Anne Charlotte was born at the Château de Lunéville because the Capital of Lorraine, Nancy, was occupied by French troops of Louis XIV due to the War of the Spanish Succession.
She met her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Orléans, the Princess Palatine for the first and last time; the occasion was for the coronation of Louis XV at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Rheims.
In 1723 Anne Charlotte's father, Léopold, disappointed with his relations with France, decided to send his heir to finish his education in Vienna under the supervision of Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor.
The intrigues of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Bourbon, prince of the blood, head of the Condé family and great rival of the House of Orléans also fought fiercely to stop the marriage as it would have decreased their influence over the young king.
Despite the plans of the Prime Minister, Marie Leszczyńska, a poor and plain catholic princess who was the second daughter of an exiled King Stanislaw I of Poland was chosen as the bride of the monarch.
In 1726, the son of the now dead Regent, nephew of the Duchess of Lorraine, became a widower aged 23; his wife Margravine Auguste Marie Johanna of Baden-Baden had died in Paris in childbirth.
[1] Her new title caused irritation between certain sovereign princes because this abbey, composed solely of ladies of high nobility and of which the temporal domain included a big number of towns, answered only to authority of the pope.
In 1754 at the age of 30, Anne Charlotte was made the Secular Abbess of the chapter of Noble Ladies of Saint Waltrude of Mons; thus she went to Belgium to see her youngest brother Charles Alexander who had been the Governor of the Austrian Netherlands since 1744.
Although Charles Alexander had been a widower for ten years, his wife was the youngest sister of the Empress and she reproached him about his liaison with Madame de Meuse.
In 1765, she attended the marriage of her nephew the future Léopold II to Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain in Innsbrück; the same year her brother the Emperor died.