Note 29 — Chapter III · LAMARCK’S SHARE IN THE REORGANIZATION OF THE JARDIN DES PLANTES AND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
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Joseph Lakanal was born in 1762, and died in 1845. He was a professor of philosophy in a college of the Oratory, and doctor of the faculty at Angers, when in 1792 he was sent as a representative (député) to the National Convention, and being versed in educational questions he was placed on the Committee of Public Instruction and elected its president. He was the means, as Hamy states, of saving from a lamentable destruction, by rejuvenizing them, the scientific institutions of ancient France. During the Revolution he voted for the death of Louis XVI.
Lakanal also presented a plan of organization of a National Institute, what is now the Institut de France, and was charged with designating the first forty-eight members, who should elect all the others. He was by the first forty-eight thus elected. Proscribed as a regicide at the second restoration, he sailed for the United States, where he was warmly welcomed by Jefferson. The United States Congress voted him five hundred acres of land. The government of Louisiana offered him the presidency of its university, which, however, he did not accept. In 1825 he went to live on the shores of Mobile Bay on land which he purchased from the proceeds of the sale of the land given him by Congress. Here he became a pioneer and planter.
In 1830 he manifested a desire to return to his native country, and offered his services to the new government, but received no answer and was completely ignored. But two years later, thanks to the initiative of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who was the means of his reëlection to the French Academy, he decided to return, and did so in 1837. He lived in retirement in Paris, where he occupied himself until his death in 1845 in writing a book entitled Séjour d’un Membre de l’Institut de France aux États-Unis pendant vingt-deux ans. The manuscript mysteriously disappeared, no trace of it ever having been found. (Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel, Art. Lakanal.) His bust now occupies a prominent place among those of other great men in the French Academy of Sciences.