Guillaume Barthez de Marmorières (2 March 1707 – 11 January 1799) was a French civil engineer.

Biography

Son of an architect, he was born in

Narbonne Narbonne (, also , ; oc, Narbona ; la, Narbo ; Late Latin:) is a commune in Southern France in the Occitanie region. It lies from Paris in the Aude department, of which it is a sub-prefecture. It is located about from the shores of the ...

in southern France. He became a civil engineer for the province of

Languedoc The Province of Languedoc (; , ; oc, Lengadòc ) is a former province of France. Most of its territory is now contained in the modern-day region of Occitanie in Southern France. Its capital city was Toulouse. It had an area of approximately ...

. He was elected to the Académie des sciences et lettres de Montpellier ( fr), gained a wide reputation through either his writings or the works he supervised. He was called upon to edit or contribute two entries in the ''

Encyclopédie ''Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers'' (English: ''Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts''), better known as ''Encyclopédie'', was a general encyclopedia publis ...

'' of Diderot and

d’Alembert Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (; ; 16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the ''Encyclopédie ...

. He was made a hereditary nobleman ''de Marmorières'' in 1780 by letters patent of

Louis XVI Louis XVI (''Louis-Auguste''; ; 23 August 175421 January 1793) was the last King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as ''Citizen Louis Capet'' during the four months just before he was ...

. He was the father of Paul Joseph Barthez physician, physiologist and encyclopedist who developed the biological theory known as

vitalism Vitalism is a belief that starts from the premise that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things." Wher ...

. He died in Narbonne in 1799 at the age of 91.

Selected works

* * Mémoires d’agriculture et de mécanique, avec les moyens de remédier aux abus du jaugeage des vaisseaux dans tous les ports du roi, Paris, 1763, in-8° * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barthez de Marmorieres, Guillaume People from Narbonne 1707 births 1799 deaths Contributors to the Encyclopédie (1751–1772) 18th-century French engineers