François Rozier

Jean-Baptiste François Rozier (23 January 1734 in Saint-Nizier parish, Lyon – 28/29 September 1793 in Lyon) was a French botanist and agronomist.

Rozier was the son of Antoine Rozier (a squire, king's counselor and provincial controller for war for the department of Touraine) and his wife. He was a 'knight' (i.e. canon) of the primatial church in Lyon, prior commendatory of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin and lord of Chevreville.

Rozier studied in the Jesuit college at Villefranche-sur-Saône and entered the Saint-Irénée seminary in Lyon. Refusing to enter a more major seminary, he preferred to devote himself to science. He was ordained priest but lacked a vocation and thus became manager of his elder brother's estate in the Sainte-Colombe district on the banks of the Rhône, near Vienne, after their father's death in 1757. He convinced his friends, including Marc Antoine Louis Claret de La Tourrette (1729-1793) and Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert (1741-1814), into his schemes to convert the lands to pasture. He thus met Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779), who set up a veterinary school in Lyon, where Rozier became professor of botany and materia medica in 1761 and set up a major botanical garden. In 1765 he became the institution's teaching director but Bourgelat - who had become the director of the school in Alfort - was offended by Rozier's success and convinced the Bertin ministry to dismiss him in 1765.

Rozier therefore returned to his family lands, where he was visited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With his friend Claret de la Tourrette, he wrote Démonstrations élémentaires de botanique, foregrounding the virtues of plants and combining the principles of Tournefort and Linné. He came to Paris to edit the Journal de physique et d’histoire naturelle founded by Jacques Gautier d'Agoty, a periodicial of which he became owner in 1771 and which he re-titled Journal d’observations sur la Physique, l’Histoire naturelle et sur les Arts et Métiers. His nephew, abbé Mongez, a noted mineralogist, helped him for a time before joining the Lapérouse expedition.

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