Aide à toute détresse Quart Monde - History

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1957-1959

-1957, France: a worker priest born in a poor family in Angers from a Polish father and a Spanish mother, Joseph Wresinski (1917-88) denounces the conditions of living of the homeless in a slum near Paris, at Noisy-le-Grand. Instead of creating a charity to provide assistance by giving out aid, he prefers to rehabilitate the dignity of the poor. Therefore, with some friends and Noisy-le-Grand’s dwellers, he sets up a team, the Groupe d’action, de culture et de relogement des provinciaux de la région parisienne, which becomes Aide à toute détresse in 1961 and takes its present name in 1968. Alluding to people from the developing third world, the word “fourth world” is aimed at counterbalancing the negative image the poorest families from the industrialized countries suffer from.