Biography | Marie Curie — First Woman to Lecture from This Sorbonne Chair

People remember 5 November 1906 as a tribute speech for a dead husband.

It was a physics class, delivered in mourning clothes, in the old physics amphitheatre of the Faculty of Sciences.

Pierre Curie had been killed on 19 April 1906 when a horse-drawn wagon struck him on rue Dauphine. The faculty appointed Marie to the chair he had held. She became the first woman professor at the University of Paris.

The room now called amphithéâtre Lefebvre sits on the Cujas side of the rebuilt Sorbonne. In 1906 it was still the physics lecture hall of the science faculty, with a painted storm on the wall behind the board.

Reporters and visitors packed the benches with the students. Émile Berr of Le Figaro was among them. He recorded a woman in black entering to long applause, then a lecture that refused the usual eulogy.

She began with the previous decade's change in ideas about electricity and matter, and went on with the course Pierre had been teaching. No special ceremony was what she had asked for. The crowd came anyway.

Sciences later moved to Jussieu. The amphitheatre kept the storm painting and took a historian's name. The plaque in the building still marks the first lecture.

The moment is not a Nobel night. Stockholm in 1903 had already named her, with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for work on radiation. This pin is the day a French faculty put a woman in a chair and she treated it as work.

Photo: Henri Manuel, Marie Curie c. 1920, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Sorbonne exterior is a later public-domain or CC facade view.