Marie-Françoise Bernard

Marie-Françoise Bernard (born September 16, 1819 in Paris , † October 9, 1901 in Bezons ; née Martin, Fanny for short) was the wife of Claude Bernard and a staunch opponent of vivisection .

Live and act

Marie-Françoise Bernard was the daughter of the doctor Henri Martin and his wife Anne-Antoinette, née Hezette. On May 7, 1845, she married Claude Bernard. Both had two daughters, Jeanne-Antoinette-Henriette (called Tony; 1847-1923) and Marie-Louise-Alphonsine (called Marie; 1850-1922), as well as two sons who died early: the first-born Louis-Henri (* 1846) was only three months old, Claude-Henri-François (* 1856) died at the age of 15 months.

Claude Bernard, from the François Magendie School, used vivisection for his physiological research. Marie-Françoise Bernard contributed part of the dowry for physiological research at the beginning of their marriage . His experiments, however, increasingly aroused the opposition of his family, especially his wife, a circumstance that was partly responsible for their divorce on August 22, 1870.

It is reported that Claude Bernard, in his enthusiasm, brought a stray dog ​​home and vivisected it on the kitchen table. Marie-Françoise, startled by the howling of the dog, fled with Tony and Marie to the house of the writer Victor Hugo . Magnus Schwantje wrote in 1919: "The hearts of the daughters had turned away from their father at an early age when one day they missed their faithful dog and, to their great pain and horror, discovered that the darling had been vivisized by their father."

Fanny Bernard, with her daughters and the support of Helena, Comtesse de Noailles, founded the first French association against animal testing in 1882. Acting president of the Société Française contre la Vivisektion was Alphonse Karr , the elected honorary president Victor Hugo. She also joined the Société protectrice des animaux, founded on December 2, 1845 by Étienne Pariset (1770-1847), and became one of its strongest members.

After their divorce, Fanny moved with Tony and Marie several times until they settled in Bezons in 1893. There they established a home for dogs and housed countless cats in their house.

In 1919 and 1925, Magnus Schwantje and Manfred Kyber both quoted from reports that appeared in German daily newspapers and magazines at the beginning of 1914, according to which, while preparing for Claude Bernard's 100th birthday on July 12, 1913, they came across a soul tragedy: his daughters After the death of their mother Fanny they lived completely withdrawn from the people in a one-story house in Bezons. They were unwilling to take part in the celebrations, as they refused to glorify his name due to the immeasurable moral distance between them and their father. They had devoted themselves solely to the task of continuing their mother's work and of making amends with compassion and love for what their father had done to animals for decades, and they took in all the rejected dogs and cats and sick animals that were put into their care.

Marie Bernard died on September 14, 1922. A little later, on January 7, 1923, her sister Tony also died.

literature

• Marie-Aymée Marduel: Claude Bernard, un physiologiste natif du Beaujolais. Sa famille, sa vie, son oeuvre . 2006 (PDF; 7.9 MB) .

Web links

• Images de la vie de Bernard (French)
• A History of Antivivisection from the 1800s to the Present: Part I (mid-1800s to 1914) (English)
• Société protectrice des animaux (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marie-Aymée Marduel: Claude Bernard, un physiologiste you natif Beajolais. Sa famille, sa vie, son oeuvre . 2006, p. 7.
2. ^ ^{A b} Marie-Aymée Marduel: Claude Bernard, un physiologiste natif du Beajolais. Sa famille, sa vie, son oeuvre . 2006, p. 32.
3. ↑ A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog. Emile-Edouard Mouchy , oil painting, 1832.
4. ↑ Rudolf Kötter: Claude Bernard and the logic of the experiment in modern physiology. Paderborn 2008 (PDF; 138 kB) .
5. ↑ Short biography of husband Claude Bernard ( memento of the original from August 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (French) 
6. ↑ Roberta Kelechofsky: The Poet-Physician and The Healer killer. Vivisection And The Emergence of A Medical Technocracy. P. 12 (online)
7. ↑ Magnus Schwantje: Reasons against Vivisection. Association for Radical Ethics, e. V., Berlin 1925, p. 6.
8. ↑ Victor Hugo. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 11, 2012 ; Retrieved on December 23, 2011 (French): "Veuve et filles de Claude Bernard lancèrent la Ligue antivivisectionniste française dont Victor Hugo accepta la présidence en 1883" Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Kathleen Kete: The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris University of California Press, Berkeley 1994, p. 17

   “A significant network of feminine patronage existed throughout the 1870s and 1880s for the rescue of lost dogs, extending from rich bourgeoises like Mlle Fanny Bernard or Mm d'Este Davenport who spends the major part of her fortune on animals , to the so-called dog and cat ladies of Paris who used their meager, ocasionally supplemented, income to buy bread for the homeless animals in their neighborhood "

   - The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris
10. ↑ 1844-1848: Les Premiers Projets. Retrieved on December 23, 2011 (French): "Elle rejoint la société nouvellement créée pour la protection des animaux, la SPA et devient une de ses membres les plus virulents." 
11. ↑ Un important epilogue. Retrieved December 23, 2011 (French). 
12. ↑ Magnus Schwantje: Reasons against Vivisection. Association for Radical Ethics, e. V., Berlin 1925, pp. 6-7.
13. ↑ Manfred Kyber: Animal protection and culture. Grethlein, Leipzig / Zurich 1925; Original reprint in: Manfred Kyber: Tierschutz und Kultur. bioverlag gesundheitleben GmbH, Hopferau-Heimen 1982, ISBN 3-922434-25-8 , pp. 231-232.