Charles Adolphe Ginestet (also, Ginestel/Ginester) M.D. (5 November 1807 – 17 May 1884) was a French homeopathic physician, author, journalist and socialist politician during the Second Republic. He was outlawed in exile in Jersey following the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 against French President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III), that resulted in the end of the Second Republic.

Ginestet practiced in Niort, France, and Jersey in the Channel Islands. He was a colleague of French homeopathic physician Francois Perrussel. It is also likely that he was a colleague of another Channel Island homeopath, John Ozanne, who practiced on Guernsey from 1844 – 1864.

Charles Adolphe Ginestel/Ginestet was born on 5 November 1807, in Rodez, Aveyron, Midi-Pyrénées, France, the son of Jean Pierre Ginestel (d. 1842) and Marie Rose Benoit (d. 1826).

In June 1840, Ginestet married Susanne Victorine Martineau (c. 1819 – 1855), in Luçon, Vendée, Pays de la Loire (Loire). They had three children: Victoire Berthe (b. 1842), Alice Claire, and a son, Henry Théophile Ginester/Ginestet.

Ginestel/Ginestet was practicing as a physician in Niort, Deux-Sèvres, France, in 1845. Niort is only 60km from Luçon, where he married Susanne, so it is likely that he was practicing in Luçon around 1840.

Ginestet published two books on medicine, the first in 1840, and a second in 1847, La vieille médecine et ses dangers surtout dans l’apoplexie, that revealed he had converted to homeopathy. There is an unusually lengthy review of Ginestet’s second book by homeopath Dr. Defert in the Journal de la Medicine Homoeopathique, volume 3 (1847).

Ginestet edited a short-lived journal, Almanach de la santé pour l’année 1850 and Almanach de la santé pour l’année 1851.

That year, 1851, Ginestet experienced serious legal troubles when he was convicted by a jury in Deux-Sèvres, and was sent to prison for 6 months and fined 2000 francs for an article he had published in another journal he edited, l’OEil Peuple (the Eye of the People).

After he was released from prison, he moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands. Interestingly, he would later return to the Deux-Sèvres area.

Although Ginestet’s professional relationships with other homeopaths remain largely unknown, in 1854, an extract of a letter addressed to Ginestet was reprinted in The British Journal of Homoeopathy that reveals he was a colleague of pioneering French homeopath Francois Perrussel. According to Perrussel‘s letter, he had been sent to Poulaines, by the Prefect of the Department of l’Aube, to deal with a cholera outbreak in the area. In his letter to Ginestet, Perrussel calculated that his mortality rate using homeopathy was between 5-7%, compared with 90% of those treated allopathically!

While practicing in Jersey, on 20 January 1855, Ginestet’s wife Susanne died of a heart aneurysm, aged 36. Nine months later, on 22 November 1855, at St Helier, Jersey, 49 year old Ginestel (D.M.) married 48 year old Jane Nicolle (c. 1807).

A biography of Ginestet was added to Le Maitron, the Biographical Dictionary of the French Labour Movement:

He was the ninth of eleven children of the merchant Jean-Pierre Ginestet (1762 – 1842) and his wife Marie-Rose Benoit (1767 – 1827). Married, he had three children: Berthe born in 1842, Alice in 1844 and Théophile in 1850.

Editor-in-Chief of The Eye of the People from 1849 to 1851. The first issue of this newspaper, published in Niort, 21, rue du Faisan, appeared on 25 March 1849, shortly before the elections to the Legislative Assembly.

From the statement of principle, it emerged that The People’s Eye, which was called the “journal of democratic, agricultural, and social interests,” had to defend a reformist socialism without being attached to a determined school. It called in particular for: the right to work, the creation of national banks organizing and distributing the credit, the progressive tax substituted for proportional taxation, the free and identical education for all, the free voluntary association, the Democratic Republic and all the social improvements that drown them.

Dr. Ginestet was prosecuted in the Assize Court for his editorial of 16 December 1849, entitled “Right to enjoy”. He developed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea: “The earth belongs to God and its fruits are for everyone.” Indicted infringement of the right of property, he was acquitted.

In The People’s Eye of February 17, 1850, Ginestet wrote: “Socialism is Civilization. Yes, Civilization, for it is at last time, for the honour of mankind, for instruction to spread, for work to be more widely recompensed and for property, by the very rise of wages, to become accessible to all. Yes, Civilization, for it is at last, for the happiness of our fellow human beings, that regular work should take the place of unemployment and that the father, moralized by ease, as Robert Peel said, should no longer be eternally grappling with the irritation of misery.”

While writing and directing The People’s Eye, Dr. Ginestet served as president of the Niort Philanthropic Society.

By judgement of the Court of Assizes of the Deux-Sèvres on 11 September 1851, he was sentenced to a fine of two thousand francs and six months’ imprisonment for press offences. He was serving his sentence when the coup d’état of 2 December occurred.

On January 17, 1852, in a report to the minister, the prefect of the Deux-Sèvres said about Ginestet: “In prison. It is the soul of the revolutionary party; despised and feared by all, it is an organizer of resistance; corresponds with the secret societies, subsidized by the revolutionaries, it deserves the strongest punishment; but in prison for the crime of the press, deprived by me of communication with his political friends, put in secret on the evening, he knew what had happened only on the 6th; it was not for the recent insurrection, quickly to be free in May 1852 and then be able to head the movement. It was he who did all the evil in the department; public opinion would understand that he had the most severe punishment and that from what he was guilty earlier did not become the cause which made him less severely punished.”

On February 16, 1852, the Commission at Deux-Sèvres decided that Ginestet would be far from France, “not thinking that it would be possible to his regret to apply a more severe punishment to him.”

Expelled from the territory, Dr. Ginestet retired to England; he is on the list of procrites residing in Jersey. On October 21, 1853 he was present at the general assembly of the republican proscribed residing in Jersey, which declared Mr. Julien Hubert as a spy and provocateur officer of the police of Napoleon III.

Under the amnesty of 1859, he was able to return to France. He was elected councillor of Niort in 1871. He presented himself, but without success, in the elections of 8 February to the National Assembly in the Deux-Sèvres.

On 9 February 1876, aged 68, Ginestet married for a third time, Jersey-born Elizabeth Barett (b. 1837), in Niort, Deux-Sèvres. Ginestet was still residing in Niort in 1881.

Charles Adolphe Ginestet died in Bordeaux on 15 May, 1884.

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