BIOGRAPHY OF A VENERATED MISSIONARY AND ABOLITIONIST
Born in 1779 at Chamblanc, near Seurre, Anne-Marie Javouhey founded the Burgundy based order of Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny in 1798. She is said to have had visions at an early age of Teresa of Avila giving into her care children of different races, which became the foundation of her lifelong commitment to missionary work, education and reform in the French speaking colonies of the Atlantic world.
Her schools, missions and hospitals included such locations as the Île Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, Gorée off the coast of Senegal, French Guiana and Guadeloupe. She was a pioneer of mental healthcare in Africa, and believed in integrated education. Her expeditions were both intrepid and successful, as her work in French Guiana can attest: “The French Government, after unsuccessful attempts at colonizing the rich interior of this country, appealed to the foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who were already established there. Having submitted her plans for approval and received full authority, Mother Javouhey set out for Guiana in 1828, with 36 sisters and 50 emigrants, and soon had organized a self-supporting colony” (Catholic Encyclopædia). This community developed into the town of Mana in the northwest of the country. The settlement grew around an orphanage, but soon became a refuge for newly emancipated and runaway slaves, as well as supporting a leprosarium.
Javouhey herself was a firm believer in the total abolition of slavery, but her presence in the French colonies served an important purpose in the run up to the 1848 French emancipation act. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution there was a certain amount of backlash from pro-slavery factions of French society who used the threat of insurrection and unrest as a reason to forestall or qualify emancipation. The gradual acts of abolition therefore were established to only grant freedom to those who demonstrably assimilated to colonial life. Javouhey’s presence, as well as her education and Christianisation initiatives, served as an important ameliorative in this process, and ultimately she was credited with enabling the smooth and peaceful emancipation of hundreds of formerly enslaved Africans, well in advance of the 1848 proclamation.
Though certainly taking a paternalistic approach, Javouhey was in her own time considered to be something of a radical, and has been subsequently recognised as an important forebear of modern social justice movements. Her attempts to improve the lives of formerly enslaved Africans in the French colonies made her a target for assassination attempts as well as excommunication. She died aged 71 in 1851, was venerated in 1908, and beatified in 1950.
.
