Gustave Isambert

Gustave Isambert, c. 1890's

Gustave Honoré François Isambert (20 October 1841 – 14 April 1902) was a French journalist and politician.

Biography

Gustave Isambert was born in Saint-Denis-les-Ponts, the son of François Michel Isambert, miller, and Faustine Julie Péan. He began his studies in Châteaudun and continued them at the Lycée of Vendôme.

From 1858 to 1860, he began his career as a journalist with the Union Agricole (a newspaper published in Chartres), which Ferdinand Jumeau had just founded.

He went to Paris in 1860 where he became a contributor to various newspapers such as La Voie nouvelle, La Jeune France, Le Mouvement, La Jeunesse and Le Temps. In 1862, he became editor of the Courrier du dimanche, a newspaper opposed to the Second Empire, which he directed for a time. Then he joined the newspaper Le Temps where he wrote the "bulletin du jour".

In 1868, he left for Reims to direct the Indépendant rémois, another opposition newspaper, but he returned to Paris in 1870 to continue his collaboration with Le Temps.

During the war of 1870, Isambert was in Tours, where he directed the press service for the local delegation of the Government of National Defense. There he met Léon Gambetta, of whom he became a faithful friend. He worked with him in Paris, then again in Tours, then in Bordeaux, on the organization of the National Defense.

In October 1871, he had Combat et incendie de Châteaudun, 18 octobre 1870, published by the Librairie Internationale, containing a complete account, supported by numerous supporting documents, of the events that took place on October 18, 1870 in Châteaudun. This book allowed us to compare the versions of Ernest de Lipowski and Captain Blaise Georges Testanière with each other and with the German accounts.

At the end of 1871, he took part in the foundation of the République française and became its editor-in-chief in 1879 at the initiative of Léon Gambetta. But, after the death of the latter, he was ousted in 1883 from the direction, then from the editorial staff. Isambert then provided numerous articles, notably to the Lyon républicain and Le Temps on art, literature and morals. In 1892, he began a political collaboration with the newspaper Le XIXe siècle where his colleague and friend Louis Terrier was already writing.

In 1882, the voters of Châteaudun, without consulting him, elected him to the municipal council of their town. In 1884, he was elected, following his father and grandfather, mayor of Saint-Denis-les-Ponts (Eure-et-Loir). An commited anticlerical, he ran unsuccessfully in the legislative elections of 1871, 1881 and 1885. He was finally elected deputy of Eure-et-Loir in 1889 under the colors of the Republican Union. He was re-elected in the two following legislative elections and held the position until 1902.

He was vice-president of the Chamber in 1896.

A member of the Republican Union, in 1894 he founded a new parliamentary group, the Progressive Union, with 92 members, which he chaired and which opposed the Méline government in particular.

Gustave Isambert married in March 1882 in Paris with Eulalie Adélaïde Neubauer. The witness of his marriage was Léon Gambetta. The couple had an only daughter, Jeanne, who died very young in August 1893. His widow died in November 1902 "poisoned by carbon monoxide escaping from a stove that she had carelessly left lit in her bedroom.".

There is an Isambert collection made up of 6,000 works donated or bequeathed by Gustave Isambert and his widow, made up of various 19th century documents: brochures, books, engravings, parliamentary documents, which can be consulted at the Châteaudun media library.

Works

• La loi militaire de 1868, expliquée par demandes et par réponses (1868; with Paul Coffinhal-Laprade)
• L'Impôt, expliqué par demandes et par réponses. Catéchisme du contribuable (1868)
• Combat et incendie de Châteaudun (18 octobre 1870) (1871)
• Lettres de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse: notes et notices (1876–1877; 2 volumes)
• Le Neveu de Rameau, de Diderot: notes et notices (1876)
• La défense de Châteaudun 18 octobre 1870 (1885)
• La vie à Paris pendant une année de la Révolution 1791-1792 (1896)

External links

• Works by Gustave Isambert at Gallica