St. Louise de Marillac

St. Louise de Marillac was a Frenchwoman who, with St. Vincent de Paul, founded the Daughters of Charity in Paris in 1633 and trained the first women in the Catholic Church to serve the poor outside a cloister. She was born in 1591, spent twelve years as a wife and then thirty-five as a widow in religious work, and died in Paris on 15 March 1660. Pope John XXIII named her patroness of Christian social workers in 1960.

What she built was a method. Before Louise, a woman who wanted to give her life to God entered an enclosed convent, and charity to the poor was carried out by volunteers with no training. She produced a third thing: a company of women, mostly of peasant background, formed and organised and sent into houses, wards and prisons, without walls and without vows that bound them for life.

The Organizer of Charity

St. Louise de Marillac (1591-1660) was a French noblewoman who, alongside St. Vincent de Paul, co-founded the Daughters of Charity. Despite being born illegitimate and facing rejection from her family (including being denied entry into a convent due to poor health), she rose to become one of the most influential women in the history of social work.

After the death of her husband, she met St. Vincent de Paul, who became her spiritual director. He saw in her a deep piety joined to exceptional intelligence and organizational ability.

The word organiser is exact. Louise did the work that keeps charity alive after the enthusiasm passes: she wrote rules, kept accounts, inspected houses, corrected practice, trained new members and settled disputes, and she did it in constant correspondence with Vincent. Several hundred of her letters survive, and they are full of instructions about linen, bread, money, illness and the conduct of particular sisters. Sanctity in her case looks like administration carried out for God.

Who Louise de Marillac Was

Louise was born on 12 August 1591. She was the daughter of Louis de Marillac, a member of a prominent French family, and was acknowledged by him and raised at his expense, though her mother is unknown and she had no standing in the family line. That fact shaped her early life. She was educated at the royal monastery of Poissy, where a relative was a Dominican nun, and later in a modest boarding house in Paris after her father died when she was in her early teens.

The Marillac name mattered in France and it cost her. Her uncle Michel de Marillac was Keeper of the Seals and another relative was a Marshal of France, and both fell in the political conflict with Cardinal Richelieu, one dying in prison and the other executed in 1632. Louise was doing her first organised charitable work while her family was being destroyed.

As a young woman she wanted to enter the Capuchin nuns and was refused, and she was told her health would not support that life. The refusal is the beginning of everything she later built, since it left her outside the only religious form then available to a woman.

Marriage, Widowhood and the Light of 1623

In 1613 Louise married Antoine Le Gras, a secretary to the queen. Because he held no title of nobility, she was addressed as Mademoiselle Le Gras rather than Madame, and that is the name under which she is known in most seventeenth-century documents. They had one son, Michel.

The marriage lasted about twelve years and ended in a long illness. Louise nursed her husband through it, and during that period she suffered a severe spiritual crisis: doubt about whether she had failed God by not entering religious life, doubt about the immortality of the soul, and a fear that her husband's illness was a punishment.

She recorded the resolution herself. On the feast of Pentecost in 1623, in a Paris church, her doubts lifted in what she described afterwards as a light. She wrote that she was given to understand that she would live in community with others and serve the poor, that the time was not yet, and that she would be given a new director. Her own account of it, written in the third person, survives, and it is one of the plainest descriptions of a mystical experience in the period, without imagery or drama.

Antoine Le Gras died in 1625. Louise was thirty-four, a widow with a son, no institution to belong to and no obvious future.

Vincent de Paul and the Confraternities of Charity

Vincent de Paul became her spiritual director around the time of her husband's death, and by her account he was the new director she had been told to expect. He was a country priest of peasant origin who had already begun the Confraternities of Charity, associations of laywomen in parishes who visited and fed the sick poor.

Those confraternities had a problem. In wealthy parishes the members were ladies who sent servants, and the work drifted. Vincent needed someone to visit them, assess them and hold them to their rule, and in 1629 he sent Louise out to do it. She travelled across France by coach and on foot, inspecting confraternities, teaching, reorganising, and reporting back. That work, done in her late thirties in poor health, is where she learned what actually happens to charitable projects and what keeps them honest.

