Abbé Pierre (born Henri Marie Joseph Grouès; (5 August 191222 January 2007) was a French Catholic priest. He was a member of the Resistance during World War II and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement. In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor and homeless people. For several decades, he was one of the most popular public figures in France. Allegations that he had sexually abused dozens of women, as well as several underage girls, emerged in 2024 and 2025.
Youth and education Grouès was born on 5 August 1912 in Lyon, France to a wealthy Catholic family of silk traders, the fifth of eight children. The writer and murderer Héra Mirtel was one of his aunts. He spent his childhood in Irigny, near Lyon. He was twelve when he met François Chabbey and went for the first time with his father to an Order circle, the brotherhood of the "Hospitaliers veilleurs" in which the mainly middle-class members would serve the poor by providing barber services.
Grouès became a member of the Scouts de France in which he was nicknamed "Meditative Beaver" (Castor méditatif). In 1928, aged 16, he made the decision to join a monastic order, but he had to wait until he was seventeen and a half to fulfill this ambition. In 1931, Grouès entered the Capuchin Order, renouncing his inheritance and offering all his possessions to charity.
Known as frère Philippe (Brother Philippe), he entered the monastery of Crest in 1932, where he lived for seven years and was ordained a priest on 24 August 1938. He had to leave in 1939 after developing severe lung infections, which made monastic life difficult. He became a chaplain to the sick at several places and then was made curate of Grenoble's cathedral in April 1939.
The theologian Henri de Lubac told him on the day of his priestly ordination: "Ask the Holy Spirit to grant you the same anti-clericalism of the saints".
World War II When World War II broke out in 1939, he was mobilised as a non-commissioned officer in the train transport corps. According to his official biography, he helped Jewish people to escape Nazi persecution following the July 1942 mass arrests in Paris, called the Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv, and another raid in the area of Grenoble in the non-occupied zone: "In July 1942, two fleeing Jews asked him for help. Having discovered the persecution taking place, he immediately went to learn how to make false passports. Starting in August 1942, he guided Jewish people to Switzerland".
His pseudonym dates from his work with the French Resistance during the Second World War, when he operated under several different names. Based in Grenoble, an important center of the Resistance, he helped Jews and politically persecuted escape to Switzerland.Abbé Pierre, the conscience of France, dies at the age of 94 , The Scotsman, 23 January 2007 In 1942, he assisted Jacques de Gaulle (the brother of Charles de Gaulle) and his wife escape to Switzerland.
He participated in establishing a section of the maquis where he officially became one of the local leaders in the Vercors Plateau and in the Chartreuse Mountains. He helped people to avoid being taken into the Service du travail obligatoire (STO), the Nazi forced-labour program agreed upon with Pierre Laval, by creating in Grenoble the first refuge for resistants to the STO; he founded the clandestine newspaper .L'insurgé de la bonté, L'Humanité, 23 January 2007 In Le Mondes obituary, in English: "ABBÉ PIERRE, FOUNDER OF EMMAÜS, IS DEAD" , 23 January 2007 (original article here ) For a time, in 1943, he was given shelter by Lucie Coutaz, a Resistance member who later became his secretary and was his assistant in his charity work until her death in 1982.
He was arrested twice, once in 1944 by the Nazi police in the town of Cambo-les-Bains in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, but was quickly released and travelled to Spain then Gibraltar before joining the Free French Forces of General de Gaulle in Algeria. In the Free North Africa, he became a chaplain in the French Navy on the battleship Jean Bart in Casablanca. He had become an important symbol of the French Resistance.
Political career (1945–1951) and the 1960s–1970s When the war was over, following de Gaulle's entourage's advice and the approbation of the archbishop of Paris, Abbé Pierre was elected deputy for Meurthe-et-Moselle department in both National Constituent Assemblies in 1945–1946 as an independent close to the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), mainly consisting of Christian democratic members of the Resistance. In 1946, he was re-elected as a member of the National Assembly, but this time as a member of the MRP. Abbé Pierre became vice-president of the World Federalist Movement in 1947, a universal federalist movement.
After a bloody accident resulting in the death of a blue-collar worker, Édouard Mazé, in Brest in 1950, Henri Antoine Grouès decided to put an end to his MRP affiliation on 28 April 1950, writing a letter titled "Pourquoi je quitte le MRP" ("Why I'm leaving the MRP"), where he denounced the political and social attitude of the MRP party. He then joined the Christian socialist movement named Ligue de la jeune République, created in 1912 by Marc Sangnier, but decided to finally end his political career. In 1951, before the end of his mandate, he returned to his first vocation: helping the homeless. With the modest funds he had received as a deputy, he invested in a run-down house near Paris in the Neuilly-Plaisance neighbourhood, repairing the whole house. He made it the first Emmaus base (because, according to him, it was simply too big for one person).
Although the priest had left representative politics, preferring to invest his energies in the Emmaus charity movement, he never completely abandoned the political field, taking strong stances on many and various subjects. Thus, when the decolonization movement was slowly beginning to emerge in the whole world, he attempted in 1956 to convince Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba to obtain independence without using violence. Present in various international conferences at the end of the 1950s, he met Colombian priest Camilo Torres (1929–1966), a predecessor of Liberation theology, who asked for his advice on the Colombian Church's criticism of "workers' priests". He was also received by US president Eisenhower and Mohammed V of Morocco in 1955 and 1956. In 1962, he resided for several months in Charles de Foucauld's retreat in Béni-Abbés (Algeria).
