Rutan served as the mother superior of a hospital the sisters managed until the time of the French Revolution when she was executed based on the allegations of fanaticism and anti-Revolution sentiment.

[1] The process for beatification – the recognition that she died "in odium fidei" (in hatred of the faith) – commenced under Pope Benedict XV but was long and protracted; it seemed doomed after Rome suggested there was no local following (or "cultus") to Rutan.

[2] Marguerite Rutan was born in France on 23 April 1736 as the eighth of fifteen children to Charles Gaspard and Marie Forat; she was baptized hours after her birth in the parish church of Saint Stephen.

She was sent on various assignments during her novitiate in the line of Saint Vincent de Paul's core precept: "Let us not be bound in any way, neither to places nor to tasks, not to people".

[4] The Bishop of Dax Louis-Marie de Suarez d'Aulan asked the sisters to take charge of a new hospital in Saint-Eutrope; Rutan arrived there in 1779 with a small group of seven religious and was appointed as its Mother Superior.

In 1795 - after her execution - French officials involved in The Terror expressed their regret that such a woman "had been sacrificed in a barbarian manner on alleged grounds that still were not evidenced".

In 1909 a request from Rome from the Congregation of Rites demanded another process be opened to ascertain whether or not Rutan was venerated on a broad scale following her execution since the acknowledgment of "non-cultus" would have been fatal to the cause and its potential continuation.

Petitions led to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints granting approval at the resumption of the cause and reconfirmed her title of Servant of God under Pope John Paul II on 26 June 1998.