Louis Pasteur was a great chemist.
I met this personality, really interesting, on the occasion of a research I did at the time on the birth of Stereochemistry. Pasteur is known as a scientist in the fields of biology and medicine, but his beginnings were in the fields of crystallography and chemistry. In fact, he started with an academic preparation in the chemical sciences. He worked a lot on the structure of crystals, making discoveries that had an enormous impact on the progress of chemistry. I have dedicated an article to this content of his research on this same site.
In this new article I wanted to focus on his private life and the places of his work.
Pasteur and Napoleon share a privilege
Louis Pasteur enjoys a great privilege: while all the greats of France are buried together in the nation’s mausoleum that is the Pantheon in Paris, a personal mausoleum has been dedicated to Pasteur. A large crypt decorated with very beautiful mosaics that reproduce the style of the churches of Ravenna. His privileged position he shares only with another great character that the French consider the father of the country. This personality is Napoleon Bonaparte who is buried in a mausoleum, dedicated to him alone, at the Hôtel des Invalides in the heart of Paris. The following images show the crypt with the tomb and the funerary mask made immediately after Pasteur’s death. There is also a portrait representing Louis Pasteur as a young man who is in a room of his apartment inside the Institute where he lived with his family.
Lights and shadows
Louis Pasteur was a great scientist, an efficient organizer. His life has recently been reviewed in a critical sense. Aspects that his myth had hidden were highlighted, for example a trait of his character that made it difficult to relate to those who lived the life of a researcher with him. A tendency to credit the merits of his discoveries more than he had deserved. But he remains a character, even with his harshness, of great human depth. He is part of the glories of France, he too feeds the collective feeling of the Grandeur of this country.
Some aspects of personality
After a very negative study experience in Besançon, the sixteen-year-old Pasteur returned home to Arbois, where he was tempted by art. But his projects will take another form. She writes to her sisters from Dijon, where she studies for her diploma:
<< Three things, willpower, work, and success are the cornerstones of human existence. Willpower opens the door to a brilliant and happy career, work allows you to enter it and once you have made the race, success crowns our conquest >>.
It is the project of his life. In 1857 Louis Pasteur’s career took a leap : he was appointed director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Debrè, one of his biographers, writes:
<< Pasteur professed an almost military sense of order and a hierarchy that required respect for the rules equal to that of the laws. The school had to be governed by rules just as nature is governed by determinism >>
Moreover, Pasteur was a fervent and intransigent Catholic.
The original nucleus of the Pasteur Institute
It is worth a visit to the original nucleus of the Institute which contains his workshop (Pasteur Institute), his apartment and his tomb, guarded as if they were sacred things. Not only is it a journey through the history of science, but also into the private environment of a scientist, who achieved fame, at the end of the nineteenth century. In the sliders that I present to you there are images of his house and his laboratory that I took during a visit to the Pasteur Institute, whose original nucleus consists of the primitive institute, the adjacent apartment where he lived with his family, his laboratory and the tomb where his body is kept.
L’Istituto Pasteur
The foundation stone of the institute was laid in January 1887. The inauguration took place on November 14, 1888, in front of many French and foreign authorities in a jubilation of crowds. The definitive statute provided for two objectives: the treatment of rabies according to the Pasteurian method and the study of virulent contagious diseases.
