Juliette Colbert de Barolo

Juliette Victoire Colbert was born on 26 June 1786 in Maulévrier, in the historic province of Anjou in western France. She belonged to the Colbert family of Maulévrier, a branch of the house whose most famous member, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had been the principal minister of King Louis XIV. The French Revolution broke out when she was a small child, and the aristocratic world into which she had been born was violently overturned. Many relatives faced exile or the scaffold, and her education and early piety were formed in this climate of instability and loss. She emerged from those years with a deep Catholic faith and a lasting concern for those who suffered injustice or abandonment.

In 1806 she married Carlo Tancredi Falletti, Marquis of Barolo, a cultured Piedmontese nobleman then living in France. The marriage united two old families and considerable wealth. After a period in Paris during the Napoleonic years, the couple established themselves in Turin at the Palazzo Barolo. They had no children. Rather than treating childlessness as a private sorrow alone, they came to regard the poor, prisoners, and neglected girls of the city as the family entrusted to them. Carlo Tancredi later served as mayor of Turin and shared his wife’s religious and philanthropic convictions. Their home became a center of Catholic charitable and intellectual life in Restoration Piedmont.

Juliette’s most distinctive work was among women in prison. She obtained permission to visit the female inmates of Turin’s jails, bringing material aid, religious instruction, and the prospect of a different life after release. She and her husband founded refuges so that women leaving prison would not be forced back into crime or prostitution, and they created schools for poor and abandoned girls as well as support for hospitals and asylums for the chronically ill. In the same decades Turin saw the rise of other great charitable initiatives, and the Barolo works formed part of a broader Catholic response to urban poverty. The writer Silvio Pellico, freed after years of Austrian imprisonment, found hospitality and friendship with the couple.

In 1834 Juliette founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne to ensure that the education of poor girls would continue under religious care. Her husband died in 1838, after which she took full direction of their foundations and lived with still greater austerity and prayer. She promoted further works for former prisoners and for the sick, and she undertook the building of the Church of Santa Giulia in Turin, dedicated to the martyr Saint Julia and intended as the spiritual heart of her institutions and as her own burial place. She spent her last years in a routine of Mass, visits to her houses, and correspondence, widely regarded in Piedmont as a woman of holiness though she sought no public notice.

Juliette Colbert Falletti di Barolo died in Turin on 19 January 1864 and was buried in the Church of Santa Giulia. Devotion to her memory remained strong among the Sisters of Saint Anne and in the city she had served. The cause for her beatification advanced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; she was declared Venerable by Pope Francis, and on 29 May 2021 she was beatified in Turin. She is honored as a model of lay and married holiness, a foundress, and a pioneer of organized charity toward prisoners and poor girls in nineteenth-century Italy.