French military physician and botanist. Spire worked in the French colonies in West Africa and Indochina from the early 1900s until the 1940s. He stayed in Java from late 1901 until March 1902, sending plants collected in the vicinity of Buitenzorg to the Paris Museum of Natural History. He remained in Asia in 1902-1903, being sent to Indochina in the capacity of military physician, and in 1905 took his doctoral degree (in botany) in Paris. He went on to work in West Africa in the 1910s, for example collecting plants in Dahomey around 1911, and was in Indochina in the 1920s, where he collected plants in Xiangkhouang, north-east Laos. Spire's major botanical publications were his doctoral thesis, a study of the Apocynaceae family (1905) and a 1906 work co-authored by André Spire, Le caoutchouc en Indo-Chine, dealing with rubber-producing plants. The latter was produced for the French Colonial Office. Camille Spire also authored medical guides for those visiting the colonies in the 1920s. He became a member of the Botanical Society of France in 1905. The genus Spirella Constantin was named for him.

Sources:
F. Gagnepain, in H. Lecomte, 1944, Flore générale de l'Indo-chine, tome préliminaire
J. van der Maesen and A. Akoègninou, 2004, "Notulae Florae Beninensis 3. - Botanical collectors in Benin", Willdenowia, 34: 14
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/FMCollectors/S/SpireO.htm.