Background
Bernard de Jussieu was born on August 17, 1699, in Lyons, France. He was the son of Laurent de Jussieu and Lucie Cousin, and brother of Antoine de Jussieu, another noted botanist.
Statue of Bernard de Jussieu presented at the Botanical Garden of Lyon.
Botanist naturalist scientist author
Bernard de Jussieu was born on August 17, 1699, in Lyons, France. He was the son of Laurent de Jussieu and Lucie Cousin, and brother of Antoine de Jussieu, another noted botanist.
Jussieu began his studies at the Jesuit college of Lyon and then went to Paris. In 1716 he accompanied his brother Antoine, who was then professor of botany at the Jardin du Roi, on his travels through France, Portugal, and Spain, and then took a degree in medicine at Montpellier and another at Paris in 1726.
Jussieu was appointed sous-démonstrateur de l'extérieur des plantes at the Jardin du Roi on September 30, 1722, filling the vacancy created by the death of Sébastien Vaillant. Jussieu was charged with field courses and supervision of the gardens and greenhouses, and it was at the royal gardens that he developed his greatest gift, that of teaching, in which he exhibited profound botanical knowledge and great personal charm. Jussieu’s field trips were famous, and the list of those botanists inspired by his course includes Adanson, Guettard, Poivre, Duhamel, L. G. Le Monnier, Thouin, Claude and Antoine Richard, his brother Joseph, and his nephew Antoine-Laurent. Among those attending his classes were Buffon, Malesherbes, and foreign visitors such as Carl Linnaeus in 1738.
Although he published little, Jussieu’s influence on eighteenth-century French botany was unequaled. He wrote on Pilularia, Lemna, and Litorella but never prepared his botanical lectures or ideas on classification for publication. Rather, it was through the arrangement of the botanical garden of the Trianon, near Versailles, that Jussieu became known as one of the great protagonists of a natural classification of plants. Louis XV, interested in horticulture and forestry, wanted a living collection of as many species of cultivated plants as possible for his Trianon garden. Jussieu was charged with the arrangement, on the recommendation of one of his amateur pupils, Louis de Noailles, Due d’Ayen.
With the help of the gardener Claude Richard, Jussieu designed part of the garden as a “botany school” to illustrate his natural system, the layout of the grounds reflecting his ideas on the natural relationships of plants and the circumscription of his plant families. It was not until 1789 that this system appeared in print. At that time Antoine-Laurent published in his Genera plantarum a simple list of genera, which, according to his uncle, constituted certain natural families. Although in many ways comparable to similar enumerations published by Linnaeus in his Genera plantarum (1737) and Philosophia botanica (1751), Jussieu’s work played an important role in the development of the concept of natural relationship as the main basis for classification, opposing the prevalent artificial sexual system of Linnaeus.
In 1725 Jussieu became a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In 1727 he became a member of the Royal Society in London. He also became a member of other academies, including those of Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Uppsala and Bologna.
Presumably, Jussieu never married.