LAPICQUE Louis (EN)

Biographical commentary

Louis Édouard Lapicque was a French professor of medicine in the first half of the 20th century, who contributed to the development of neurology. Also specialising in physiology, his work focused on the excitability of human nerves by electric current: muscular electro-stimulation. He developed the notion of excitability threshold as a function of time, which led him in 1907 to define the concept of chronaxis (a value used to measure the speed of excitability of nerve or muscle tissue). 

His wife Marcelle Lapicque (1873-1960), daughter of Severiano de Heredia (Republican MP, Minister of Public Works in 1887), was also a neurophysiologist, with whom he collaborated on their research into chronaxis and the effects of poisons (such as strychnine).She succeeded him as director of the physiology laboratory at the École Pratique des Hautes-Études. 
From a republican and socialist family tradition, Louis Lapicque was committed throughout his life to defending human rights, secularism and freedom of religion and thought. As early as 1898, he organised a "Public Conference on the Dreyfus Affair" in Paris, alongside the Dreyfusards; he helped found the Human Rights League, of which he remained an active member until 1905. Along with Paul Rivet, Paul Langevin and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, he demonstrated on 21 June 1933 at the Manège Japy against this "barbaric system of oppression", foreshadowing the creation of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes on 5 March 1934. 

A socialist activist in his native Vosges, Louis Lapicque helped to found the Université Populaire and then, in 1902, the socialist newspaper L'Ouvrier Vosgien, in which he set out his socialist doctrine, fought against clericalism and denounced the repression of the Tsarist regime. 
He stood in the 1906 legislative elections for the Vosges federation of the S.F.I.O. socialist party (Remiremont district), becoming its national delegate. 

Around 1900, Louis Lapicque and his friend, the historian Charles Seignobos, president of the Ligue des droits de l'Homme (Human Rights League), brought together a community of humanist scientists, who met every summer for holidays at l'Arcouest (a hamlet in the commune of Ploubalzanec opposite the island of Bréhat, near Paimpol, which was nicknamed "Sorbonne Plage" or "Fort la Science"). Here they welcomed their friends Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1935), Pierre and Marie Curie (Nobel Prize in Physics 1903, then the only Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1911) and Jean Perrin (Nobel Prize in Physics 1926), Émile Borel, mathematician and his wife, the novelist Camille Marbo (Prix Femina 1913), the chemist Victor Auger, Jean Zay and the historian Georges Pagès.

Louis Lapicque was mobilised during the First World War as the chief medical officer of an infantry regiment depot. At his own request, he was sent to the front in Champagne in December 1914 and remained there until July 1915, when he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his health. 
He then set up a research laboratory for national defence and protection against asphyxiating gases. 
At the end of the war, he was one of the founders of the Comité d'assistance aux sinistrés vosgiens. In 1924, he was an independent socialist candidate in the legislative elections, on the list of the Cartel des gauches. 

During the Second World War, in his laboratory at the Faculty of Science, he helped to set up the Masonic resistance group Patriam recuperare in January 1941. Arrested by the Gestapo, Louis Lapicque was imprisoned in Fresnes, where he wrote his last book, La Machine Nerveuse (1943).
Louis Lapicque adopted his orphaned nephew, the future painter Charles Lapicque (1898-1988), a figure of the "Nouvelle École de Paris" between 1939 and 1943. An engineer by training, Charles Lapicque turned to a career as a painter at the instigation of his wife, Aline Lapicque-Perrin (1899-1991), daughter of the atomic scientist Jean Perrin and herself an illustrator. During the war, Charles and Aline Lapicque hid Jews and were recognised as "Righteous Among the Nations".

His collection

Probably considered to be the core of the collection, the first objects recorded at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro on his return in 1896 came from the Andaman (71.1896.14.1 to 70). These were mainly bows with characteristic curves and spears used for fishing from rocks or boats. The other objects concern the next stages of the journey, Malaysia, Burma and Indonesia. 