Abbé Pierre was then called to India in 1971 by Jayaprakash Narayan to represent, along with the Ligue des droits de l'homme (Human Rights League) France in the issues of refugees. Indira Gandhi then invited him to deal with the question of Bengali refugees, and Grouès founded Emmaus communities in Bangladesh.
Emmaus
1949: the origin Emmaus (Emmaüs in French) was started in 1949. Its name is a reference to a village in Palestine appearing in the Gospel of Luke, where two disciples extended hospitality to Jesus just after his resurrection without recognizing him. In that way, Emmaus's mission is to help poor and homeless people. It is a secular organization. In 1950 the first community of Emmaus companions was created in Neuilly-Plaisance close to Paris in France. The Emmaus community raises funds for the construction of housing by selling used goods. "Emmaus, it's a little like the wheelbarrow, the shovels and the pickaxes coming before the banners. A sort of social fuel derived from salvaging defeating men".Albine Novarino. (2007) L'abbé Pierre: Citations (French) Paris: Huitième Jour Editions.
Winter 1954: "Uprising of kindness"
Grouès became famous during the extremely cold winter of 1954 in France, when homeless people were dying in the streets. Following the failure of the projected law on lodgings, he gave a well-remembered speech on Radio Luxembourg on 1 February 1954, and asked Le Figaro, a conservative newspaper, to publish his call, in which he stated soberly that "a woman froze to death tonight at 3:00 AM, on the pavement of Sebastopol Boulevard, clutching the eviction notice which the day before had made her homeless". He went on to describe the drama of homeless life, claiming that in "every town in France, in every quarter of Paris" ministry was needed based on "these simple words: 'If you suffer, whoever you are, enter, eat, sleep, recover hope, here you are loved.l'Appel de l'Abbé Pierre
The next morning, the press wrote of an "uprising of kindness" () and the now-famous call for help ended up raising 500 million francs in donations (Charlie Chaplin gave 2 million). This enormous amount was totally unexpected; telephone operators and the postal service were overwhelmed, and owing to the volume of donations, several weeks were needed just to sort them, distribute them, and find a place to stock them throughout the country. Moreover, this call attracted volunteers from all over the country to help them, including wealthy bourgeoises who were emotionally shaken by the Abbé's call: first to do the redistribution, but then to duplicate the effort all around France. Quite quickly, Grouès had to organise his movement by creating the Emmaus communities on 23 March 1954.
A book was written by Boris Simon called Abbé Pierre and the ragpickers of Emmaus. It spread knowledge about the Emmaus community. In 1955, the priest gave President Eisenhower an English translation of the book in the oval office. The Emmaus communities quickly spread worldwide. Grouès traveled to Beyrouth (Beirut, Lebanon) in 1959, to assist in the creation of the first multiconfessional Emmaus group there; it was founded by a Sunni (Muslim), a Melkite (Catholic) archbishop and a Maronite (Christian) writer.
1980s to 2000s After the 1981 election of President François Mitterrand (Socialist Party, PS), during which Abbé Pierre called for voters to vote in blank), he supported the initiative of the French Premier Laurent Fabius (PS) to create in 1984 the Revenu minimum d'insertion (RMI), a welfare system for indigent people.Le diable et le Bon Dieu, Le Figaro, 26 January 2007 The same year, he organized the operation "Charity Christmas", which, relayed by France Soir, raised 6 million francs and 200 tons of products. The actor Coluche, who had organized the charitable Restos du Cœur, offered him 150 million French cents received by his organisation. Coluche's huge success with the Restos du Cœur, caused by his popularity (Coluche had even tried to nominate himself as a candidate in the 1981 presidential election before withdrawing), convinced the Abbé again of the necessity and value of such charitable struggles and the usefulness of the media in such endeavours.
In 1983, he spoke with Italian President Sandro Pertini to plead the cause of Vanni Mulinaris, imprisoned on charge of assistance to the Red Brigades (BR), and even observed eight days of hunger strike from 26 May to 3 June 1984 in the Cathedral of Turin to protest against detention conditions of "Brigadists" in Italian prisons and the imprisonment without trial of Vanni Mulinaris, who was recognized innocent sometimes afterwards.CAMT. Répertoire papiers Abbé Pierre/Emmaus , on the website of the French Archives Nationales (National Archives) Italian magistrate Carlo Mastelloni recalled in the Corriere della Sera in 2007 that a niece of the Abbé was a secretary at Hyperion language school in Paris, directed by Vanni Mulinaris, and married to one of the Italians refugees then wanted by the Italian justice.«Quel giorno in Tribunale con lui Difese i terroristi rossi e l' Hyperion» , Corriere della Sera, 23 January 2007 According to the Corriere della Sera, it would even have been him who convinced then president François Mitterrand to grant protection from extradition to left-wing Italian activists who took refuge in France and had broken with their past.Abbé Pierre, il frate ribelle che scelse gli emarginati , Corriere della Sera, 23 January 2007