Clémence Royer (1830–1902)

Clémence Royer was born Augustine-Clémence Audouard in Nantes, France, to a royalist army captain father and a seamstress mother. They married seven years after her birth. When she was a toddler, the failure of an 1832 rebellion to restore the Bourbon monarchy forced the family to flee to Switzerland, where they spent four years in exile. After their return to France,

Clémence was educated at home and attended a convent board school for a year at age 10; after that, she was self-taught. At age 13, she moved with her parents to Paris. She was greatly influenced by the events of the Revolution of 1848 and abandoned her family's political beliefs to become a republican and atheist. She obtained diplomas qualifying her to work as a teacher in a secondary school.
In 1854, she taught for year at a private girls’ school in Haverfordwest in south Wales, where she became fluent in English, then returned to teach at schools in Touraine and Beauvais. In 1856, she gave up teaching to live on a small legacy from her late father and moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. There she studied anthropology, comparative religion, astronomy, biology, economic theory, moral theory, philosophy, mathematics, and more. She began to offer lectures on science and logic for women. She took up writing for journals such as Le Nouvel Économist and in 1860, when the Swiss canton of Vaud offered a prize for the best essay on income tax, she wrote a book that won second prize. It was published in 1862 as Théorie de l'impôt ou la dîme social (Theory of Taxation, or the Social Tithe), and included a discussion of the economic role of women in society. It was through this book that she first became known outside Switzerland. In 1863, she
translated Charles Darwin's Origin of Species into French, and caused a controversy by adding a 60-page preface of her own to make her anti-religious arguments. This added to her international fame and she became a popular interpreter of science as well as a philosopher of science. In her time, she was considered a scholar without peer, with an encyclopedic grasp of the world that allowed her to question society’s greatest institutions and beliefs. As a woman, she was barred from access to higher education or university teaching positions, as well as many learned societies, but later became the first woman member of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris; and her work helped opened doors to other women. In 1866, she had a son, René, with her longtime lover and companion Pascal Duprat, a married man, editor of Le Nouvel Économiste. She moved back to France in 1885 and published more books, including Natura

Rerum (1900), her theory of the nature of the world and the energy of atoms. She continued to produce reviews and monographs, and became a regular columnist for the new feminist newspaper La Fronde. In 1900, she was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.