Charlotte Garrigue
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Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk (born November 20, 1850 in Brooklyn, New York, USA, died May 13, 1923 near Prague) was the wife of the Czech philosopher, sociologist, politician and statesman Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia. She was born to a Unitarian family with Huguenot ancestry on her father's side and having a Mayflower passengers' descent on her mother's one.
In 1877 visiting a friend studying at a conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, she first met her future husband Tomáš Masaryk who was staying there after having gained his doctorate at the University of Vienna. They married a year later in the USA, after which they settled in Vienna. After the wedding her husband added her surname into his name thus becoming Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, as he is remembered in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (or often by the abbreviation TGM). In 1881 the Masaryks moved to Prague, where TGM obtained a professorship at the University of Prague. Out of the couple's six children four of them reached adulthood - Alice, Herbert, Olga and Jan, who later became a noted Czechoslovakian diplomat and politician.
In the era before the First World War Mrs. Masaryk became involved in many social, humanitarian and cultural activities of the Prague society. She entered the Social Democratic Party, however she (in accordance with her husband) rejected the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle.
After the break out of the First World War her husband (with their daughter Olga) left for exile to pursue the international support for the independence of the nations of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, notably the Czechs and Slovaks. For the most of the war, Mrs. Masaryk was under police supervision, while daughter Alice was even under arrest. The situation went even worse when son Herbert died of typhus in 1915. All of these hardships made Charlotte Masaryk suffer from depression and cardiac problems.
In December 1918 Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk returned to Prague already as the President of Czechoslovakia. The family started to live at the Prague Castle spending often much time at the chateau of Lány.
