Background
Rose Philippine Duchesne was born on August 29, 1769 in Grenoble, Dauphiné, France. She was the daughter of Pierre François Duchesne and Rose Euphrosyne Périer.
Rose Philippine Duchesne was born on August 29, 1769 in Grenoble, Dauphiné, France. She was the daughter of Pierre François Duchesne and Rose Euphrosyne Périer.
Her education, begun at home, was continued in the Convent of the Visitation of St. Mary on the Alpine spur, Chalmont, overlooking Grenoble.
Having become a novice in the Convent of St. Mary, Grenoble, Duchesne was there when the French Revolution began. The monastery was taken over by the government to be used as a prison for non-juring priests and for Royalists, and the religious whose home it had been were dispersed.
During the Reign of Terror, Philippine Duchesne showed herself an angel of pity to its victims in Grenoble. At the close of the Revolution she hoped to rehabilitate the religious of the Visitation in the ruined old monastery, but this proving impossible, she offered herself and the house to the newly founded Society of the Sacred Heart. It was as a professed of that Order that she was sent to America in 1818 by the foundress, Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat. Such a mission had been Philippine Duchesne’s ambition since as a child she had heard a missionary speak of the New World and of the pagan Indians.
The two months’ voyage from Bordeaux to New Orleans was followed by another no less hazardous, that up the Mississippi to St. Louis, where the travelers were welcomed by Bishop DuBourg. In St. Charles, a village some seventeen miles from St. Louis, the religious of the Sacred Heart opened a boarding-school for the daughters of the pioneers of Missouri, and at the same time founded the first free school west of the Mississippi. Later on, at Florissant, Missouri, they added to these two works the foundation of a school for Indian girls, the first of its kind to be established under Catholic auspices in the United States. The sisters suffered from hunger, illness, and cold, from opposition, misunderstanding, and failure; yet when her brother offered to send her passage back to France, Mother Duchesne replied: “Use that sum of money to pay the way of two more nuns coming from France to America. ” In spite of privations, the pioneers and their wives were glad to confide their children to her and the school records bear well-known names, such as Chouteau, Mullanphy, Pratte. In 1821 another convent was founded at Grand Coteau, Louisiana, and there, as at St. Michael’s, Louisiana, founded four years later, the religious conducted a boarding-school for the daughters of the planters, a day school for the white children of the parish, and, in addition to these institutions, classes for the instruction of the negroes. Mother Duchesne when stationed in Missouri made two long voyages to Louisiana to visit these schools, and on one of the return journeys contracted yellow fever and was put ashore where she nearly died of exposure and neglect. In founding a convent in St. Louis, she fulfilled an ardent desire of the foundress of her Order, Mother Barat, and by opening a mission school among the Indians of Kansas she realized her own long-cherished hope. At that time she was over seventy and broken in health, but with spirit undaunted she had pleaded to be sent to the red men, and in 1841 she made the perilous voyage up the river to Westport, Kansas.
She had hoped to be left at that post to the end of her life, but was recalled to St. Charles where she remained in humble hidden labor, in suffering and prayer, until her death in November 1852.
The members of the Historical Society of Missouri, after discussing what their state owes to its pioneer women, in 1918 voted Mother Philippine Duchesne as the greatest benefactress. They put an account of her life and work into their archives and had her name inscribed on a bronze tablet, placed in the Jefferson Memorial Building, St. Louis.
Her work among the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek was confined to example and prayer, so that the Indians picturesquely designated her as “the woman who always prays. ”