The collections made by Louis Lapicque in the small islands of the eastern Sunda during his voyage on the Semiramis are typical of the collections made at the end of the 19th century. It concerns the islands of Flores, Timor and Savu. There are also 6 Javanese batiks, sarongs and scarves collected on the island of Flores, and an unfinished jacket from Sarawak with remarkably fine ikat motifs. The majority of the objects relate to weapons in the broadest sense, with knives, bows and arrows in large numbers and no apparent desire to seek out the exceptional. The collection does, however, contain some very fine pieces, notably textiles and basketry, as well as a few rarities such as two cartridge belts (71.1896.16.59; 71.1896.16.6.1-10) worn by Meo warriors from Timor, which can be seen on photographs taken by the expedition. Remarkable textiles include a skirt worn by high-ranking Sikka women (71.1896.16.49) and a selimut (71.1896.16.48) worn by Flores men with motifs inspired by Indian patolas. The textiles from Timor and Savu are very well made and are among the finest textiles (71.1896.16.57; 71.1896.16.58; 71.1896.16.47) in the museum's collection. Some Sikka basketry from the Maumere (71.1896.16.8.1-2; 71.1896.16.7.1-2; 71.1896.16.33.1-4) which is linked to the consumption of betel. Some are decorated with glass beads. Pyrographed cylindrical lime boxes, mother-of-pearl spoons carved from nautilus and others from coconuts are also present. Jewellery, bracelets and earrings are also part of the collection. There is nothing exceptional about their workmanship. Dutch collections have the same type of pieces, brought back at the end of the 19th century. 

Louis Lapicque practised photography throughout the trip, using gelatin silver bromide glass plate negatives taken by camera. He seemed to be an enlightened photographer who chose medium-format plates (18 x 24 cm), probably to achieve a certain quality. In India, he had a stereoscopic plate camera (9 x 18 cm) in 1903-1904. From his first mission, he built up a vast collection of images covering almost every stage of the journey. This collection is both typical of the visual output of anthropologists' missions at the end of the nineteenth century, with numerous anthropometric portraits of the various indigenous groups he encountered, and also rare for the views it contains of certain regions he travelled through, such as the Andamans, and of lesser-known indigenous groups such as the Moken of the Mergui archipelago and the Semang of Malaysia. 

Louis Lapicque became one of France's leading specialists in the indigenous populations of Asia, and from 1906 onwards he used these studies to defend a new hypothesis, namely that human populations were mixed. At the beginning of the 20th century, he contributed to the development of anthropology. In 1911, he and Paul Rivet helped to found the Institut Français d'Anthropologie, whose aim was to bring together French scholars to adopt a more modern approach that would no longer be satisfied with studying physical appearance but would address the cultural issues of human societies.

Photograph collections

• Bibliothèque nationale de France, Société de Géographie, 41 projection plates for a lecture given by Louis Lapicque on 23 November 1894 at the Société de Géographie, [main theme: Beloutchistan - Persian Gulf], SG XCH-155; two portraits of Louis Lapicque, Atelier Nadar: catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb465541682 
• Bibliothèque de l'Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, collections Jacques Doucet: Albums Dieulafoy, 2 photographic prints, 4 PHOT 018 (3) and (4): bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/idurl/1/62743 
• Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, collection of 481 gelatino-silver bromide negatives on 18x24 cm glass plates and 598 prints (543 prints on aristotype paper, 58 prints on baryta paper), 53 projection plates. collections.quaibranly.fr/ 
• Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, 10 photographs, Fonds de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, SAP 155 (8) / 11 to 20: bibliotheques.mnhn.fr 

Collections of objects

• Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, 202 objects collected during the 1896 voyage: collections.quaibranly.fr 
• Laboratoire d'anthropologie du Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, human remains, 76 skulls and 2 skeletons (4 France Ploubazlanec, 1 Maghreb, 28 Ethiopia, 1 New Guinea, 6 Flores, 30 remains from India, 6 Iran). science.mnhn.fr/institution/mnhn/collection/ha/item/search