An Award for Being a Decent Person: How the Montyon Prize Started

The world abounds in prizes and awards given to those who excel in their field, from the arts and sciences, to literature, to acting, to athletic prowess, and more.
But wouldn’t it be nice if you could get an award for being a decent human being? Readers, look no further than the Montyon Prize handed out since the 18th century.
Oberlin spent over 50 years transforming his little piece of France. He built roads, drained marshes, introduced new crops, set up a farmers’ cooperative, planted orchards, helped peasants pay off their indebtedness, sent the village youth off to learn new trades, and provided small interest-free loans. He set up schools and pioneered the establishment of nursery schools. All this in addition to his ill-paid duties as a clergyman.
When Oberlin found some of his parishioners abusing a Jewish pedlar, he took the man’s goods on his own back and invited him home. That Sunday, he delivered a sermon from the pulpit entitled “Has God Rejected His People?” where he affirmed: “I am also an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.”
In 1823, Joseph Bécard was an impoverished Frenchman who scratched out a precarious living as a dealer in old clothes. Despite his poverty, he had for over 10 years supported the elderly widow Madame Chavalliac, a once prosperous woman whose husband had been killed in the French Revolution and who was now blind and destitute. Bécard was no relation of the widow, but he had known her family in better times and he resolved that she should not go unsupported in her old age. He gave her his bed while he slept in a chair; he fed her and tended her during her nights of pain although she had become crabby and ungrateful. When she died, he carved a cross with her name on it, put it on her grave, and paid for a priest to say prayers for her soul.
By 1915, Paulin Enfert, a Parisian insurance clerk, had spent decades working with the poor kids of his city. He taught them their catechism, found them apprenticeships, placed orphans with adoptive families, built them a theatre, set up a soup kitchen, and established a medical clinic. He never married and lived simply, devoting all his free time to his charitable work.
When the monarchy was restored after the fall of Napoleon, he returned to France and set up other awards—one for literature, one for workplace safety, one for technological advancement, and the “prix de vertu,” to reward noble or courageous acts done by a poor woman or man. To this day, the Académie française and the French Academy of Sciences continue to reward the talented and the humane in the name of the Baron de Montyon.