Concept

Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent

Summary
Jean-Baptiste Geneviève Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent was a French naturalist, 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. 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, 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 prison the entomologist Pierre André Latreille, whose early work he had read, and in saving Latreille from deportation to the penal colony of Cayenne. 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, 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. 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. He was then assigned to Brittany and moved to Rennes; it was at this time that he acquired his Bonapartist sentiments.
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