1870 deaths

Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (26 July 1805, Saint-Cyr, Saône-et-Loire – 7 April 1870, Paris) was a French photographic inventor. Claude was an army lieutenant and the cousin of Nicéphore Niépce. He first experimented in 1847 with negatives made with albumen on glass, a method subsequently used by Frederick Langenheim for his and his brother’s lantern slides. At his laboratory near Paris, Saint-Victor worked on the fixation of natural photographic colour as well as the perfection of his cousin's heliographing process for photomechanical printing. His method of photomechanical printing, called heliogravure, was published in 1856 in Traité pratique de gravure héliographique. In the 1850s, he also published frequently in La Lumière.

Auguste Henri André Duméril (30 November 1812 – 12 November 1870) was a French zoologist. His father, André Marie Constant Duméril (1774–1860), was also a zoologist. In 1869 he was elected as a member of the Académie des sciences.
Duméril studied at the University of Paris, and in 1844 became an associate professor of comparative physiology at the university. From 1857, he was a professor of herpetology and ichthyology at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
In 1851, with his father, he published Catalogue méthodique de la collection des Reptiles. With zoologist Marie Firmin Bocourt (1819–1904), he collaborated on a project called Mission scientifique au Mexique et dans l'Amérique Centrale, a publication that was the result of Bocourt's scientific expedition to Mexico and Central America from 1864 to 1866. The section on reptiles is considered to be Dumeril's best written effort in the field of herpetology. Duméril died in 1870 during the siege of Paris, and Mission scientifique au Mexique et dans l'Amérique Centrale was continued by Bocourt, Léon Vaillant (1834–1914) and other scientists.
As part of the Collection des Suites à Buffon, he issued a two-volume ichthyological study titled Histoire naturelle des poissons, ou Ichtyologie générale (1865, 1870), research that complemented the works of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Achille Valenciennes (1794–1865) by describing species not covered by the two famous naturalists. Duméril also conducted significant research involving the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum).

Jules Léotard (French: [leɔtaʁ]; 1 August 1838 – 16 August 1870) was a French acrobatic performer and aerialist who developed the art of trapeze. He also created and popularized the one-piece gym wear that now bears his name and inspired the 1867 song "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", sung by George Leybourne.

Carl August von Steinheil (12 October 1801 – 14 September 1870) was a German physicist, inventor, engineer and astronomer.

François Rochebrune (Polish: Franciszek Rochebrune) (born 1 June or 1 January 1830, died 19 November 1870 (some sources state 1871)) was a French soldier who served in the French Zouaves during the Crimean War. He then lived in Poland for two years as a tutor. He returned to the French Zouaves for five years, serving as a sergeant in China. He then returned to live in Poland once again in 1862. When the Polish rebellion against Russian rule began in January 1863, he formed and led a Polish rebel unit called the Zouaves of Death. Within months, he had been promoted to general. After the collapse of the uprising, he returned to France, where his exploits in Poland earned him the rank of captain in the French army. He was promoted to colonel for the Franco-Prussian War, and was killed by a sniper at the Battle of Montretout at the age of forty.

Auguste Michel Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély, later 2nd Count Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély (30 July 1794, Paris – 1 February 1870 Cannes) was a Marshal of France, soldier and politician.

Jérôme Napoléon "Bo" Bonaparte (5 July 1805 – 17 June 1870) was an American farmer, chairman of the Maryland Agricultural Society, first president of the Maryland Club, and the son of Elizabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon I.

Louis-Victor-Nestor Roqueplan [also sometimes spelled Rocoplan] (16 September 1805 – 24 April 1870) was a French writer, journalist, and theatre director.

Pierre Dupont (23 April 1821 – 25 July 1870) was a French songwriter.
Dupont was born in Lyon as the son of a blacksmith. His mother died before he was five years old, and he was brought up in the country by his godfather, a village priest. He was educated at the seminary of L'Argentière, and was afterwards apprenticed to a notary at Lyon. In 1839 he found his way to Paris, and some of his poems were inserted, in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne. Two years later he was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume – Les Deux Anges – through the exertions of a kinsman and of Pierre Lebrun.
In 1842 he received a prize from the Academy, and worked for some time on the official dictionary. Gounod's appreciation of his peasant song, Les Bœufs (1846), settled his vocation as a songwriter. He had no theoretical knowledge of music, but he composed both the words and the melodies of his songs, the two processes being generally simultaneous. He himself remained so innocent of musical knowledge that he had to engage Ernest Reyer to write down his airs.
He sang his own songs, as they were composed, at the workmen's concerts in the Salle de la Fraternité du Faubourg Saint-Denis; the public performance of his famous "Le chant du pain" was forbidden; "Le chant des ouvriers" (1846) was even more popular; and in 1851 he paid the penalty of having become the poet laureate of the socialistic aspirations of the time by being condemned to seven years of exile from France.
The sentence was cancelled, and the poet withdrew for a time from participation in politics. He died at Lyon, where his later years were spent, on 25 July 1870.
His songs have appeared in various forms:

Chants et chansons (3 vols., with music, 1852–1854)
Chants et poesies (7th edition, 1862)Among the best-known are "Le Braconnier", "Le Tisserand", "La Vache blanche", "La Chanson du blé", but many others might be mentioned of equal spontaneity and charm. His later works have not the same merit.

Victor Noir, born Yvan Salmon (27 July 1848 – 11 January 1870), was a French journalist. After he was shot and killed by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin of the French Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1852–1870), Noir became a symbol of opposition to the imperial regime. His tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris has become a fertility symbol.