The Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants The garden was formally founded in 1635 as the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants by an edict of King
Louis XIII. The garden was put under the authority of the Physician of the king,
Guy de la Brosse. It was staffed by a group of "demonstrateurs", who lectured visitors, particularly future physicians and pharmacists, on botany, chemistry, and geology, illustrated by the garden collections. In 1673, under Louis XIV, and his new royal physician and director of the Garden,
Guy-Crescent Fagon, great-nephew of Guy de la Brosse, the garden was given a new amphitheater, where dissections and other medical courses were conducted. The lecturers included the celebrated physician and anatomist
Claude Perrault, who was equally famous as the architect; he designed the facade of the
Louvre Palace. In the early 18th century, the chateau was given an additional floor to house the collections the royal botanist's medicinal plant collection. This section was gradually turned into galleries to display the royal collection of minerals. At the same time, the greenhouses on the west and south were enlarged, to hold the plants brought back to France by numerous scientific expeditions around the world. New plants were studied, dried, and cataloged. A group of artists made Herbiers, books with detailed illustrations of each new plant, and the plants of the collection were carefully studied for their possible medical or culinary uses. One example was the group of
coffee plants brought from Java to Paris, which were raised and studied by
Antoine de Jussieu for their possible medical and commercial use. His studies led to the plantation of coffee in the French colonies of North America.
The Buffon period (1739–1788) File:Buffon statue dsc00979.jpg|Statue of
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the formal garden File:Sophora de Jussieu D2019 1.jpg|The Sophora Jussieu, planted by Buffon in the garden in 1747 The most celebrated head of the garden was
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who served as its head from 1739 until his death in 1788. While director of the garden, he also owned and operated a large and successful iron works and foundry in Burgundy, but lived in the garden, in the house that now carries his name. Buffon was responsible for doubling the size of the garden, expanding down to the banks of Seine. He enlarged the Cabinet of Natural History in the main building, and added a new gallery to the south. He also brought into the scientific community of the garden a team of important botanists and naturalists, including
Jean Baptiste Lamarck, author of one of the earliest theories of
evolution. Under the sponsorship of Buffon, explorers and botanists were sent to different corners of the world to collect specimens for garden and museum.
Michel Adanson was sent to
Senegal, and the navigator
La Perouse to the islands of the Pacific. They returned with shiploads of specimens, which were carefully studied and classified. This research caused a conflict between the scientists of Royal Gardens and the professors of the
Sorbonne over the question of evolution. The scientists, led by Buffon and his followers, claimed that natural species gradually evolved, while the theologians of the Sorbonne insisted that nature was exactly as it was at the time of the Creation. Since the scientists had the backing of the Royal court, they were able to continue their studies and publish their work.
The French Revolution and the 19th Century – The Menagerie File:Le Jardin des Plantes 1 - Paul Legrand.jpg|The Jardin des Plantes and Menagerie in 1842 File:Maison Singes MJP.jpg|Crowd outside the Palace of the Apes (c. 1900) File:Séeberger - Jardin des Plantes de Paris 38.jpg|Rachel the elephant (c. 1905) On June 7, 1793, in the course of the French Revolution, the new government, the
National Convention, ordered a complete transformation of the former royal institutions. They created a new Museum of Arts and Techniques, transformed the Louvre from a royal residence to a museum of art, and joined the Royal Garden of Plants and the Cabinet of Natural Sciences together into a single organization: the Museum of Natural History. It also received a number of important collections which had belonged to members of the aristocracy, such as a famous group of wax models illustrating anatomy which had been created by André Pinson. The Museum and gardens also benefited from the 1798 expedition launched by First Consul
Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt; the military force was accompanied by one hundred and fifty-four botanists, astronomers, archeologists, chemists, artists and other scholars, including
Gaspard Monge,
Joseph Fourier, and
Claude Louis Berthollet. Drawings and paintings of their findings are found in the collections of the Natural History Museum. The major addition to the garden in the late 18th century was the
Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes. It was proposed in 1792 by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the intendant of the gardens, in large part to rescue the animals of the royal menagerie at the Palace of Versailles, who had been largely abandoned during the Revolution. The Duke of Orleans had a similar private zoo, also abandoned. At the same time the government of the Convention ordered the seizure of all the animals put on public display by various circuses in Paris. In 1795, the government acquired the Hôtel de Magné, the large estate of a French nobleman next to the gardens, and installed the large cages that had housed the animals at Versailles. It went through a very difficult early period, when the majority of the animals died, before it was given sufficient funding and more suitable structures by Napoleon. It became the home of animals brought back to France in scientific expeditions in the early 19th century, including a famous giraffe given to King
Charles X by the Sultan of Cairo in 1827. On 25 August 1944, Allied American troops (2nd DB) were stationed here for the night after the Liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany.
Late 19th–20th century – additions and experiments Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the primary mission of the gardens and museums was research. Working in the laboratories there, the chemist
Eugene Chevreul first isolated fatty acids and
cholesterol, and studied the chemistry of vegetal dyes. The physiologist
Claude Bernard studied the functions of the
glycogen in the liver. In 1896, the physicist
Henri Becquerel, working in a laboratory in the museum, discovered
radioactivity. He wrapped
uranium salts together with an unexposed photographic plate wrapped in black cloth, to keep out the sunlight. When he unwrapped them, the photographic plate had changed color from exposure to the radiation. He received the
Nobel Prize in 1903 for his discovery. The Gallery of Paleontology and of Comparative Anatomy was opened in 1898, replacing structures built between 1795 and 1807, to contain and display the thousands of skeletons the museum had collected. The buildings of menagerie were also expanded, with the construction of immense Bird House, by architect
Jules André, high, long and long, The appearance of the gardens changed in late 19th and early 20th century with the construction of new buildings. In 1877, the gallery of zoology, the landmark building that overlooks the formal garden, designed by
Jules André, was begun. It was built to contain the immense zoological collections of the museum; the central hall is a landmark of iron construction, comparable to the
Grand Palais and the
Musée d'Orsay. It was inaugurated in 1888, but thereafter suffered from a long lack of maintenance. It was closed in 1965, In the 1980s, a new home was found for the museum's gigantic collections. The Zoothêque, was constructed between 1980 and 1986 underneath the Esplanade Milne-Edwards, directly in front of the Gallery of Zoology. It is accessible only to researchers, and contains the thirty million specimens of insects, five hundred thousand fish and reptiles, one hundred fifty thousand birds, and seven thousand other animals. The building above underwent a major renovation from 1991 to 1994, to house the updated Grand Gallery of Evolution. == National Museum of Natural History ==