Curie, Paul
NAME: Curie, Paul
ACHIEVEMENT(S): None
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: fl. 1820s and 1830s
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH:
DISCIPLINE: Physician
FIELD: Medicine
LANGUAGE: French
PARENTS: ?
SIBLINGS: ?
SPOUSE: ?
CHILDREN: Eugene Curie and three younger children
EDUCATION: ?
MAJOR WORK: ?
LIFE AND TIMES: Paul Curie was a successful early-19th-century physician and a prominent member of the local Protestant church in Mulhouse, France. In 1831 he converted to the new, secular alternative to Christianity known as “Saint-Simonianism.” The doctrine of Saint-Simon* (who had died in 1825) attracted many intellectuals of the time. Saint-Simon supported the establishment of a new meritocratic society based on the ideals of love, equality of goods, peace, technological progress and the betterment of women. This he believed, would produce the social cohesion that Roman Catholicism had failed to provide.
Curie made several public statements concerning his new faith, in particular calling for all privileges of birth to be abolished and for society to be reorganized into a hierarchy based on ability. As a result, he was removed from the Protestant church and renounced by the local pastor.
Ultimately, Curie left Mulhouse for England (probably in 1832, when several Saint-Simonians were publicly tried and found guilty of a variety of crimes including outrages against public morality) where he became a very successful practitioner of homeopathic medicine, the system of therapeutics based upon the "law of similars" which was introduced in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann.
Curie married and had four children, the eldest of whom was Eugene Curie, another physician who supported anti-clericalism and egalitarianism, and whose son, Pierre married Maria Sklodowska, better known as the physicist Marie Curie*.
ASSESSMENT: He was an active supporter of Saint Simon
EXTRA CONNECTIONS:
Pierre Curie's grandfather, Paul Curie (1799–1853), a doctor of medicine, was a committed Malthusian humanist and married Augustine Hofer, daughter of Jean Hofer and great-granddaughter of Jean-Henri Dollfus, great industrialists from Mulhouse in the second half of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th century. Through this paternal grandmother, Pierre Curie is also a direct descendant of the Basel scientist and mathematician Jean Bernoulli (1667–1748), as is Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics.
ONELINER: Pierre Curie, grandfather of Marie Curie’s husband
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Giroud, Françoise, 'Marie Curie: A Life', trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986.