Born in Grenoble, France, on August 29, 1769, Rose Duchesne was of a family well known and influential in affairs on both her father╒s and mother╒s sides. She was educated for a year in a convent school and otherwise by private tutors. At eighteen she became a novice of the Visitation Order at Sainte-Marie-d╒en Haut, near Grenoble, and she took the habit in September 1788. On the closing of the convent in 1792 as a result of the French Revolution she returned home. For nearly ten years she carried on private devotions and charity. When changed political conditions allowed the reopening of convents, she obtained possession of Sainte-Marie-d╒en-Haut and attempted to bring back the scattered Visitation nuns. Failing in that, she gathered a few companions and in 1804 joined the four-year-old Society of the Sacred Heart; Sainte-Marie became that order╒s second convent. A boarding school was begun a short time later. In 1815 she was elected secretary general of the order and sent to Paris to establish a convent there.
Three years later a long-standing ambition to work among Native Americans was brought closer when she and four companions were given permission by Mother General (now Saint) Madeleine Sophie Barat, founder of the order, to sail to Louisiana. They arrived in New Orleans in May 1818 and in St. Louis in August after a difficult journey. At the direction of Bishop William V. Du Bourg, on whose invitation they had come to America, they established the first free school west of the Mississippi River in St. Charles, Missouri. They encountered great hardship in the frontier village and after a year had to abandon the school. In 1819 they established a small convent in Florissant, Missouri, and opened a boarding school, a free parish school, an orphanage, a novitiate for the order, and a short-lived school for Native American girls. One of the sisters was dispatched to Louisiana to open a convent and school in Grand Coteau in 1821 and a second convent in St. Michael╒s in 1825. In 1827 Mother Duchesne accepted the gift of a house and land in St. Louis, where an orphanage, an academy, and a parish school were built. In 1828 the mission in St. Charles was reopened. Despite lack of resources the schools operated by Mother Duchesne╒s nuns were highly regarded and well attended. In 1841, at the age of seventy-one, she was at last permitted by Mother Barat to attempt work among Native Americans. In cooperation with a Jesuit mission under Father Pierre-Jean de Smet she established a school for girls of the Potawatomi tribe at Sugar Creek, Kansas. Ill and unable to speak the pupils╒ language, she did no teaching there; but her presence was formidable and influential, and the natives called her ╥Quah-kah-ka-num-ad,╙ ╥Woman who prays always.╙ A year later she was called back to the St. Charles, Missouri, convent, where she remained in seclusion until her death on November 18, 1852. In May 1940 she was declared beatified by Pope Pius XII.
