Paul Bert

Paul Bert (October 19th 1833, Auxerre - November 11th 1886, Hanoï) is a physiologist and politician French.

Biography

He enters to the Polytechnic school (of which he will not be graduate) with the intention to become an engineer. He studies then the law, obtaining a Doctorat in right in 1857; and finally under the influence of the zoologist, Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815-1865), it is interested in physiology, becoming one of the most brilliant pupils of Claude Bernard. Doctor of medicine in 1864 (thesis on the animal Clerc's Offices), science doctor in 1866, professor of physiology in Bordeaux in 1866 (it was youngest professor de France) then with the Sorbonne in 1869, he becomes member of the Academy of Science in 1882.

The scientist

The name of Paul Bert is associated with the physiology of the Plongée underwater. It is the first to have described in a systematic way the state of convulsion related to toxicity of oxygen under strong partial pressure for the central nervous system called “Effet Paul Bert”. It publishes a summary work in 1878, the barometric Pressure , where it describes various experiments on the demonstrations caused by the variations of the Atmospheric pressure and the oxygen pressure on the human being, and this, using a tight box of big size, being able to contain a man. It thus details the effects of the lack (Hypoxie) or of too full of oxygen (Hyperoxie).

It will apply its knowledge to the realization of a Scaphandre provided with a governor automatically-controlled. He also works, during the years 1870, on anesthetic gases.

In 1874, it prepares the aeronauts Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Theodore Sivel with a rise in balloon with: 7300 m of altitude. The following year, whereas the two aeronauts launch out in a new rise in company of Gaston Tissandier, they do not receive in time a letter of Paul Bert informing that their oxygen reserve will not be sufficient for three men. Seul Tissandier will survive forwarding.

The policy

Many streets of our communes and many schools bear its name because Paul Bert is especially known as a politician. He left his mark in three fields: the State education, worships and colonies. He was appointed republican, Ministre for the State education and Minister for the Cultes of the government Gambetta from November 14th, 1881 to January 30th, 1882, and Resident general with the Tonkin and in Annam.

Paul Bert was with Jules Ferry the founding father of the free school, laic and obligatory (for example, law of the August 9th 1879 imposing the creation of at least a Teacher training school boys but also of girls by department, for the formation of the black hussards. Although minister of religion and thus parking protection of the State with respect to the religions, it devoted himself to the fight against the Cléricalisme. He was member of several companies of free thinkers whose majority were created with the beginning of the year 1880. Paul Bert was founding member and vice-president until his death of the democratic Union of propaganda anticlerical who gathered atheists materialists.

The civil national funeral of Paul Bert caused a scandal among catholics. Free-thinker, faithful to the currency “Neither God, nor Master, with bottom the cap and lives the Social one”, Paul Bert opposed science to the religion. He considered indeed that these two systems of values and beliefs were antagonistic. He wrote: “With science, more possible superstitions, more foolish hopes, more these credulities niaises, of these beliefs in the miracles, anarchy in nature. ” Follower of the applied science, it refused to be interested in the questions of the existence of God and even less belief as a God. He made register on his funerary stele “Science” and “Fatherland” to affirm his ultimate conviction of science against the religion.

Active member of the Company of anthropology of Paris as from 1861, Paul Bert takes an active part in the diffusion of the theses racists of this company, in particular when he becomes Minister for the State education. He is thus the writer of several explicitly racist school handbooks. According to Lemon-yellow Suzanne, it also clearly took part to give a nationalist orientation to the school handbooks of IIIe République, in particular the school handbooks of history, geography and French.

He was freemason and had collaborated with Jean Macé in the direction of the League of teaching.

Posterity

A price Paul Bert was created by the American space agency and the American company of physiology rewarding for work in the field of the physiology of space.

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