page_title: Alexandre Liautard
section_title: Family life and return to France
hierarchical_section_title: Alexandre Liautard / Biography / Family life and return to France
caption_attribution_description: English: Postcard view of the Palais Garnier (Paris Opera) from the Avenue de l'Opéra around 1900
context_page_description: Alexandre François Augustin Liautard was a French veterinarian born on February 15, 1835 in Paris and died April 20, 1918 at Bois-Jérôme-Saint-Ouen. After graduating from the École nationale vétérinaire de Toulouse in 1856, he emigrated to the United States in 1859 to exercise his profession of veterinary practitioner in New York until 1900, when he retired and returned to France. The name of Alexandre Liautard is associated with the beginning of private veterinary education in America. Liautard was the founder and dean of the New York American Veterinary College. He participated in organizing the American Veterinary profession and founded the United States Veterinary Medical Association, now the American Veterinary Medical Association, of which he was for many years a driving force. His name is still cited in the American veterinary press as a dominant figure in the history of the profession for having defined its professional standards and missions, and been a uniting force, and as founder of the American Veterinary Review, now the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
context_section_description: In New York, Alexandre Lieutard married Emily Joséphine Stouvenel the daughter of French immigrants to New-York. Their only daughter, Marie-Louise was born in 1864 in New York where she was brought up. In 1890, she married Octave Boyer who had come to New York to set up a branch of the Grande Maison de Blanc, a luxury Brussels store in Opéra district of Paris. The New York store on Fifth avenue was closed down in the 1960s. In 1900, when Octave Boyer was made director of the Grande Maison de Blanc, boulevard des Capucines, in Paris, Alexandre Liautard retired and returned to France with his wife, then confined to a wheelchair due to cerebral infarction, and with his daughter and son-in-law. It seems that Liautard was too attached to his daughter to let her leave without him. They lived in a vast apartment on the fourth floor of a luxury building at 14, avenue de l'Opéra.
  Although no longer a practitioner, Liautard continued to develop numerous activities. As honorary dean of New York American Veterinary College, he kept up extensive correspondence from France with his American colleagues and continued to write editorials for his American Veterinary Review. He took part in the meetings of the Central Society of Veterinary Medicine which, in 1928 and thanks to Emmanuel Leclainche, became the Veterinary Academy of France (Académie vétérinaire de France). He became its president in 1911. From 1914 onwards  he provided financial support for the activities of the Commission for Relief in Belgium initiated by Herbert Hoover (who would later become President of the United States), to provide aid to German-occupied Belgium.
  In 1911, he purchased a small 19th century chateau, La Mare aux Cerfs, at Bois-Jérôme-Saint-Ouen, near to Vernon, in the Eure. It was there that he died on April 18th 1918 following a heart attack.
caption: Avenue de l'Opéra, Paris, 1900
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