Coco Chanel - Early Life

Early Life

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born to an unwed mother, Eugénie "Jeanne" Devolle, a laundrywoman, in "the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence" in Saumur, France. She was Devolle's second daughter. Her father, Albert Chanel, was an itinerant street vendor who peddled work clothes and undergarments, living a nomadic life, traveling to and from market towns, while the family resided in rundown lodgings. In 1884, he married Jeanne Devolle, persuaded to do so by her family who had "united, effectively, to pay Albert to marry her." At birth, Chanel’s name was entered into the official registry as “Chasnel.” Jeanne was too unwell to attend the registration, and Albert was registered as "travelling". With both parents absent, the infant's last name was misspelled, probably due to a clerical error. The couple eventually had five other children: Julia-Berthe (1882–1912), Antoinette (born 1887), and the three sons, Alphonse (1885-1953), Lucien (born 1889), and Augustin, who died in infancy.

In 1895, when Gabrielle was twelve years old, her mother died of bronchitis at the age of only thirty-one. Gabrielle's father sent his two sons out to work as farm laborers and sent his three daughters to the Corrèze, in central France, to the convent of Aubazine, whose religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was "founded to care for the poor and rejected, including running homes for abandoned and orphaned girls". It was a stark, frugal life, demanding strict discipline. At age eighteen, Chanel, too old to remain at Aubazine, went to live in a boarding house set aside for Catholic girls in the town of Moulins.

Later in life, Chanel fabricated her history, concocting elaborate fictions in order to obscure her humble origins. Of the various stories told about Coco Chanel, a great number were of her own invention. These legends were to prove the undoing of her earliest biographies. These were ghosted memoirs commissioned by Chanel herself, but never published, always aborted before fruition, as she realized that the facts exposed a personage less laudatory than the mythic Chanel she had invented. Chanel would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America to seek his fortune and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 instead of 1883 and that her mother had died when Coco was two instead of twelve.