page_title: Godefroy Calès
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Godefroy Calès / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Godefroy Calès. (Huile sur toile, auteur et date inconnus, collection privée famille Gouzi)
context_page_description: Jean Marie Noël Godefroy Calès was a French physician and politician. He was born on March 21, 1799 in Saint-Denis and died on July 25, 1868 in Villefranche-de-Lauragais.
context_section_description: Godefroy Calès was born on 21 March 1799 in Saint-Denis in a family from southwestern France with a republican tradition. His father, Jean Calès (born in Caraman on 8 November 1764, deceased in Mazamet on 11 October 1840 and married to Marianne Louise Victorine Fournier, deceased on 9 February 1744 in Villefranche-de-Lauragais), was a physician and the administrator of the region Haute-Garonne between 1793 and 1794. He was later appointed, in 1799, chief physician of the military hospital of Saint-Denis, then called hôpital militaire de Franciade and located after the revolution within the walls of the Abbey Church of St Denis, where his son Godefroy was born. He then filled, from 1800 to 1804, the functions of Inspector-General of Military Hospitals. Jean Calès was the brother of Jean-Marie Calès (1757-1834), the eldest, also physician and representative at the National Convention and at the Council of Five-Hundred, and of Jean-Chrysostôme Calès (1769-1853), colonel in Napoleon's Great Army, baron of the Empire and representative at the Chamber of Representatives. Their parents (Godefroy's grandparents), Jean Calès, who was an alderman of Caraman, and Jeanne Rochas, were landowners of the region of Lauragais near Toulouse, from old Protestant families rooted in the region and forced to convert to Catholicism after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes issued by king Louis XIV in 1685.
  
  The younger brother of Godefroy, Louis Denis Godefroy, (born in November 1800 in Etain, Meuse), medical student in Toulouse in 1821, then professor at Castres, was presented to the Faculty of Protestant Theology of Montauban (created in 1808 by Napoleon I) and the Protestant consistory named him, on April 20, 1832, pastor in Viane (Tarn) where he will officiate until June 1874.  
  Faithful to family's traditions, Godefroy Calès followed, in Montpellier, the courses at the Faculty of Medicine and was received doctor in 1822. Established in Villefranche-de-Lauragais, where he had early acquired a certain political influence in republican circles, he was named after the Revolution of 1830 Commander of the National Guard; but seeing that the government was embarking on a course which was not his, he resigned. Godefroy remained close, intellectually and politically, to his uncle Jean-Marie, and this, despite the fact that the royalists condemned him to exile and banished him from the national territory in 1816, as a regicide, during the restoration of Monarchy. A letter written from Liège in 1833 by the former conventional and deputy to the Council of the Five-Hundred, and addressed to his nephew Godefroy, explicitly testifies about the proximity of their common republican convictions. Still remaining a member of the Municipal Council of Villefranche until 1848, Godefroy proclaimed that year, during the French second revolution, the Republic, and took over the administration of the city.
caption: Godefroy Calès (oil painting, unattributed)
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