Louis Ramond de Carbonnières

Louis François Élisabeth Ramond, baron de Carbonnières (4 January 1755 Strasbourg – 14 May 1827), was a French politician, geologist and botanist. He is regarded as one of the first explorers of the high mountains of the Pyrenees who can be described as a pyreneist. Louis Ramond was born in Strasbourg, to Pierre-Bernard Ramond (1715–1796), treasurer of war, and Rosalie-Reine Eisentrand (1732–1762). He studied law at the University of Strasbourg in 1775 and became a lawyer in February 1777. In Strasbourg he became friends with another student, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), a writer belonging to the then-fashionable Sturm und Drang movement. During this period Ramond discovered German Romantic literature, in particular Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; this book inspired him to become a writer and in 1777 he published the Werther-influenced Les Dernières aventures du jeune d'Olban (The Last Adventures of Young Olban). Ramond undertook a voyage to Switzerland in May 1777 where he met writers and poets, as well as scientists: the theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), and the zoologists Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) and Charles Bonnet (1720–1793); he also came across his friend Lenz there. The two men shared what was by all accounts an ecstatic experience contemplating the valley of the Rhine. Ramond also caught the passion for high mountains. A few days later, Lenz suffered his first bout of insanity. In 1778, Ramond published Élégies, impressions inspired by his love for nature. Extracts from this work were published the same year in the Journal de Dames of Claude-Joseph Dorat (1734–1780). In 1779, Ramond and his father settled in Paris. In 1780, Ramond published La Guerre d'Alsace pendant le Grand Schisme d'Occident (The War of Alsace during the Great Western Schism), a romantic and historical epic. But the French capital was not yet ready for German Romanticism and the book was not received as well as he had hoped.