Alfred Naquet

Origins and early life

Alfred Naquet was born on 6 October 1834 in Carpentras, into one of the old Jewish families of the Comtat Venaissin, the papal enclave whose Jews had lived there since the Middle Ages.

Work and career

A chemist by training, professor at the faculty of medicine of Paris and author of scientific textbooks, he chose the other laboratory of the century: politics. A radical republican, imprisoned under the Empire for his ideas, he was elected deputy and then senator of Vaucluse. His name belongs to the civil history of France for one tenacious battle: for years, session after session, he carried the cause of divorce — abolished with the Restoration in 1816 — until the law of 27 July 1884, the loi Naquet, restored it, giving unhappy marriages a legal exit and French family law its modern turn; his adversaries mocked him as the apostle of divorce, and the mockery became a monument.

This fiche records the shadow too: he was later caught in the Boulangist adventure and the Panama scandal's acquittals, and history judges those years severely. He died in Paris on 10 November 1916.