Une Imagination républicaine. François-Vincent Raspail (1794–1878)

This collection of essays by proficient university scholars—nine from France, one from Spain (José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez) and one from Canada (Dawn Dobbs)—is the result of an academic conference held in April 2015 in Carpentras, the birthplace of Raspail: the one of the boulevard fame in Paris. For Raspail’s political background, readers would do well to start with Chapter 7: ‘Un candidat “impossible”. La construction de la candidature Raspail à l’élection présidentielle’. It argues that the divisions among republicans and socialists during the Second Republic over the system of implementing democratic political representation are best illustrated in his candidature. Many of those splits have plagued the Left in France ever since. Already in 1831 and 1832, Raspail had headed the Société des Amis du peuple—details of which are given in Chapter 9 on ‘Les lunettes de M. Raspail. Les Almanacs de l’Ami du peuple, 1849–1850’—and in 1848, he had run into trouble with the authorities for his part in the 15 May 1848 demonstrations. His controversial candidacy for the radicals in the first presidential election run with manhood suffrage in September 1848 during the short-lived Second Republic, when he gained a fourth place after Bonaparte, Cavignac and Ledru-Rollin, was a tactic for his political opposition to the powers the newly elected regime was grabbing from the sovereign people.

The bulk of the work covers the many lesser-known facets of the ‘great man’, the extent of whose career is overshadowed by his place in the history annals of the Left: the punishments of imprisonment and exile from France after Napoleon III’s coup of 1851 did not deter him or others of his generation. Allowed to return in 1862 he was still in the political shadows until after the creation of the Third Republic in 1870 by which time he was seventy-four years old. Further biographical details emerge in the second part of the introduction, where there is a commentary on the extraordinary presence of Raspail the scientist throughout the entries in the Grand Dictionnaire du XIX^esiècle, the creator of which, Larousse, was an admirer. Raspail stood for election in Marseilles, campaigned for political amnesty for the Communards and became the doyen of the Assemblée Nationale until infirmity prevented him from exercising his role. Some family details are given of the Raspail dynasty—his sons and grandsons followed the tradition of a career in medicine, science and politics—which preserved his papers for posterity. There is a lively middle section of illustrations showing commemorative images of Raspail and caricatures.

The more original aspect of this volume is the excellent treatment of the historical context of the scientific feats of discovery and scholarship. Throughout his life, Raspail was an innovator and author in sciences as the dictionary entries and bibliography of his work testify. Known as the ‘doctor to the poor’ he applied his expertise to challenging elitist established scientific knowledge in addition to pursuing research into disease prevention and proposing measures to alleviate poverty. He worked on applying medical knowledge to identifying social causes of public health including prison reform, illustrated in chapters such as ‘Principes pour une réappropriation globale de la santé au XIXe siècle. Les combats de Raspail’; ‘Les spécialités à base de camphre de Raspail’; ‘Contre les poisons industriels. La voix dissonante de Raspail’. An important theme demonstrated by several chapters such as ‘Raspail et la science populaire’ and ‘Raspail et la défense des savoirs ouvriers et artisanaux’ is how as a true democrat he believed that knowledge should be made accessible to all: it was not to be the privilege of the few. With his wide knowledge of chemistry, botany, physiology, medicine, agronomy, economics and meteorology, Raspail had much to offer. Of interest to scholars working on the nineteenth-century history of knowledge, science and medicine, and the links of those disciplines with politics, this book has much to recommend it: written in a clear style, coherent through expert editorship and above all a well-organized set of chapters, it is an imaginative study that adds to biographical methods. The ‘candidat impossible’ has been transformed into a fascinating subject whose avant-garde approach to politicizing science and medicine in multiple schemes has been handled skilfully, making him highly relevant to today’s environmental and social problems.