Charles-Eugène de Foucauld de Pontbriand was born in Strasbourg to one of the great Catholic noble families of France. Orphaned at six and raised by his maternal grandfather (a colonel), he lost his faith in adolescence and entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr — graduating near the bottom of his class as a notorious idler and bon vivant. He served as a cavalry officer in Algeria, was expelled for taking his mistress with him as 'Madame Vicomte de Foucauld,' resigned his commission, and undertook a remarkable solo geographical expedition into Morocco in 1883–84 disguised as a Russian Jewish rabbi (the country was forbidden to Christians). His Reconnaissance au Maroc won him gold medals from the French Geographical Society.
Returning to France he experienced a profound reconversion. In the church of St. Augustin in Paris in October 1886 he asked a holy priest (Fr. Henri Huvelin) to hear his confession — Huvelin instead made him receive Communion. From that moment Foucauld was transformed. He entered the Trappists in 1890, was professed, asked for and obtained transfer to a more austere Syrian Trappist house, then left to live as a hermit-servant at the Poor Clare convent at Nazareth (1897–1900), then was ordained priest at Viviers (1901) and immediately requested permission to serve the Tuareg people of the Sahara as a hermit.
From 1901 until his death in 1916, Charles de Foucauld lived alone — first at Beni Abbès on the Algerian-Moroccan border, then from 1905 at the remote Tuareg town of Tamanrasset in the Hoggar mountains. He made no converts. He compiled the first French-Tuareg dictionary (a four-volume scholarly work still in use). He served the sick, ransomed slaves, and offered his life in silent friendship for the salvation of the people among whom he lived.
He was shot dead by a marauding Senusi band on December 1, 1916 in his small mud-walled hermitage at Tamanrasset. He had no living disciples. His writings, dispersed by friends in France over the following decades, slowly generated the religious families of the Little Brothers of Jesus (1933) and Little Sisters of Jesus (1939) — now spread across the world. Beatified 2005; canonised by Pope Francis on May 15, 2022.