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BIOGRAPHY

Charles de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg on September 15, 1858. He has a  sister, Marie 3 years younger than him, which will marry in 1884 Raymond de Blic.

The two children become orphan in 1864. Charles is then six years old. His maternal grandfather receives him with his sister and undertakes their education. After the war of 1870 and the annexation of Alsace by Germany, he chooses for them the French nationality and comes to live in Nancy.

Charles continues his studies at the college of this city. The Christian formation of his childhood enables him to make an enthusiastic First Communion in 1872, but it will not be enough solid to help him in his adolescence and, since 1874, he loses the faith.

He prepares his entry at Saint-Cyr military school to become soldier and is allowed there in 1876. Second lieutenant of cavalry, he carries out a rather disordered life, which does not prevent him from being courageous in the military operations in which he takes part in the west of Algeria.

In 1882, he gives his resignation of the Army and undertakes a voyage of exploration in Morocco. The successes of this perilous forwarding worth honors and open to him the doors of the world of the geographers and the explorers.

But he is inhabited then by a religious search. Under the discrete influence of his family which he found in Paris, he seeks to have courses of religion and request the assistance of a priest to be enlightened on the catholic faith. He speaks to this priest, Fr. Huvelin, at the end of October 1886, at Saint Augustine’s church in Paris. Instead of given him a course of religion, the priest invites him to confess himself and to receive the Holy Communion: for Charles it is conversion, a grace which will transform him for the life. Solved not to live more from now on but for this God of Jesus-Christ who came to his meeting, he makes the Holy Land pilgrimage. He discovers there the humble and hidden life of the Son of God incarnate while becoming this man Jesus, poor working in Nazareth.

Attracted by the desire to imitate him of all his forces, he decides to become Trappist monk. Entered in 1890 in the monastery of Our-Lady-of-Snows, for going to hide for always in a poor Trap of Syria, he seeks to advance more and more in the imitation of the life of Jesus in Nazareth. Six years later, he asks to leave the Trap, it is granted to him and in February 1897, he is authorized to follow his personal vocation.

Following Fr. Huvelin’s advice, he goes to Nazareth, asks to place at the door of the convent of Clarisses and became their servant. He lives thus as a hermit in the prayer, the poverty and the research of the will of God on him. At the end of three years, his desire to imitate Jesus in his universal Charity makes him accept the prospect for priesthood. He prepares there at the Trap of Our Lady of Snows and, June 9, 1901, he is ordered priest for the diocese of Viviers, this is why he will be beatified with the qualification of “diocesan priest ".

To make radiate divine Charity and carry the Eucharistic presence to the poor of the non-evangelized areas, he thinks of going to the south of Morocco, where he traveled formerly, and is established for that in Beni-Abbès, at the algéro-Morrocans borders. He will not be able to carry out this project, but Mgr Guerin, the first prefect apostolic of the Sahara, will accept that he goes in the Algerian south.

Charles fixes himself in 1905 at Tamanrasset, in Hoggar, with the country of Touaregs. He learns their language to become close to all and to save their culture. He seeks, by as well as possible using the resources brought by the colonizing nation which is France, to promote their human progress, intellectual and moral, thus preparing them to discover one day what makes the secrecy of his religious life. In Tamanrasset as in Beni-Abbès, the hoped companions will not come; he remains alone there, but he wants that in France one shares the missionary task which is his, and he considers in this goal a "brotherhood" which would link all the Christian goodwill in a wide-area network at the service of these countries under development and not touched by the evangelic message. He dies in an ambush in front of his hermitage, victim of a shot, December 1, 1916.