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The Marist Brothers is a Catholic religious order of brothers and affiliated lay people. The order was founded in France, at La Valla near Lyon in 1817 by Saint Marcellin Champagnat, a young French priest of the Society of Mary (Marist Fathers). Champagnat, disillusioned with the encroaching culture of post-revolution secularism that gripped the areas of rural France where he worked, decided to start an order of consecrated brothers in the Marian tradition, building schools for the underprivileged where they might learn to become "Good Christians and Good Citizens".