepherd and farmer on demanding and austere lands. With others, he formed a think tank which would serve as an “open-air monastery” to reintegrate “nature and its laws” into his existence. A “submission to reality” which resembles many current realizations. Marcel Légaut was not yet an ecologist. But already he aimed for an integral life.