2023-11-03 15:33:22
Henri Burin des Roziers, 1930-2017
by Sabine Rousseau
Cerf, 474 p., 29 €
The life of Henri Burin des Roziers, who died in 2017, is told like a legend: a young boy from the French Catholic nobility, close to General de Gaulle, against all odds becomes a Dominican friar and advocate for landless peasants in Brazil. For the first time, a biography makes it possible to trace the birth of his vocation carried by a « rage de justice ».
In 1955, Henri carried out his military service in Algeria. Aged 25, he is a fervent Gaullist, opposed to the country’s independence. Although he was destined for a great career, he announced to his family in the middle of a year of law thesis at Cambridge his desire for a religious life. Not very devout and very discreet about his relationship with God, the young Burin des Roziers seems inhabited by the rejection of a banal life. He chose the Dominican order for the possibility of leading a life in society there.
A tireless fight
During his training, he was pushed around by a left-wing community fighting injustice. In a few years, while remaining faithful to the spirit of the Resistance which marked his family history, he found himself supporting political and social struggle movements, and participated in May 68. At 40, called to explore the margins of Catholicism as of society, he left for Besançon with a brother. Worker, then social worker and legal advisor in Annecy, he discovered the fate of those forgotten by globalization.
But it was ultimately in Brazil, in the 1970s, that he met the face of a Church to which he felt close and immersed himself in the struggles that would make him famous. He becomes the lawyer of the “landless” peasants of the Amazon and leads a tireless fight for equality and justice, until he is threatened with death. This integral commitment is brilliantly restored in this biography, always precise and never complacent.
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