Anne-Marie Javouhey was born to a small Burgundian peasant family at Jallanges in the Côte-d'Or — her father had himself, as a young man, smuggled non-juring priests across French Revolution Burgundy. At nineteen, in 1798, she dedicated herself privately to religious life despite the suppression of all religious orders, gathered around her four sisters and a small group of like-minded laywomen, and from 1805 began organizing a small Burgundy religious community for the catechetical education of poor children. In 1807, with the encouragement of Pius VII (then in temporary exile from Napoleon), she made formal religious vows and founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny.
The Sisters' work spread quickly across Burgundy. But from 1817 — encouraged by the early French colonial administration of the Bourbon Restoration — Anne-Marie sent her sisters as missionaries to the French overseas colonies: first to Réunion, then to Senegal (1819), then to French Guiana (1828), then to Madagascar, Tahiti, and the French Antilles. In each colony the Sisters opened schools both for French settlers and for enslaved and recently-emancipated African and Caribbean populations.
Her work in French Guiana in the 1830s and 1840s was the most consequential. The French Bourbon administration entrusted to her the running of the new settlement of Mana on the Maroni River as a colony for emancipated slaves — the first French colonial governmental project of legal emancipation. Anne-Marie ran the settlement personally from 1828 to 1843, gradually transforming it into a functioning self-governing community of free black Catholics. She was particularly opposed by the plantation-owners' faction in the colony and by their Parisian sponsor Bishop Jean-Baptiste Castalan of Beauvais, who attempted in 1834 to have her formally suppressed (she was personally vindicated by King Louis-Philippe). She died at the Paris maison-mère on July 15, 1851 — three years after the formal French abolition of slavery in 1848. Beatified 1950.