Jean-Baptiste Geneviève Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent was a French naturalist, army officer and politician. He was born on 6 July 1778 in Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) and died on 22 December 1846 in Paris. Biologist and geographer, he was particularly interested in volcanology, systematics and botany.
Life
Youth Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint Vincent was born at Agen on 6 July 1778. His parents were Géraud Bory de Saint-Vincent and Madeleine de Journu; his father's family were petty nobility who played important roles at the bar and in the judiciary, during and after the French Revolution. Instilled with sentiments hostile to the revolution from childhood,Biography of Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent on the website of the French National Assembly: http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/sycomore/fiche/(num_dept)/16507 he studied first at the college of Agen, then with his uncle Journu-Auber in Bordeaux in 1787. He may have attended courses in medicine and surgery from 1791 to 1793. During the Reign of Terror in 1793, his family was persecuted and took refuge in the Landes.
In 1794, as a precocious naturalist, aged 15, Bory was instrumental in freeing from prisonLauzun 1908 p. 6 the entomologist Pierre André Latreille, whose early work he had read, and in saving Latreille from deportation to the penal colony of Cayenne.the ship Le Républicain, which was to transport him to French Guiana, sank in front of the Cordouan lighthouse with all prisoners aboard. Latreille later became one of the leading entomologists of his time; he and Bory remained lifelong friends. A student of geologist and mineralogist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu at the Paris School of Mines,Enis Rockel, Z'histoires de la Réunion, Télé Réunion, 10 August 2007. Bory sent his first scholarly publications to the Academy of Bordeaux the same year, and consequently came into contact with many established naturalists.
After the death of his father, he joined the French Revolutionary armies in 1799. Thanks to the recommendation of Jean-Gérard Lacuée, also from Agen, he was soon appointed second lieutenant.Lauzun 1908 He served first in the Army of the West, then in the Army of the Rhine under the orders of General Jean Victor Marie Moreau.Germain Sarrut and B. Saint-Edme, Biographie des hommes du jour: industriels..., Volume 2, page 79, Henri Krabbe, Paris, 1836. (Read online) He was then assigned to Brittany and moved to Rennes; it was at this time that he acquired his Bonapartist sentiments.
First expeditions in the oceans of Africa
In 1799, Bory learned about the upcoming departure of a scientific expedition to Australia organized by the government and obtained, thanks to his uncle and to the famous naturalist Bernard-Germain de Lacépède, the position of chief botanist aboard one of the three participating corvettes. Thus, after having left the Army of the West at the end of August and receiving from the Ministry of War an indefinite leave, Bory left Paris on 30 September and embarked in Le Havre on 19 October 1799 aboard the corvette commanded by Captain Nicolas Baudin, Le Naturaliste.Voyage dans les quatre principales îles des mers d'Afrique.
After several stops in Madeira, the Canary islands, and Cape Verde and then rounding the Cape of Good Hope, towards the middle of the trip Bory suddenly left the ship of Captain Baudin with whom he was in conflict and explored alone (and with limited resources) several islands of the African seas. He visited Mauritius in March 1800 during a stopover. From there, he sailed to the neighboring island of Réunion, where in October 1801 he ascended the Piton de la Fournaise, the active volcano of the island, and wrote the first general scientific description of it. He gave the name of his former professor Dolomieu, of whose death he had just learned, to one of the craters he described as a mamelon. He gave his own name to the summit crater, the Bory crater. On the way back, he continued his geographical, physical and botanical explorations on the island of Saint Helena
Bory was back in France by 11 July 1802 and learned that his mother had died during his absence. He published his Essai sur les Îles Fortunées (Essay on the archipelago of the Canary islands), which earned him his election first as correspondent of the National Museum of Natural History in August 1803, and later as correspondent first class of the Institut de France (division of Physical Sciences) in the spring of 1808. In 1804, he published his Voyage dans les quatre principales îles des mers d'Afrique.
Military campaigns Following his return, he resumed service in the army and, promoted to captain, he was transferred to the 5th Dragoon Regiment of cavalry, in the 3rd Army Corps of Marshal Davout, of which he became assistant staff captain on 3 October 1804. He was then assigned to the Camp of Boulogne for the creation of Emperor Napoleon I's Grande Armée.
From 1805 to 1814, Bory followed the greater part of Napoleon's campaigns within the Grande Armée. In 1805, he took part in the campaign of Austria as captain of dragoons and was present at the Battle of Ulm (15-20 October 1805) and at the Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805). Captain Bory then spent two years in Prussia and Poland and fought at the Battle of Jena (14 October 1806) and at the Battle of Friedland (14 June 1807). He continued drawing military maps of Franconia and Swabia and during his visits to Bavaria, Vienna and Berlin, where he found his own works translated into German, he took the opportunity to meet several scientists including the botanists Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin and Carl Ludwig Willdenow, who received him with open arms and presented him with valuable gifts. In October 1808, he served on the staff of Marshal Ney, which he soon left to be attached to Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, as aide-de-camp, in October 1809. Having been promoted to major, Bory was mainly involved in military reconnaissance thanks to his skills in graphic work. From 1809 to 1813, he took part in the French campaign of Spain and distinguished himself at the Siege of Badajoz in the spring of 1811, at the Battle of Quebara and at the Battle of Albuera (16 May 1811). Events having placed him at the head of the troops that formed the garrison of Agen, he found himself commanding soldiers from his hometown for about two weeks. In May 1811, he became squadron leader and was then appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the year.
