Marcellin Champagnat was born to a small Auvergnat peasant family. His own boyhood was famously without formal education; his first day at the village school was so traumatic (he saw the teacher beat another boy) that he refused to return. His mother taught him the basics at home; he learned to read and write only in his late teens, after deciding to enter the seminary. He was ordained priest at Lyon in 1816 at twenty-seven — one of the last ordinands of the Restoration French Church before the 19th-century mass-clerical expansion.
His first assignment as curate to the parish of La Valla, in the wild Pilat hills of the Loire department south of Lyon, brought him face to face with the catastrophe of post-Revolutionary French rural Catholic education. A dying boy he was called to anoint did not know that God existed, that there was a Saviour, or what a prayer was. The episode galvanized him. Within months he had founded — January 2, 1817 — the Little Brothers of Mary (the Marist Brothers): a lay teaching congregation specifically for the catechetical education of poor French rural children. The first novice was a teenaged farmboy he had personally evangelized.
Under his twenty-three years of leadership the Marist Brothers grew from two to over 280 brothers serving over 7,000 students in over 50 French schools. The order survived the upheavals of the long French 19th century and expanded globally; by 2024 the Marist Brothers operate over 500 schools in 80 countries. He died at the mother-house of Notre-Dame de l'Hermitage near Saint-Chamond on June 6, 1840 — five years after the death of Magdalena di Canossa, with whom he shared a parallel charism of catechetical education for the poor. Canonized 1999.