The illegitimate daughter of a general and a writer, Marguerite Durand was raised by her maternal grandparents, who gave her a convent education. At the age of 17, she rebelled against her milieu and went off to become an actress at the Comédie française, where she became a star. In 1886 she married the rising radical deputy Georges Laguerre and her salon became a centre of the Boulangist movement which rocked the Republic in the late 1880s.