Marie-Eugénie Milleret

Daughter of a Voltairean banker of Metz and of a mother attentive to the poor, Anne-Eugénie Milleret de Brou saw her family come apart when she was twelve — ruin, her parents' separation, exile to Paris — and her mother die of cholera two years later. She lost her faith. In Lent 1836, at eighteen, she heard Lacordaire preach at Notre-Dame and came out a believer. Three years were enough: trained among the Benedictines and then at the Visitation, on 30 April 1839, aged twenty-one, she founded with a few companions the Religious of the Assumption. The purpose was the education of girls — not the charitable workroom then usual, but a full instruction, intellectual as much as religious, because she judged that faith would not hold in heads left empty. She led the institute for fifty-five years, wrote its constitutions from 1840 to their approval in 1888, and saw it reach England, Spain, Italy, Nicaragua and the Philippines. Withdrawn from office in 1894, her health broken, paralysed at the end, she died at Auteuil in 1898. Paul VI beatified her in 1975, Benedict XVI canonised her on 3 June 2007; since 8 December 2024 her relics have been sealed in the new altar of Notre-Dame, in the very place where she had come to believe.