Joseph Wresinski

Joseph Wresinski was born in Angers in 1917 to a Polish father and a Spanish mother. His father was interned as an enemy alien during the First World War, and the family lived in a poverty he never forgot: the shame of charity, the humiliation of his mother at the hands of officials, the way the poor were spoken about rather than to. He left school early to work, and was ordained a priest in 1946.

In 1956 his bishop sent him to Noisy-le-Grand, east of Paris, where about 250 homeless families were living in a camp of corrugated huts on a patch of mud. Instead he settled there. What struck him was that the families had been helped for years, with soup and clothing, and it had changed nothing. He decided the camp did not need more charity but a way for its people to be heard.

With the residents he built a chapel, a kindergarten, a library and a workshop, and founded the association that became ATD Fourth World, a name chosen to insist that the very poor were a people with rights, not cases.

In 1987 he wrote a report for the French Economic and Social Council that put extreme poverty on the national agenda, and on 17 October that year gathered a hundred thousand people at the Trocadéro. He died the following February. The United Nations adopted the date as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.