1903 deaths

Jules Allix (9 September 1818 in Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée – 1st September 1903 in Paris) was a feminist, socialist, political activist and eccentric inventor. A communard, he was mayor of the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

Alphonse Francois Renard (27 September 1842 – 9 July 1903), Belgian geologist and petrographer, was born at Ronse, in East Flanders, on 27 September 1842. He was educated for the church of Rome, and from 1866 to 1869 he was superintendent at the college de la Paix, Namur.In 1870 he entered the Jesuit Training College at the old abbey of Maria Laach in the Eifel, and there, while engaged in studying philosophy and science, he became interested in the geology of the district, and especially in the volcanic rocks. Thenceforth he worked at chemistry and mineralogy, and qualified himself for those petrographical researches for which he was distinguished.In 1874 he became professor of chemistry and geology in the college of the Belgian Jesuits at Leuven, a few years later he was appointed one of the curators of the Royal Natural History Museum at Brussels, and in 1882 he relinquished his post at Louvain. In 1888 he was chosen professor of geology at the University of Ghent, and retained the post until the close of his life. Meanwhile, he had been ordained priest in 1877, and had intended to enter the Society of Jesus. He was known as the Abbé Renard; but, as remarked by Sir A. Geikie, as years passed, the longing for mental freedom grew ever stronger, until at last it overmastered all the traditions and associations of a lifetime, and he finally separated himself from the church of Rome.His first work, written in conjunction with Charles-Louis-Joseph-Xavier de la Vallée-Poussin (1827–1904), was the Mémoire sur les caractères minéralogiques et stratigraphiques des roches dues plutoniennes de la Belgique et de l'Ardenne française (1876). In later essays and papers he dealt with the structure and mineral composition of many igneous and sedimentary rocks, and with the phenomena of metamorphism in Belgium and other countries. In acknowledgment of his work, the Bigsby Medal was awarded to him in 1885 by the Geological Society of London. Still more important were his later researches connected with the Challenger Expedition. The various rock specimens and oceanic deposits were submitted to him for examination in association with Sir John Murray, and their detailed observations were embodied in the Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger Deep Sea Deposits (1891). The more striking additions to our knowledge included the detection and description of cosmic dust, which as fine rain slowly accumulates on the ocean floor; the development of zeolitic crystals on the sea-bottom at temperatures of 32 °F (0 °C) and under; and the distribution and mode of occurrence of manganese nodules and of phosphatic and glauconite deposits on the bed of the ocean. Renard died at Brussels on 9 July 1903.Rue Alphonse Renard, in western Ixelles, is named in his honor. In addition, the mineral renardite was named in his honor in 1928.

Ernest Charles Philippe Auguste Munier-Chalmas (7 April 1843 – 9 August 1903) was a French geologist, born at Tournus in Burgundy, who is known for his contributions to the understanding of the Cretaceous, but who also isolated and defined the Priabonian stage of the Late Eocene, in a paper co-written with Albert de Lapparent in 1893.
From 1864 he worked as an assistant in the geology department at the Sorbonne, and subsequently participated in geological missions to Austria-Hungary and the Venetian Alps. From 1882 he taught classes at the École Normale Supérieure, and in 1891 became a professor of geology at the Sorbonne. In addition, from 1892 to 1903, he was director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études.In 1873 he described the bivalve genera Matheronia and Toucasia (family Requieniidae). With paleontologist Charles Schlumberger, he conducted important investigations on sexual dimorphism in Foraminifera.In 1891 he was appointed president of the Société géologique de France. He was elected to the mineralogical section of the French Académie des sciences on 5 May 1903.In 1895, botanist Hermann zu Solms-Laubach published Chalmasia, which is a genus of green algae in the family Polyphysaceae and name in Chalmas's honour.He died in retirement at Aix-les-Bains, Provence.

François Crépin (30 October 1830 – 30 April 1903) was an important botanist of the 19th century and director of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium.
Crépin was born in Rochefort, Belgium. The genus Crepinella (Araliaceae) is named after him. As a taxonomist he circumscribed numerous plants within the genus Rosa. He died in Brussels.
His Belgian herbarium and his herbier des roses are kept in the collections of the Botanic Garden Meise.

Henri-Alexis Brialmont (Venlo, 25 May 1821 – Brussels, 21 July 1903), nicknamed The Belgian Vauban after the French military architect, was a Belgian army officer, politician and writer of the 19th century, best known as a military architect and designer of fortifications. Brialmont qualified as an officer in the Belgian army engineers in 1843 and quickly rose up the ranks. He served as a staff officer, and later was given command of the district of the key port of Antwerp. He finished his careers as Inspector-General of the Army. Brialmont was also an active pamphleteer and political campaigner and lobbied through his career for reform and expansion of the Belgian military and was also involved in the foundation of the Congo Free State.
Today, Brialmont is best known for the fortifications which he designed in Belgium and Romania and would influence another in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The fortifications he designed in Belgium at the end of the 1880s around the towns of Liège, Namur and Antwerp would play an important role during the early stages of the German invasion of Belgium during World War I.

Adrien Achille Proust (18 March 1834 – 26 November 1903) was a French epidemiologist and hygienist. He was the father of novelist Marcel Proust and doctor Robert Proust.He studied medicine in Paris, where in 1862 he obtained his medical doctorate. Beginning in 1863 he worked as chef de clinique, and in 1866 earned his agrégation with the thesis Des différentes formes de ramollissement du cerveau (On different forms of softening of the brain). In 1869, he was sent on a mission to Russia and Persia in order to conduct cholera research – a journey in which he also visited Athens, Constantinople, Messina and several locations in Germany.He was a professor of hygiene at the faculty of medicine in Paris, and chief physician at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. He was a member of the Comité d'Hygiène publique de France and of the Académie de médecine (from 1879), serving as its secretary from 1883 to 1888.In 1888, Adrien Proust, believing like many doctors of his day that masturbation may lead to homosexuality, sent his son Marcel to a brothel with 10 francs. Marcel would relate the awkward experience of what occurred there in a letter to his grandfather.Adrien Proust is mentioned in Love in the Time of Cholera, a 1985 novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

Oscar François George Berger-Levrault (9 May 1826 in Strasbourg – 24 September 1903 in Nancy) was a French philatelist. The invention of the stamp catalogue is attributed to him and to the Englishman, John Edward Gray.

Prince Adam Stanisław Sapieha (4 December 1828– 21 July 1903) was a Polish nobleman, landlord, politician.
His mother, Jadwiga Sapieżyna, was a daughter of the 12th Ordynat of the Ordynacja Zamojska Count Stanisław Kostka Zamoyski.In 1894, he became Head of the Exhibition Committee of the General National Exhibition in Lviv.

Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (14 December 1865 – 7 April 1903), better known under his pseudonym George Chapman, was a Victorian era Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner.
Born in Congress Poland, Chapman moved to England as an adult, where he committed his crimes. He was convicted and executed after poisoning three women, but is remembered today mostly because some contemporary police officers suspected him of being the notorious serial killer "Jack the Ripper".

Sabino Policarpo Arana Goiri (in Spanish), Sabin Polikarpo Arana Goiri (in Basque), or Arana ta Goiri'taŕ Sabin (self-styled) (26 January 1865 – 25 November 1903), was a Spanish writer and the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). Arana is considered the father of Basque nationalism.
He died in Sukarrieta at the age of 38 after falling ill with Addison's disease during time spent in prison. He had been charged with treason for attempting to send a telegram to President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he praised the United States for helping Cuba gain independence from Spain.