Emmanuel d'Alzon

Emmanuel Joseph Marie Maurice d’Alzon was born the oldest of four children, in Le Vigan, Gard,[1] in southern France, to an aristocratic and intensely Catholic family from the Cévennes Mountains.

It was at the end of his secondary studies that he came into contact with the influential thinker, Félicité de Lamennais, much of whose early teachings on the political order and Christian society would mark the young d'Alzon.

[1] During these years in the French capital he had come to know a host of distinguished young men, some of whom remained friends throughout his life, Henri Lacordaire, who would re-establish the Dominican order in France, Olympe Philippe Gerbet, founder of La Revue catholique, noted preacher Théodore Combalot, and Count Charles de Montalembert, journalist, historian, and politician.

According to George Tavard, "It was influence of Bonald, Joseph de Maistre and Lamennais that made the later d'Alzon a determined opponent of the Gallican party at the First Vatican Council.

D'Alzon's early years in ministry were dedicated to confronting Protestants, who made up a third of the local population, and to numerous initiatives such as the founding of youth groups, a home for unwed mothers, libraries for workers, and innumerable retreats, conferences, and sermons.

In 1843 one of his most cherished dreams became a reality: he acquired a secondary school, Collège de l'Assomption, in Nìmes,[1] where he hoped to form upper-class students to enter society as Catholic agents of change in a traditionalist mode.

With this purchase began one of the greatest struggles of d'Alzon's life, a fight to obtain free and full exercise of private education in the face of state monopoly.

In Paris he established an organization called the Association of Our Lady of Salvation (Notre Dame de Salut) from which would spring two great Assumptionist fields of apostolic involvement: He understood these latter endeavors to be "education in its various forms".