Peter Maurin (; May 9, 1877 – May 15, 1949) was a French Catholic social activist, theologian, and De La Salle Brother who founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 with Dorothy Day.
Maurin expressed his philosophy through short pieces of verse that became known as Easy Essays. Influenced by the contemporary work of G. K. Chesterton and Vincent McNabb, he was one of the foremost promoters of the back-to-the-land movement and of Catholic distributism in the United States. He was also influenced by Peter Kropotkin, an anarchist, and while Maurin always accepted himself privately as one, he preferred to call himself a personalist.
Biography
He was born Pierre Joseph Orestide Maurin into a poor farming family in the village of Oultet in the Languedoc region of southern France, where he was one of 24 children. After spending time in the De La Salle Brothers, Maurin served in the Sillon movement of Marc Sangnier until he became discouraged by the Sillonist shift from personalist action towards political action. He briefly moved to Saskatchewan to try his hand at homesteading, but was discouraged both by the death of his partner in a hunting accident and by the harsh conditions and rugged individualism that characterized his years of residence in the region. He then traveled throughout the American east for a few years, and eventually settled in New York.