Jean Jules Godefroy Calès () was a French politician and physician. He was born on July 24, 1828, in Villefranche-de-Lauragais (Haute-Garonne) and died on November 2, 1899, in Bordeaux (Gironde).
Biography
« Son of Jean Marie Noël Godefroy Calès, physician doctor, and of dame Léonie Alphonsine Zulmée Metgé », Jean Jules Godefroy Calès was born in Villefranche-de-Lauragais (Haute-Garonne) on July 24, 1828. His father, the doctor Godefroy Calès (1799–1868) was a deputy (Représentant du Peuple) of Haute-Garonne at the Constituent National Assembly (1848–1849) under the French Second Republic. His grandfather, Jean Calès (1764–1840), also physician, was the Administrator of Haute-Garonne and Inspector-General of military hospitals. His grand-uncles were Jean-Marie Calès (1757–1834), who was deputy at the National Convention and at the Council of Five Hundred under the French Revolution, and Jean-Chrysostôme Calès (1769–1853), who was colonel of the Great Army, baron of the Empire and elected at the ephemeral Chamber of Representatives created by Napoléon Bonaparte during the period of the Hundred Days in 1815. The Calès family came from old Protestant families rooted in the region of Lauragais and forced to convert to Catholicism after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes issued by king Louis XIV in 1685.
Under the Second French Empire (1852–1870) Jean Jules Godefroy studied medicine in Paris and in Montpellier, and, after receiving his doctor's degree in 1854, he settled in his native town of Villefranche-de-Lauragais. He exercised there, and free of charge, the functions of doctor of the prisons, of the gendarmerie, of the charity office, and of the schools & assisted children. He was later elected Municipal Councilor (1863–1875) and then Mayor of Villefranche-de-Lauragais (1875–1892), a function he exercised for nearly seventeen years. He also became General Councilor of the canton of Villefranche from 1880 to 1898.
During the Second French Empire, Calès took part to the fights of the Democratic Party against Emperor Napoleon III, and presented his candidature to the Corps législatif (French parliament), as a candidate of the Republican Opposition at the Legislative Elections of May 24, 1869, in the 3rd district of Haute-Garonne: he failed, obtaining however 7,730 votes against 16,523 for the official candidate, the outgoing Bonapartist deputy M. Piccioni. The famous leader of the French Socialist Party Jules Guesde will report with ardor, indignation and with a certain sense of irony, this electoral defeat of the doctor Calès in a polemical article published the August 31, 1869, in his republican newspaper « La liberté de l’Hérault »:
Under the French Third Republic (1870–1885)
After the outbreak of the Franco-German war on July 19, 1870, Calès was appointed, Sub-Prefect of his Arrondissement on September 5, 1870, just three days after the defeat of the French troops at the battle of Sedan and the capitulation of Napoleon III on September 2 (which provoked his exile and the fall of the Second Empire), and the next day only after the proclamation of the Third Republic by Republican leader Léon Gambetta, on September 4. But soon he considered that his place was with those who defended France against the Prussian invasion. He thus resigned from his new position and joined the Army in November, in one of the eleven regional military camps created by Gambetta, who was newly appointed Minister of the Interior and of War in the Government of National Defense. He was appointed Chief Physician of the military Camp of Toulouse on November 20, 1870, a position he held until his demobilization on March 15, 1871.
After the victory of the German troops, the signing of the Armistice of Versailles on January 28, 1871, and the suspension of the hostilities, and in accordance with the German requirements which stipulated that elections should be organized rapidly to form an Assembly aimed at ratifying peace, Calès made a second electoral attempt at the Legislative Elections of February 8, 1871: he arrived first on the list of the Republican Party led by Gambetta with 27,349 votes. However, the mixed list of the National Union, essentially composed of Monarchists, won (M. de Belcastel, the last elected member of this list, passed with 63,123 votes). The newly formed Assembly, mostly monarchist and favorable to peace, invested on February 19, a new government headed by Adolphe Thiers.