Antoine Lavoisier
1743 – 1794 French chemist
The father of modern chemistry, guillotined in the French Revolution.
- Religion
- Catholic by background; his outlook was that of an Enlightenment rationalist.
- Affiliations
- Member of the French Academy of Sciences; a royal tax farmer, which cost him his life in the Terror.
Lavoisier named oxygen and hydrogen, showed that matter is conserved in chemical reactions, and swept away the old phlogiston theory. He built the systematic language of modern chemistry. As a former tax collector he was condemned and beheaded during the Revolution.