French scientist and revolutionary politician, born at Carpentras in the department of Vaucluse, France, on the 29th of January 1794, and attained the chair of philosophy in the college of his native place. He was called to pronounce the oration there on the anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, and this, on being submitted to Napoleon, elicited the remark: “Surveillez ce jeune homme, il ira loin.” In 1815 he hailed with joy the return of the Emperor and composed a song which was sung with enthusiasm everywhere. Removing to Paris in 1816 he took part in all the plots of the Restoration-period. In the Revolution of July 1830, he was severely wounded. Later he was instrumental in founding the club of “The Friends of the People,” and wrote a number of fugitive pieces against the July government, for which he suffered an imprisonment of fifteen months. On the compulsory dissolution of “The Friends of the People” in 1832, he took part in founding “The Society of the Rights of Man.” For a time he studied law, but, disgusted with its dry details, he turned from it and gave himself with enthusiasm to the natural sciences. His scientific writings of this earlier period were devoted to organic microscopic chemistry and to vegetable physiology. Beside general treatises he published Histoire Naturelle de l’ Insect de Gale (Paris, 1834).
On the outbreak of the riots of April 1834, he was again made prisoner, but being released after a short captivity he founded a revolutionary daily paper, Le Reformateur, which lived about a year. Raspail now devoted himself with redoubled zeal to science, and matured his camphor-system of medicine, proclaiming camphor as a specific against the germs of all, or most, zymotic diseases. This theory was set forth in his Histoire Naturelle de la Santé et de la Maladie (3 vols., 1839–46) and in several medical annuals which had extensive sale. On February 24, 1848, at the head of a riotous mob, he stormed his way into the council chamber of the Provisional Government in the Hôtel de Ville, and compelled this body to proclaim the Republic. On February 27th appeared the first number of his Ami du Peuple, whose teachings he enforced by the establishment of a revolutionary propaganda through clubs of the “Friends of the People.” Again, on May 15th, he invaded the sitting of the National Assembly. Brought for this outrage along with Blanqui and other ringleaders before the high court of justice in Bourges, he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in the citadel of Doullen. This confinement like the many others he had to undergo he utilized for the purposes of science, producing in his cell several of his most valuable works. In 1853 the Imperial government permitted him to exchange imprisonment for exile, and he settled in a village in Belgium. Elected a member of the Legislative Corps in 1869, he attached himself to the party of the extreme left and associated especially with Rochefort. In 1876 he was chosen a member of the Chamber of Deputies. He died on the 8th of February 1878, at Arcueil near Paris. Besides almanacs and scientific and medical reviews he published Reformes sociales (1872).
His son, Benjamin François Raspail, born at Paris, on the 16th of August 1823, has trod in his father’s footsteps. In 1849 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, but being proscribed in 1851, sought refuge in Belgium and did not return to France till 1863. In 1876 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he took his place on the extreme left. He died in 1899.
