Jeanne Calment

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Jeanne Calment before the wedding in 1895

Jeanne Louise Calment (born February 21, 1875 in Arles , France ; † August 4, 1997 there ) has held the record of the highest reached human age since 1990 . She was the first person who was proven to be 116 and the following years up to and including 122.

Life

Jeanne Calments birth certificate
Jeanne Calment's parents around 1905–1910
Grave on the Cimetière de Trinquetaille in Arles

Born in Arles in the south of France, she was the daughter of shipbuilder Nicolas Calment (1838–1931) and his wife Marguerite Gilles (1838–1924), who came from a family of millers. Jeanne Calment's brother was François Calment (1865–1962).

On April 8, 1896, Jeanne married Fernand Nicolas Calment (1868–1942), a second cousin - her grandfathers were brothers. He was a wealthy shop owner and enabled Jeanne Calment to never have to work much and to pursue hobbies such as tennis, cycling, swimming, roller skating, playing the piano and the opera. Her husband died in 1942 of poisoning from a dessert made of spoiled, canned cherries. Calment's daughter, Yvonne (1898–1934), died of pneumonia . She then raised her grandson Frédéric (1926–1963), who later became a doctor and died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 36. Two years after the death of her grandson, the then 90-year-old sold her apartment to the 47-year-old lawyer Andre-François Raffray in exchange for an annuity of 2500 francs per month. After her death, the apartment would go to Raffray. Raffray did not live to see the end of his payment obligation. When he died of cancer in December 1995 at the age of 77 , his widow had to continue paying her pension. The approximately 900,000 francs that he had paid by then was twice the market price of the apartment.

She gained international fame at the age of 113 when she reported on how she met the painter Vincent van Gogh at the age of 14 in 1889 . He bought painting supplies in a shop that belonged to her future relatives and in which she was a saleswoman. However, Calment did not have anything positive to say about him: According to her statements, she was facing a dirty, badly dressed and rude person. She also remembered the construction of the Eiffel Tower .

After an interview, the Guinness Book of Records awarded her the title of oldest living person. Shortly thereafter, however, this was given to the American Carrie White, whose life data have since been refuted. After White's death in 1991, Calment got the title back. In the same year she had a brief appearance as herself in the film Vincent et moi ("Vincent and me"). In a short interview, she says Vincent van Gogh was ugly. This was followed in 1995 by the documentary Au-delà de 120 ans avec Jeanne Calment (“Beyond the 120 Years with Jeanne Calment”) and in 1996 the CD Maîtresse du temps (“Lady of Time”), on which she spoke her memories to techno rhythms . She did this mainly in order to be able to finance a few minibuses for her retirement home. The old people's home in which Calment spent the last years of her life bears her name today.

On May 12, 1990, she exceeded the age of the German-born American Augusta Holtz , who, according to current research, held the human age record up to that point .

Calment died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days, the longest validated life span to date. Her case has been the most fully documented of all supercentenarians . She was buried on the Cimetière de Trinquetaille in her hometown of Arles.

health

Calment started fencing when he was 85 and still rode a bike when she was 100 . She lived alone until the age of 110, only in 1985 did she move to a retirement home . In a fall at the age of 115, she broke two bones and was dependent on a wheelchair after an operation . Calment lived her last years blind and almost deaf , but remained mentally active. According to her own statements, she never did anything special to stay healthy.

Jeanne Calment had been a smoker since 1896 and did not try to quit smoking until 1992, at the age of 117, but returned to smoking a year later. However, it finally ended a year later at the age of 119. She was unable to light a cigarette as a result of her blindness, and she hated asking others for help. According to her doctor, no health issues played a role, but rather Calment's pride. She herself attributed her age to the consumption of olive oil , garlic , vegetables and port wine .

Fraud allegations

In 2018, two Russian scientists, the mathematician Nikolai Sak and the gerontologist Valeri Novoselow , suspected that Jeanne Calment's age record could be fraudulent. Your thesis assumed that Jeanne Louise Calment died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne (then officially a pleurisy died) Jeanne's identity supposed to save inheritance tax. As evidence, Sak and Novoselow named, among other things, deviations in the earlier information, specifically in the 1930s, regarding eye color and height in official documents. To prove their thesis, they proposed an exhumation and autopsy . However, in 2019 these doubts were countered with statistical and historical arguments; the identity of Calment was reportedly proven. In a detailed report in the New Yorker , Lauren Collins also came to the conclusion in 2020 that too many people would have to have been privy to a change of identity with the daughter to make the theory credible.

See also

literature

  • Michel Allard, Victor Lèbre, Jean-Marie Robine: Les 120 ans de Jeanne Calment: doyenne de l'humanité . Le Grand livre du mois, Paris, 1995 (French).
    • English edition: Jeanne Clament. From Van Gogh's time to ours ("Les 120 ans de Jeanne Calment. Doyenne de l'humanité"). Freman, New York 1998, ISBN 0-7167-3251-3 . (Includes interviews with Jeanne Calment, among others.)
  • France Cavalié: Jeanne Clament. L'oubliée de Dieu . Editions TF !, Boulogne 1995, ISBN 2-87761-072-1 .
  • Jean-Marie Robine, Michel Allard: Jeanne Calment. Validation of the Duration of Her Life . In: Bernard Jeune (Ed.): Validation of Exceptional Longevity . Odense University Press, Odense 1999, ISBN 87-7838-466-4 .
  • Gabriel Simonoff among others: Jeanne Calment. Le passion de vivre . Editions du Rocher, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-268-01938-1 .

Web links

Commons : Jeanne Calment  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://medium.com/@yurideigin/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity-record-may-be-fake-af87fc0c3133
  2. ↑ World's oldest person marks 120 beautiful, happy years . Associated Press report in The Deseret News , Feb. 21, 1995, pp. A1-A2.
  3. ^ Robert Young: Age 115 or more in the United States: Fact or Fiction? Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research , Section 3.3, pp. 274–276 (PDF; 298 kB).
  4. ↑ J.-M. Robine, M. Allard: Jeanne Calment: Validation of the Duration of Her Life. In: Bernard Jeune, James W. Vaupel (Eds.): Validation of Exceptional Longevity .
  5. ↑ The grave of Jeanne Calment. In: knerger.de. Klaus Nerger, accessed on February 21, 2019 .
  6. ^ Jeanne Calment: the secret of longevity on www.researchgate.net
  7. ↑ www heutea at heute: Was the oldest woman of all time a cheater? Retrieved January 4, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Scientists do not believe in French woman's age record faz.net, accessed on January 3, 2019.
  9. ↑ NZZ: After doubts about the age record of Jeanne Calment: Researchers again confirm their long life. Retrieved September 17, 2019 .
  10. ↑ "How many people would Yvonne have had to co-opt? Two notaries, a priest, a seven-year-old boy, a crowd full of mourners, a whole city? The theory made no sense [...] “; Lauren Collins: Was Jeanne Calment the oldest person who ever lived – or a fraud? , in: The New Yorker , February 10, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Calment, Jeanne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Calment, Jeanne Louise
BRIEF DESCRIPTION oldest person
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Arles , France
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1997
Place of death Arles , France