What she found in the villages was the answer to the problem: country girls with no dowry and no prospect of entering a convent who were willing to do the physical work of nursing the poor. Our page on St. Vincent de Paul covers his side of the partnership.

Servants of the Poor

Louise trained and organized the young peasant women who volunteered to serve the poor. She formed them into a religious community dedicated to active service, a radical concept at the time when most nuns were cloistered behind walls. She taught them that "the service of the poor is the service of Christ."

Under her leadership, the Daughters of Charity established hospitals, orphanages (for the "foundlings"), schools for poor children, and homes for the elderly. She traveled extensively, despite her chronic ill health, to supervise these foundations.

The founding date is given as 29 November 1633, when Louise took the first candidates into her own house in Paris to be formed. The training covered prayer, the catechism, and the practical skills of nursing and household management, and it was residential, which was itself an innovation. What she was doing was building a novitiate for a form of life the Church did not yet have a category for.

The teaching that the poor are served in Christ is not a metaphor in the Vincentian tradition. It rests on Matthew 25:40, where Jesus says that whatever was done to the least of his brothers was done to him. Vincent and Louise both press the point in its strong form: the sister who is called away from prayer to attend a sick person is leaving God for God.

The Rule That Broke the Cloister

The most consequential decision Louise and Vincent made was legal. Any group of women who took solemn vows and were canonically recognised as religious would have been required to accept enclosure, which would have ended the work. Their solution was to refuse the category.

The Daughters of Charity were established as a company rather than an order. The sisters made simple, private vows renewed each year rather than solemn perpetual vows. They wore the ordinary dress of Frenchwomen of their class rather than a habit, and the winged cornette that later became famous was a peasant headdress before it was a religious sign. In canonical terms they were laywomen living together, which is exactly what allowed them to go where they were needed.

Vincent's own formula for the company is the clearest statement of what they had made: their monastery is the house of the sick, their cell a hired room, their chapel the parish church, their cloister the streets of the city, their enclosure obedience, their grille the fear of God, and their veil holy modesty.

Every congregation of active sisters in the Catholic Church since has been built on the space Louise and Vincent opened. In the United States, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton founded her community on the Daughters of Charity rule, and the two bodies were later joined.

The Works: Foundlings, Hospitals, Schools and War

The list of what the company took on in Louise's lifetime is a description of seventeenth-century French misery.

• The foundlings. Abandoned infants in Paris were held in conditions with an appalling death rate. Louise and the Ladies of Charity took the work over and set up houses and wet nurses. Vincent's appeal to the Ladies, telling them that the children would live or die by their decision, is one of the famous documents of the period.
• The Hotel-Dieu. The great Paris hospital, where the sisters worked alongside the existing staff, brought organised nursing and catechesis to the wards.
• Schools for poor girls. Free schools, small and local, teaching reading and the catechism to children who would otherwise have had neither.
• Prisoners and galley slaves. Care for men held in conditions that killed them before their sentences ran out.
• War relief. During the wars and the disturbances of the Fronde, sisters were sent into devastated provinces with food and medical help for refugees and the wounded.
• The elderly and the insane. Houses for old people without families, and care for the mentally ill at a time when almost no one provided it.

Louise's insistence on standards runs through her letters. She wanted clean linen, proper food, accurate accounts and courteous manners toward the poor, on the argument that people who have been treated as refuse should be treated by Christians as guests.

Patron of Social Workers

St. Louise is the patron saint of social workers because she brought system, dignity, and specialized training to the care of the needy. She insisted on high standards of hygiene and care, believing that the poor deserved the best.

The designation is formal. Pope John XXIII declared her patroness of Christian social workers in 1960, three centuries after her death, and the reason given was the character of what she created: assessment of need, trained personnel, defined method, supervision and continuity.

