At the time of his murder, Fr. Charles de Foucauld had been living alone in the outer reaches of the Algerian desert for more than a decade. Once known as “Le Porc” (pig) and nearly drummed out of the French calvary for “premature obesity,” he had become a gaunt, leathery hermit who only escaped starvation during a famine with the help of his impoverished Tuareg neighbors.
Though it’s hard to imagine this 20th century desert father having anything in common with a genteel American widow and mother of five, he might have become a soul friend to Elizabeth Seton had they lived in the same century and had a chance to meet. Both went through major losses as small children, traumatic deprivations that haunted them into adult life. Both were devoted to the Eucharist. And both experienced a martyr’s death—his officially designated as such, and hers, a martyrdom of love.
But it is their dramatic conversion stories—Elizabeth’s after an arduous trip to Italy with her dying husband and her life-changing encounter while there with the Catholic Church, and Charles’s delayed for years by his intractable rebelliousness—that unite them as witnesses to the power of divine love.
Born in France in 1858, Charles should have enjoyed a privileged, pampered upbringing in the heart of his illustrious family, which included forebears who served as Crusaders under Louis IX and, centuries later, relatives who died during the French Revolution. But when he was only five, his gentle father suffered a complete mental breakdown that turned him into a raging stranger. Within a year, both of Charles’s young parents were dead. A grandmother who stepped in to care for Charles and his younger sister soon died herself.
Their remaining grandfather became their guardian. A respected colonel in the military, he adored the little orphans but had none of the skills necessary to rear them properly. Still shocked by their tragic losses and fearful that Charles might have inherited his father’s mental instability, their grandfather coddled and indulged them. His aunt and his cousin Marie, genuinely interested in the intelligent, passionate child he was becoming, introduced him to the faith. At thirteen, he was confirmed a Catholic, and for a while, took his new religious practice seriously.
But atheism was in the wind, and not even Marie’s steadying influence could overcome the bright teenager’s secret doubts about Christianity. Charles read whatever caught his fancy with no objections from his indulgent grandfather. The same held true in school. His teachers, he wrote, were “all very respectful,” in the sense that they encouraged him to explore philosophical ideas at will, but the result was predictable. By the time he was seventeen, Charles wrote, “I lived the way it is possible to live once the last spark of faith has been extinguished. . . all egotism, all impiety, all desire for evil; it was as if I had gone a little mad.”
His downward slide continued at the famous Saint-Cyr school for future officers. He deliberately overindulged in sweets, tobacco, alcohol, and women, a trend that accelerated after his grandfather died and he came into a fabulous inheritance. But no matter how many expensive Havana cigars he smoked or how much priceless foi gras he gobbled, Charles could not evade the depressing result of unrestrained hedonism: “I am wholeheartedly bored.”
He knew he had to find a better way. He tried the prestigious calvary school at Saumur only to discover he didn’t like horses, much less eleven hours a day in the saddle. Sick of the monotony but unable to get leave, he disguised himself as a beggar and was only caught by the gendarmes as he was about to leap from a bridge onto a moving train. Things got worse from there: Charles moved his mistress, Mimi, into his own quarters and refused to give her up even when his division was deployed to Algeria.
It was not until his first experience of armed combat that the young rebel came into his own. To everyone’s surprise, he proved to be an excellent military leader. Yet it wasn’t the fighting that brought out the best in him. It was the desert itself: the purple-blue of the hills at sundown, the enormous silence, the velvety blackness of the sky on starry nights. Finally, Charles had found something bigger than himself: “Africa! I can demand anything of her; for her, I can demand anything of myself. Because she is the earthly representation of eternity, she gives me the true, the good, and the beautiful.” He was equally fascinated by the peoples of the region—the Kabyles, Berbers, Arabs, and Jews—and he longed for the freedom to explore this mysterious world more fully.
Against the advice of his worried family, Charles left the army, disguised himself as a poor, wandering Jewish rabbi, and embarked on a year-long trek through Algeria and Morocco, making him the first European to set foot in the inaccessible regions beyond the Atlas Mountains. He tried to put into words what he was experiencing: “Harsh beauty of the landscape, seen under indescribable light . . . The contemplation during such nights leads one to understand the Arab belief in a mysterious night when the sky opens, angels descend to earth, the water in the sea turns fresh, and all that is inanimate in nature bows down to adore its Creator.”
Moved by the simple piety of the Muslims, he found himself questioning his own atheism: “Observing this faith and these souls living with God as a continual presence has allowed me to glimpse something greater and more true than worldly occupations.”
Back in Paris, Charles settled down to write a book about his travels, which earned him a gold medal from the Societe de Geographie de Paris and established him as a serious geographer. He could have launched another expedition; instead, he was being called to make an interior journey.
He’d been wondering for some time about the Christianity he had abandoned, and whether answers for his long-ago questions might exist. His cousin Marie advised he meet with her spiritual advisor, a local priest. So early one morning, Charles slipped into the confessional at Saint-Augustin’s church to speak with Father Huvelin. The priest asked if he had ever believed, and Charles admitted that he once had but that “there are all the obstacles of the mysteries, the dogma, the miracles.”
His doubts were not the problem, said the priest. “What is missing now. . . is a pure heart. Go down on your knees, make your confession to God, and you will believe.” Dumbfounded, Charles obeyed, making a lengthy confession that covered his entire life. When it was over and he had been absolved, he was given another astonishing order. Father Huvelin told him to “receive Communion.” Charles knelt at the altar to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ for the first time in thirteen years. His conversion was both instantaneous and irreversible: “As soon as I came to believe there was a God, I understood that I could not do otherwise than live only for him.”
That conviction led him to try the life of a monk at several contemplative monasteries, and finally, to the solitary desert hermitage where he died thirty years after his confession at Saint-Augustin’s. Though he initially saw himself as a missionary in the style of the 19th-century “White Fathers” who evangelized Africa, he soon realized that his nomadic Tuareg neighbors were suspicious: perhaps he was a spy for the French military. So he vowed to live as Jesus had. Wearing crude sandals and a stained cotton robe, Charles slept on a palm mat on the dirt floor. The once-debauched young aristocrat now survived on wheat-flour mush and a few crushed dates, but he shared whatever he had. Committed to becoming a “universal brother” of everyone who crossed his path, his humility and kindness earned him widespread respect among the desert tribesmen, who called him “the Christian marabout.”
However, the outbreak of World War I and France’s mass conscription of young Muslims in Algeria increased armed clashes across the already-violent Sahara, and Father Charles was advised to get out while he could. After so many wasted years, however, he was not about to abandon his difficult, precious calling: “Giving thanks for anything, I am ready for anything, as long as your will, O God, is done in me.” Even if that meant death: “I must live as if I were to die a martyr today.”
On December 1, 1916, death indeed came for him. Shot in the head by a fifteen-year-old tribal raider named Sermi ag Thora, he was found in a shallow grave in the sand. Nearby, lay scattered items flung aside by the disappointed bandits, who’d been hoping for gold.
One was a monstrance containing the Body of Christ.
PAULA HUSTON is a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow and the author of two novels and eight books of spiritual nonfiction. Her short stories have honored by Best American Short Stories and her essays have appeared in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology. Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, Huston is a convert to Catholicism. In 1999, she became a Camaldolese Benedictine Oblate and is a lay member of New Camaldoli Hermitage’s community of monks in Big Sur, Calif. She’s also a former president of the Chrysostom Society, a national organization of literary Christian writers.
Image: St. Charles de Foucauld. Public Domain.
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