Alongside Soult, Bory hastily left Spain to take part to the German campaign and participate in the Battle of Lützen (2 May 1813) and in the Battle of Bautzen (20-21 May 1813). After these victories, he returned to his homeland for the campaign of France of 1814 and fought at the Battle of Orthez (27 February 1814). He also took part in the Battle of Toulouse (10 April 1814), and on the following day organized troops of partisans and scouts in his own region of Agen. After the first abdication of Napoleon I in April 1814 and his exile to the island of Elba, of which Bory learned at Agen on 13 April 1814, he went to Paris.
Marshal Soult, rallying to the new government and having been appointed Minister of War, summoned Bory to his staff and appointed him to the rank of colonel. He also offered Bory, on 10 October 1814, the service of the ministry's Dépôt de la Guerre (a depository of maps and archives), to which his topographic work entitled him. He remained there until his proscription on 25 July 1815. Bory worked on scientific and literary works as well, and took part in the writing of the satirical liberal, anti-monarchist and pro-Bonapartist newspaper, the Nain Jaune.
Political exile
On the return of Napoleon from exile, Bory was elected by the college of the department of Lot-et-Garonne, on 16 May 1815, to the office of representative of Agen at the Chamber of the Hundred Days and sat with the liberals.Bory de Saint-Vincent is deputy of Lot-et-Garonne at the Chamber of the Hundred Days from 15 May 1815 to 13 July 1815. (Biography of Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent in the website of the French National Assembly: http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/sycomore/fiche/(num_dept)/16507) He proclaimed the constitution, gave a resounding speech before the tribune, and virulently opposed the Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto.
Absent at Waterloo, his mandate as deputy confining him to the legislative body, he saw the abdication of Napoleon I and the return of King Louis XVIII. Placed by Fouché on the lists of proscription by the Ordonnance of 24 July 1815, which condemned 57 persons for having served Napoleon during the Hundred Days after having pledged allegiance to Louis XVIII, Bory first took refuge in the valley of Montmorency, from where, hidden, he published his Justification de la conduite et des opinions de M. Bory de Saint-Vincent. Then, the amnesty law of 12 January 1816 was proclaimed by the King, condemning Bory to exile, and he went to Liège under a false name. First invited by the King of Prussia (thanks to Bory's friendship with the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt) to stay in Berlin, then in Aachen, he was expelled after eighteen months. He refused to submit to the decision which assigned him to Königsberg or Prague for his residence, and when he was offered a commission as General in Bolívar's new Republic of Colombia by botanist and friend (and vice-president) Francisco Antonio Zea, he declined. He finally managed to reach Holland, disguised as a brandy merchant and with a false passport, then Brussels, where he met Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and where he lived until 1820. With Auguste Drapiez and Jean-Baptiste Van Mons, he founded and became one of the scientific directors of the Annales générales des Sciences physiques, edited in Brussels by the printer Weissenbruch from 1819 to 1821. The articles, written by international scientific luminaries, were illustrated with lithographs printed first by Duval de Mercourt and then by Marcellin Jobard.
On 1 January 1820, Bory was finally allowed to return to France. Dismissed from the army and deprived of pay, he returned to Paris where he lived until 1825. He was obliged to devote himself entirely to editorial work (on his Annales of Brussels in particular) and he collaborated with various liberal newspapers, including the Courrier français, which reserved for him the drafting of the reports on the sessions of the Chamber of Deputies. He gave up later, when, devoting himself entirely to science, he found in the many books he was selling to booksellers an honorable means of livelihood. However, in 1823, he fought a duel with a pistol and was wounded in the foot, and, in 1825, he was thrown in prison at Sainte-Pélagie for debts, where he remained until 1827.In order to alleviate his discomfiture, Bory's colleagues at the Museum of Natural History had introduced a new "tradition": they were bringing Zarafa, the giraffe presented to King Charles X by Muhammad Ali of Egypt (and newly received in France in 1826) up the Coypeau Hill (the labyrinth) to the Jardin des Plantes. Bory, warned about this attention, was climbing up to the roof of the neighboring Sainte-Pélagie Prison, equipped with its telescope, in order to study it. Muhammad Ali of EgyptDespite the lively protests of Bory who wanted to stay in Ste-Pelagie until the end of his sentence (he was not complaining at all about his treatment in this philosophical asylum, living well, eating a lot, sleeping marvelously and receiving his friends for dinner, including Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire or his daughter Augustine, around a garbure landaise...), his future son-in-law Mr. Morel secretly bought back his debts from his usurers, allowing him to be released and to be able to accompany his daughter Augustine to the altar. (in Bory de Saint-Vincent, Correspondance, published and annotated by Philippe Lauzun, Maison d'édition et imprimerie moderne, 1908.)