Marcel Légaut

Marcel Légaut (27 April 1900 – 6 November 1990) was a French Christian philosopher and mathematician. Marcel Légaut was born in Paris, where he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure in 1925. He taught in various faculties (among them Rennes and Lyon) until 1943. Under the impact of the Second World War and the rapid French defeat in 1940, Légaut acknowledged the lack of certain fundamental aspects in his life as well as in the lives of other university professors and civil servants. That is why he tried to alternate teaching with farm work. After three years his project was no longer accepted and he left the University to live as a shepherd in the Pré-Alpes (Haut-Diois). Légaut had married in 1940, and between 1945 and 1953 he became the father of six children. Twenty years after this renunciation of his social status (and the consequent rooting in common life), Légaut, almost sixty years old, started a deep and personal reflection around man's condition and existence, which was captured in the two volumes of his main work: Human Accomplishment. Monsieur Portal, his mentor during his youth, had helped him discover that honesty and intellectual independence are essential to a vigorous, spiritual life. This wasn't usual in the Catholic education of the time, where obedience and adherence to the prevailing doctrine took priority. M. Portal had learned something from the modernist crisis period. Encouraged in this secular direction by M. Portal, Légaut ruled out the usual lifestyle in the Catholic system of the time (priesthood and religious life), and instead thoroughly followed the scientific path. As a result of these youthful decisions, but also by the way he lived the full engagement, Légaut became a leader of the Catholic students in the Normale Écoles during the interwar period up to the French defeat. He overcame the temptation of absolutizing his function as celibate leader in the group, and therefore Légaut didn't consider himself as a philosopher, or a theologian of formation or occupation.