1823 births

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (21 December 1823 – 11 October 1915) was a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects.

Jules Émile Planchon (21 March 1823 – 1 April 1888) was a French botanist born in Ganges, Hérault.

Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904) was a French physician and is considered the father of modern hypnotherapy. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was born in Favières, a small town in the Lorraine region of France, on September 16, 1823. He completed his medical degree at the University of Strasbourg in 1850, at the age of 26.
He established a medical practice in the village of Pont-Saint-Vincent, near the town of Nancy.
He made many advancements for the field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, such as co-founding the Nancy School of Hypnosis. The Nancy School — also known as the "Suggestion School", in contrast to the "Hysteria School", also known as the "Paris School", centred on the Salpêtrière Hospital — was oriented to a suggestion-centred approach to hypnosis in contrast to the previously used hysteria-centred approach promoted at the Salpêtrière Hospital. By contrast to the "Paris School", the main, fundamental belief of the "Nancy School" was that hypnosis was a normal phenomenon and not a consequence of a pathology analogous to hysteria.
Liébeault published several books on his theories, techniques, and results in working with hypnosis. On February 18, 1904, he died in Nancy, leaving behind a strong legacy and influence on the still developing field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin (Cérilly 26 August 1823 – 18 February 1902 Nice) was a French painter, printmaker, and writer. Desboutin always signed himself Baron de Rochefort.

Admiral Constant Louis Jean Benjamin Jaurès (3 February 1823 – 13 March 1889) was a French Navy officer and politician. Born in Albi, Tarn, he was a senator for life and active in Japan during the 1863 Shimonoseki campaign and the Boshin War. He became Minister of the Navy and Colonies on 22 February 1889, in the government of Pierre Tirard. The famous French politician, Jean Jaurès, was his nephew.

Félix du Temple de la Croix (18 July 1823 – 3 November 1890) (usually simply called Félix du Temple) was a French naval officer and an inventor, born into an ancient Norman family. He developed some of the first flying machines and is credited with the first successful flight of a powered aircraft of any sort, a powered model plane, in 1857 and is sometimes credited with the first manned powered flight in history aboard his Monoplane in 1874.
He was a contemporary of Jean-Marie Le Bris.

Ernest Marc Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée (French pronunciation: [ɛʁnɛst dudaʁ də laɡʁe]; March 31, 1823 – March 12, 1868) was the leader of the French Mekong Expedition of 1866-1868.He was born in Saint-Vincent-de-Mercuze near Grenoble, France, and graduated from the École Polytechnique. He joined the navy and served in the Crimean War, then took up a post in Indochina in the hope that the climate would help his chronically ulcerated throat. It did not, and throughout the Mekong expedition he was often in severe pain.
The expedition left Saigon on June 5, 1866. In addition to his ulcers, Doudart de Lagrée suffered from fever, amoebic dysentery and infected wounds caused by leeches, as the expeditioners had to walk barefoot once they had worn out their supply of shoes. By the time the expedition reached Dongchuan, in Yunnan, China, he was too sick to be moved, and his second-in-command Francis Garnier took command. Garnier led the expedition to Dali, leaving Doudart de Lagrée in the care of the doctor. He died from an abscess on his liver. The doctor removed his heart to return it to France, while Doudart de Lagrée was buried in Dongchuan.
Ernest Doudart de Lagrée was also an entomologist. Insect collections made by him in Africa are conserved in Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris.

Marie Adrien Persac (1823–1873) was a French-born American fine art painter, cartographer, photographer, and art teacher. Persac watercolored south Louisiana plantation houses and other aspects of the Southern landscape, and his work has much importance to Southern historians. His work was often signed, A. Persac.

Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (11 May 1823 – 24 August 1906) was a Belgian painter, known for his paintings of elegant modern women. In their realistic style and careful finish, his works reveal the influence of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. After gaining attention early in his career with a social realist painting depicting the plight of poor vagrants, he achieved great critical and popular success with his scenes of upper-middle class Parisian life. He tended to use the same models over and over again, and not all of them were aristocratic. "At least three of his frequent models can be identified in the infamous Book of the Courtesans, a top secret leather bound book containing the surveillance files of the Paris vice squad," writes author Summer Brennan.

Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier (15 August 1823 – 20 November 1908), French classical scholar, and secretary of the Académie française, was born at Nîmes.
The Roman monuments of his native town very early attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history. He made epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a professor of rhetoric at the University of Angoulême, where he lived and worked for ten years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was called to Paris to be professor at the Lycée Charlemagne.
He began his literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the life and work of Marcus Terentius Varro (1861). In 1861 he was made professor of Latin oratory at the Collège de France, and he became an active contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. In 1865 he published Cicéron et ses amis (Eng. trans. by AD Jones, 1897), which has enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome, Boissier had learned to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with exquisite vivacity.
In 1874 he published La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity. In L'Opposition sous les Césars (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus. By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of scholars and men of letters, and on the death of HJG Patin, the author of Études sur les tragiques grecs, in 1876, he was elected a member of the Académie française, of which he was appointed perpetual secretary in 1895.
His later works include Promenades archéologiques: Rome et Pompei (1880; second series, 1886); L'Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques (1901); La Fin du paganisme (2 vols, 1891); La Conjuration de Catilina (1905); Tacite (1903, Eng, trans. by WG Hutchison, 1906). He was a representative example of the French talent for lucidity and elegance applied with entire seriousness to weighty matters of literature. Though he devoted himself mainly to his great theme, the reconstruction of the elements of Roman society, he also wrote monographs on Madame de Sévigné (1887) and Saint-Simon (1892). He died in June 1908.