100th Birthday of Abbé Pierre

A portrait of Abbé Pierre wearing his characteristic beret, alongside the logo of the foundation he established with the microtext "Et les autres?" ("And the others?") — his watchword urging people to help their fellow human beings. On the left appear the letters "RF" for "République française" and the cornucopia — the mark of the Paris Mint; on the right a blossom, the mintmaster's mark.

Henri Grouès, known as Abbé Pierre, was born in 1912 in Lyon, the son of a wealthy silk-merchant family. He entered the Capuchin order at an early age, served as a Resistance fighter during the Second World War, and helped Jewish families flee to Switzerland. After the war, he sat in the French Parliament for the MRP, where he made a name for himself as an uncomfortable voice for the homeless and socially excluded. His best-known motto — "Et les autres?" ("And what about the others?") — he invoked whenever political debates threatened to lose sight of the poorest.

The turning point of his public influence came in the winter of 1954: in an impromptu radio appeal, Abbé Pierre asked the French people for help for homeless people dying in the cold wave. This speech triggered a nationwide wave of solidarity and is still regarded as one of the most influential broadcasting moments in French history. From these beginnings grew the Emmaüs movement, which developed into an international organisation active in more than forty countries worldwide. Abbé Pierre died in 2007 in Paris; for decades, he was the most trusted person in France according to opinion polls. On the centenary of the priest and social reformer's birth, France issued a 2-euro commemorative coin in 2012.