Jeanne Jugan was the second of eight children of a Cancale fisherman of the Côtes-d'Armor coast of Brittany. Her father was lost at sea when she was four. She worked as a kitchen maid, then as a household servant for decades — from twenty-five to nearly fifty in the household of a Cancale aristocratic family, the Lecoq de Kerland. She refused two marriage proposals in her twenties. From around 1817, attached to the Third Order of the Eudist Heart-of-Mary association, she lived in deliberate community with two other Catholic single laywomen at Saint-Servan near Saint-Malo.
On a winter night in 1839, then forty-six, she encountered an old, blind, partly-paralysed woman at her doorstep with nowhere to spend the night. Jeanne carried her up the stairs, gave her her own bed, and slept on the floor. The episode became the foundation of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Within months Jeanne had organized her small community to take in additional elderly indigent women; by 1842 they were running a small shelter at Saint-Servan with twelve elderly residents, and Jeanne — who had no source of funding — was personally walking the local streets daily begging house-to-house for bread, money, and clothes for the residents. The famous formula of the Little Sisters' begging-rounds, still used today across their global network, dates from her practice: 'Au nom des Pauvres, merci!' ('In the name of the Poor — thank you!').
The community grew rapidly across northern France and beyond — by 1879 there were over 2,400 Little Sisters in 177 houses serving 19,000 elderly indigent residents across France, Belgium, England, Spain, Algeria, and the United States. Jeanne herself was, with characteristic ecclesiastical-political tragedy, displaced from leadership of her own community in 1843 by the new diocesan-appointed superior Father Le Pailleur, who systematically obscured her role and demoted her to a humble novice-trainer at the Brittany mother-house. She lived the remaining thirty-six years of her life in obscurity at La Tour Saint-Joseph in Saint-Pern, not officially recognized as foundress; the novices who knew her were warned not to acknowledge her standing. The historical record was only set straight after Father Le Pailleur's death in 1893 and Jeanne's full recognition as foundress was definitively established in 1902 by Pope Leo XIII. She died at La Tour Saint-Joseph on August 29, 1879. Canonized 2009.