Martine Le Corre, 68, has a strong commitment to activism. For fifty years, this native of Caen, with short silver hair, has been fighting against great insecurity with the ATD Fourth World Movement.
If Martine Le Corre is so determined to stem poverty it is because she herself experienced it from a very young age. In the story of his life Mine is my strengthpublished on September 15 by Quart Monde/Le Bord de l’eau, returns to the sources of his commitment and to the discovery of the Movement that will change his life and shape his career.
The birth of a militant instinct
Born in 1955 in a slum in Caen (Calvados), Martine Le Corre grew up in a family of 14 children. “With my family we traveled to the four corners of the city of Caen, living in neighborhoods with a bad reputation, where we lived from eviction to eviction. »
“It is never easy for a child, for a brother, to find himself permanently placed on the street, with those few pieces of furniture thrown away or put up for auction, before being snatched up left and right. This was extremely painful to experience and traumatic for a child. It can only generate fears and fears in life, in everyday life. »
Despite the difficult living conditions, young Martine resists. “I always loved school, I loved learning and I was a good student. But it was school that I didn’t like. »
Why her “didn’t fit into the boxes”, “did not meet a certain standard”, the girl he ended up picking up. Having left school at the age of 13, her mother being single at 18, Martine Le Corre had the meeting that would change her life.
“A few months before the birth of my first child, a couple of volunteers from ATD Quarto Mondo came to live in the city where we had been transferred with my parents. We didn’t know who they were, we were wary of them because they didn’t look like us at all, they didn’t speak like us. We have done him a thousand and one miseries. But they stayed there and stood up to us. They told us that they were convinced that we were people capable of bringing them a lot, capable of doing things, of making our lives a struggle. No one had ever told us things like that before. »
Martine Le Corre therefore decided to start the electoral campaign within the ATD together with them. “For me it was an emergency exit door. For the first time, I was not sent back to our life of misery, we were offered a fight against it. It changed everything. »
Then he met Father Joseph Wresinski. In front of an audience of young people who had come specifically to listen to him, the founder of ATD-Quart Monde gave a speech that galvanized Martine Le Corre. “It was the strong point, which revealed in me a combativeness and a militant instinct. »
“It completely relieved us of the guilt and encouraged us to see things change. He turned to us saying that we were “good for nothing”, that we were not criminals, that our parents had not resigned themselves. But that we were able to fight to denounce what we are forced to endure. It’s like a door opened to our future, it was amazing. »
Read also: Mega surprise (no): when we give money to poor parents, they spend it their children
Learn to love your environment
Prejudices about the poor persist today. “Let’s say that they don’t want to work, that if they experience these situations it’s because they want to, because they don’t commit themselves, because they have intellectual deficiencies, because they wallow in filth, in alcoholism…” lists Martine Le Corre, bitterly.
The INSEE data, dating back to 2019, however, speak clearly: 2 million working people are poor in France, or 8% of workers – far from the cliché of the poor “Lazy” who lives handsomely on benefits. Poverty is also linked to gender and ethnic origin: women and people of color are overrepresented among the poor.
It is for all these people in need that Martine Le Corre has pushed her commitment further, to the point of dedicating her entire career to ATD. “I was incredibly fortunate to have really been trained by Father Joseph, who spent a lot of time questioning me, introducing me to the poorest people where I lived, having demands on me. »
Alongside Joseph Wresinski, Martine Le Corre “learned to know one’s environment, to love one’s own and respect them”. “Father Giuseppe never took me out of my environment, he put it in my heart”he writes in his autobiography.
“It took me years to feel like I belonged”
Since then he has never left the Movement, within which he built his entire career, until joining the General Delegation team (international direction) in 2017.
However, “It wasn’t a smooth ride”assures Martine Le Corre.
“There were moments of love and others of disenchantment. The journey of engagement for a Fourth World activist like me is littered with pitfalls. Because we must not believe: what poverty destroys, life does not necessarily repair. And there remain traces, fragilities, that we must learn to channel. And it takes a huge amount of time. It took me years to truly feel free, where I belonged. »
After having actively participated in the launch of the popular universities of the Fourth World, after having traveled to the four corners of the world to launch actions of international scope, Martine Le Corre left the general delegation of the movement in 2021. But he remains, even today, deeply committed to fight against poverty.
After having been in Mauritius for a few months with a volunteer to build together the popular university of the Fourth World, she remains in support of the local team, just like that of Haiti or that of its region, Normandy.
Because despite the nice speeches of politicians, poverty is still far from being fought, in France as elsewhere. One million people have fallen into poverty due to the Covid health crisis in France, according to charities. In 2020, up to 7 million people were expected to use food aid, or almost 10% of the French population.
“I believe that our politicians have not adopted the measure. And when we don’t act it also means that we are not working deeply to solve the problem of extreme poverty. It is absolutely not normal to think that only associations can manage crises, believes Martine Le Corre. I really like what Coluche has done with Restos du Coeur, but I am absolutely convinced that this type of association is launched with the hope that it doesn’t last forever, that it doesn’t become permanent. But unfortunately we don’t see the end. The question to ask is what is the level of abandonment on the part of our politicians. »
The historic ATD activist is also clear about the future. According to her, poverty is still the same as it was in the 60s and 70s of her childhood. “It is true that the slums of my time have been more or less absorbed. Although, with the problems related to migration, they are coming back into force. »
“I’ve seen things done in our neighborhoods. “We have gentrified neighborhoods,” they say. This means that we have painted them, we have done some renovations, some external improvements, we have fenced off two or three blocks of buildings to separate them from two or three others… But the inside remains the same, nothing has changed. It’s all a facade, everything else. And this is profoundly unfair because we are not attacking the roots of evil, we are content to fill the gaps. »
Once an activist, always an activist.
Martine Le Corre, Mine is my strength. Story of a fighter for digital skills, and. ATD Fourth World / The seafront.
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Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
