Jean Marie Antoine de Lanessan

"Lanessan" redirects here. For the Bordeaux winery, see Château Lanessan.

Jean Marie Antoine de Lanessan.

Jean Marie Antoine de Lanessan (13 July 1843 - 1919) was a French statesman and naturalist.

Biography

De Lanessan was born in Saint-André-de-Cubzac in the Gironde department of France and entered the French Navy in 1862, serving on the East African and Cochin-China stations in the medical department until the Franco-Prussian War, when he resigned and volunteered for the army medical service. He then completed his studies, taking his doctorate in 1872.

Elected to the Municipal Council of Paris in 1879, de Lanessan declared in favor of communal autonomy and joined with Henri Rochefort in demanding the erection of a monument to the Communards; but after his election to the Chamber of Deputies for the 5th arrondissement of Paris in 1881 he gradually veered from the extreme Radical party to the Republican Union, and identified himself with the cause of colonial expansion.

A government mission to the French colonies in 1886-1887, in connection with the approaching Paris exhibition, gave him the opportunity of studying colonial questions, on which, after his return, he published three works: La Tunisie (Paris, 1887); L'Expansion coloniale de la France (ib., 1888), L'Indo-Chine francaise (ib., 1889). In 1891 he was made civil and military governor of French Indochina, where his administration, which led to open rupture with Admiral Fournier, was severely criticized. Nevertheless he consolidated French influence in Annam and Cambodia, and secured a large accession of territory on the Mekong River from the kingdom of Siam. He was recalled in 1894, and published an apology for his administration (La Colonisation francaise en Indo-Chine) in the following year.

In the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet of 1899 to 1902 he was Minister of Marine, and in 1901 he secured the passage of a naval programme intended to raise the French navy during the next six years to a level befitting the place of France among the great powers. At the general election of 1906 he was not re-elected. He was political director of the Siècle, and president of the French Colonization Society, and wrote, besides the books already mentioned, various works on political and biological questions.

The standard author abbreviation Laness. is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.^[1]

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

1. ^ "Author Query". International Plant Names Index. http://www.ipni.org/ipni/authorsearchpage.do. 

Persondata
Name	Lanessan, Jean Marie Antoine
Alternative names
Short description	Governors-General of French Indochina
Date of birth	13 July 1843
Place of birth
Date of death	1919
Place of death