Étienne-François Turgot, last Lord of Brucourt, marquis of Soumont, (16 June 1721, Paris – 21 October 1789, Paris) was an 18th-century French naturalist, knight of Malta and governor of French Guiana.
His knowledge of natural history, surgery, medicine and agriculture made him a free correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences. He was a contributor to the Encyclopédie .
His father was Michel-Étienne Turgot (1690–1751), prévôt des marchands de Paris ("Master of the merchants of Paris", i.e. Mayor of Paris) and his younger brother the famous Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. He was the father of Louis Félix Étienne, marquis de Turgot.
Turgot was admitted to the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (now the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) as a young man. As a knight of Malta, he commanded one of the Order's Mediterranean galleys. [1] In the 1740s, he fought for Maurice de Saxe in Bohemia and Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession. [2] He returned to France in 1764 and was appointed brigadier of the king's armies. He established the Académie d'Agriculture in 1760 and was received free associate of the Académie des sciences in 1762.
King Louis XV appointed him governor of Guyana but the colonizing expedition conducted in 1763 at the request of Étienne François de Choiseul, poorly prepared, was a resounding failure. Similarly, because of power struggles, accused of embezzlement, Turgot ended up being the subject of a lettre de cachet.
After his detention, he took no responsibility and devoted himself to study. A gout attack - disease shared with his father and brothers - won 21 October 1789.
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is sometimes referred to as d'Alembert's equation, and the fundamental theorem of algebra is named after d'Alembert in French.
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu was a French botanist, notable as the first to publish a natural classification of flowering plants; much of his system remains in use today. His classification was based on an extended unpublished work by his uncle, the botanist Bernard de Jussieu.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Sometimes considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to have been the first political economist to have postulated something like the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.
Joseph Louis Proust was a French chemist. He was best known for his discovery of the law of definite proportions in 1794, stating that chemical compounds always combine in constant proportions.
Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède or La Cépède was a French naturalist and an active freemason. He is known for his contribution to the Comte de Buffon's great work, the Histoire Naturelle.
Louis Lartet was a French geologist and paleontologist. He discovered the original Cro-Magnon skeletons.
The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, is the national natural history museum of France and a grand établissement of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is located in Paris, France, within the Jardin des Plantes on the left bank of the River Seine. It was formally founded in 1793, during the French Revolution, but was begun even earlier in 1635 as the royal garden of medicinal plants. The museum now has 14 sites throughout France.
Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc was a French botanist, invertebrate zoologist, and entomologist.
René Louiche Desfontaines was a French botanist.
François Auguste Péron was a French naturalist and explorer.
Pierre-Justin-Marie Macquart was a French entomologist specialising in the study of Diptera. He worked on world species as well as European and described many new species.
Louis Marie Adolphe Olivier Édouard Joubin was a professor at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. He published works on nemerteans, chaetognatha, cephalopods, and other molluscs.
Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul, called Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, was a French diplomat and aristocrat from the Gouffier branch of the Choiseul family. A member of the Académie française, he served as French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1784 until the fall of the French monarchy and a scholar of ancient Greece.
Louis-Félix Guinement, chevalier de Kéralio was a French soldier, writer and academic. He married Françoise Abeille and their daughter was the feminist writer Louise-Félicité de Kéralio.
The Turgot map of Paris is a highly accurate and detailed map of the city of Paris, France, as it existed in the 1730s. The map was commissioned by Parisian municipality chief Michel-Étienne Turgot, drawn up by surveyor Louis Bretez, and engraved by Claude Lucas.
Pierre Louis Antoine Cordier was a French geologist and mineralogist, and a founder of the French Geological Society. He was professor of geology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris from 1819 to 1861, and was responsible for the development of the geological gallery in the museum.
Jean-Baptiste François Rozier was a French botanist and agronomist.
Laurent Durand was an 18th-century French publisher active in the Age of Enlightenment. His shop was established rue Saint-Jacques under the sign Saint Landry & du griffon.
François-Étienne de La Roche was a Genevan physician, naturalist, chemist, botanist and ichthyologist.
Étienne Taillemite was a French historian and archivist.