Jules Bourgeois

Who was Jules Bourgeois?

Jules Bourgeois was a French entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera.

Jules Bourgeois was initially associated with his father and brother in Rouen, as the Paris representative of the family weaving business and he finally representing the spinning mills of H. Schwartz in Sainte Marie-aux-Mines from 1893. He used his leisure time to follow his true vocation, that of naturalist. An entomologist of international fame, J.B. studied especially the exotic coleoptera in the then group Malacodermata, now unranked. He described several hundreds of new species in many scientific publications and especially in the Bulletin and Annales of the Société entomologique de France of which he was a very active member. Jules Bourgeois is especially known to Alsatian entomologists by his catalogue of the beetles of "la chaîne des Vosges" and surrounding regions published in part in 1898 in the Bulletin de la Société d’histoire naturelle de Colmar. One finds there more than 3000 species indexed with very many localities. The author thus showed the great richness of the entomological fauna of the Alsace,the richest of France, after the Provence and Côte d'Azur.