The Church's social teaching makes the same point in general terms. Charity is owed to the person rather than to a category, and assistance that leaves the recipient humiliated has failed at the thing it was for. Our page on Catholic social teaching sets out the principles, and readers who want the twentieth-century version of Louise's work will find it in St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Death, Canonisation and Feast Day

Louise died in Paris on 15 March 1660, aged sixty-eight, after years of poor health. Vincent de Paul, himself dying, could not come to her, and he died six months later on 27 September of the same year. By the time of her death the company had spread across France and had begun to move beyond it.

She was beatified by Benedict XV in 1920 and canonised by Pius XI on 11 March 1934. Her feast is kept on 15 March, the day of her death, and Vincentian and local calendars observe it on other dates in some places.

Her remains are venerated in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity on the rue du Bac in Paris, the same chapel associated with the apparitions to St. Catherine Laboure and the Miraculous Medal.

Quotable Wisdom

"Be diligent in serving the poor. Love the poor, honor them, my children, as you would honor Christ Himself."

Two further sayings from the Vincentian tradition are worth having.

"The service of the poor is to be preferred to all else."

That principle governed practice. A sister called from prayer to a sick person went, and the going was treated as the prayer.

"Their monastery is the house of the sick, their cell a hired room, their chapel the parish church, their cloister the streets of the city, their enclosure obedience, their grille the fear of God, their veil holy modesty."

Vincent's description of the company Louise formed, and the most compact statement of what they invented.

What a Reader Can Take From St. Louise

Do the admin. Louise's holiness looks like letters, accounts and inspections. Most charitable failure is a failure of follow-through rather than of goodwill.

Start after the door closes. She was refused the life she wanted at twenty and founded something new at forty-two. The refusal was the condition of the work.

Give the poor your standards, not your leftovers. Clean linen and accurate accounts were her way of saying that a poor person is a guest and not a case.

Serve where you are, in the state you are in. Louise was a wife, a widow and a worried mother before she was a founder, and none of those was an interruption of her vocation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Louise de Marillac?

St. Louise de Marillac was a Frenchwoman who founded the Daughters of Charity in Paris in 1633 with St. Vincent de Paul, and who trained the first women in the Catholic Church to serve the poor outside a cloister. She was born in 1591, married Antoine Le Gras and was known as Mademoiselle Le Gras, was widowed in 1625, and spent the rest of her life organising charitable work until her death on 15 March 1660.

What did St. Louise de Marillac found?

She founded the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, dated from 29 November 1633, when she took the first candidates into her own house in Paris to be trained. The company established hospitals, homes for abandoned infants, free schools for poor girls, care for prisoners and galley slaves, relief for war refugees, and houses for the elderly, and it spread across France within her lifetime.

Why were the Daughters of Charity not enclosed nuns?

Any group of women recognised in canon law as religious with solemn vows would have been required to accept enclosure, which would have made the work impossible. Louise and Vincent avoided that by establishing the sisters as a company rather than an order, with simple vows renewed each year and ordinary dress rather than a habit, so that in canonical terms they were laywomen living in common. Every later congregation of active sisters was built in the space that decision opened.

Why is St. Louise de Marillac the patron saint of social workers?

Pope John XXIII declared her patroness of Christian social workers in 1960 because of the character of what she built: assessment of need, trained personnel, a defined method, supervision of the people doing the work, and continuity after the founders died. Her surviving letters are full of instructions about hygiene, food, accounts and courteous conduct toward the poor, on the principle that people treated as refuse should be treated by Christians as guests.

When is the feast day of St. Louise de Marillac?

Her feast is kept on 15 March, the day of her death in 1660, and Vincentian and local calendars observe it on other dates in some places. She was beatified by Benedict XV in 1920 and canonised by Pius XI on 11 March 1934, and her remains are venerated in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity on the rue du Bac in Paris.

What was the Pentecost experience of St. Louise de Marillac?

During her husband's long illness Louise suffered a severe crisis of doubt, about whether she had failed God by not entering religious life and about the immortality of the soul. On the feast of Pentecost in 1623, in a Paris church, the doubts lifted in what she afterwards described as a light, and she understood that she would live in community with others and serve the poor, that the time had not yet come, and that she would be given a new director. Her own written account of it survives.