Biography

Military pharmacist and naturalist from Agen in Lot-et-Garonne. He trained in Bordeaux and at the School of Pharmacy in Paris, from which he qualified as a pharmacist in 1854. Debeaux joined the French Army and was based in Algeria (1855-1859) at Algiers, Boghar and in the Kabylie. He was later a member of a military expedition to China (1860-1862) during which he also made botanical and malacological collections in the Canary Islands, South Africa and probably Madagascar. He was stationed in Corsica (1870), Perpignan (1872) and again in Algeria (1880-1884). He distributed a number of exsiccatae series of his own and contributed Algerian diatoms to the exsiccatae series Algues de France (1883-1893). He retired (1898) and settled in Tolouse, publishing on Chinese medicinal plants and floristic treatments of the Kabylie and Djurdjura of Algeria, the Spanish region of Aragon (provinces of Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel), Corsica, Rousillon and Lot-et-Garonne. His personal herbarium was deposited at P. A number of species are named in his honour including Gymnocarpos debeauxii Gand., Paris debeauxii H. Lév. and Sideritis debeauxii Font Quer.