Marthe Robin was born on 13 March 1902 to a poor farming family at the hamlet of La Plaine, Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, in the French Drôme. From the age of sixteen she suffered from a progressive encephalitis; on 25 March 1928 full paralysis set in and she was confined to bed in the family farmhouse — which she never left — for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. Her sight failed in 1940; her bedroom shutters were kept closed.
In 1930 her ability to swallow ceased. From that year until her death — some fifty-one years — according to the depositions of her parish priest Fr. Georges Finet, her medical attendants, and successive teams of investigating doctors from Lyon and Grenoble, she consumed nothing whatever except the Sacred Host approximately once a week, a single fragment about half a centimetre square. From 1930 she also bore the stigmata: every Friday she reproduced the wounds of Christ's Passion, entering a state in which she relived the Passion from Thursday evening until Sunday morning. Dr. Robert Assailly, sent by the archdiocese in 1942, attested to the phenomena under sealed report; six popes were informed of her case through the successive bishops of Valence. No investigation was conducted under controlled conditions, and no autopsy was made.
From her bedside she co-founded with Fr. Finet the Foyers de Charité, an international lay movement of retreat centres that has spread to dozens of countries; the first retreat was preached at Châteauneuf in September 1936. Some 100,000 visitors came to consult her over fifty years, including bishops, theologians, and several future French presidents and prime ministers. She died on 6 February 1981. Her cause for beatification was opened on 6 February 1998, and she was declared Venerable by Pope Francis on 7 November 2014; the cause continues.