Rue Paul Bert

Paul Bert was a French physician, physiologist and politician. He was a student of Claude Bernard and a substitute for Pierre Flourens at the National Museum of Natural History. He studied the physiology of respiration (at altitude and in diving) and was interested in grafting and anaesthesia. Elected as a radical deputy in 1872, he was one of the 363 deputies during the 1877 crisis and was Minister of Public Instruction and Religious Affairs from 1881 to 1882. An anti-clerical, he was one of the founders of the free, secular and compulsory school introduced by the laws of Jules Ferry, whom he succeeded as Minister of Public Instruction. As a supporter of the colonization policy, he published several school textbooks. In January 1886, he was appointed superior resident of Annam-Tonkin, in Indochina, where he died a few months later of cholera.