1911 was the year Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel Prizes. It was also the year the French press tried to destroy her, a mob gathered outside her house, and the Swedish Academy suggested she might prefer not to come and collect the award.
The two things happened within weeks of each other, and the second is the reason the first is worth telling properly.
January: The Académie Says No
In January 1911 a seat fell vacant at the Académie des Sciences and Curie stood for it. She had a Nobel Prize, two elements, the professorship at the Sorbonne that she had taken over on Pierre’s death, and an international reputation without equal among French physicists.
Her opponent was Édouard Branly, a respectable physicist with real work on radio detection behind him and no comparable record.
The campaign that followed was not about physics. The nationalist and Catholic press attacked her on three grounds: that she was a woman, that she was a foreigner, and that she was not a Christian. L’Action française and its allies also asserted that she was Jewish, which she was not, in a country still raw from the Dreyfus affair. The Académie had already debated whether women were eligible at all and concluded, in effect, that the tradition was against it.
The vote was held on 23 January 1911. Branly won by one or two votes.
The Académie des Sciences did not elect a woman until 1962, and when it did, it elected Marguerite Perey, who had begun her career as Curie’s laboratory assistant.
November: The Letters
In the autumn of that year Curie was in Brussels for the first Solvay Conference, in the company of most of the leading physicists in Europe.
While she was there, private letters between her and Paul Langevin, a physicist and a former student of Pierre’s, were obtained by Langevin’s wife’s family and handed to the press. Le Journal published the story on 4 November 1911. L’Œuvre printed extracts from the letters themselves.
What followed was a press campaign of a kind that is entirely recognisable today. She was a foreign woman who had come to France, taken a French husband, and then, in the telling of the papers, taken another woman’s. The word used repeatedly was foreign. Her Polish origin, her lack of religion, her position at the Sorbonne and her earlier Nobel Prize were all reassembled as evidence of presumption.
Crowds gathered outside her house at Sceaux, where she lived with her two daughters, Irène aged fourteen and Ève aged seven. Stones were thrown at the windows. She could not go home, and she and the children took refuge with Émile and Marguerite Borel. Émile Borel, a mathematician at the École Normale Supérieure, was warned by his superiors that sheltering her might cost him his position.
Langevin, for his part, fought a duel with the editor of L’Œuvre on 25 November. Both men declined to fire.
7 November: The Telegram
Three days after the first article appeared, Curie received word that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alone and unshared, for the discovery of radium and polonium.
Her first prize, in Physics in 1903, had been shared with Pierre and with Becquerel, and the committee had originally proposed to omit her name altogether until Pierre intervened. This one was hers by herself, and it made her the first person of any kind to win twice. She remains the only person to have won in two different sciences.
Then Svante Arrhenius wrote to her from Stockholm. He had supported her candidacy. His letter suggested that, in view of the newspaper reports, she should stay away from the ceremony, and that she might consider declining to attend until the accusations had been publicly disproved.
Her reply is the best thing in the whole episode. She wrote that the prize had been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium, that there was no connection whatever between her scientific work and the facts of her private life, and that she could not accept the principle that appreciation of scientific work could be influenced by slander concerning private life.
She went to Stockholm. She collected the prize on 10 December 1911 and delivered her lecture, in which she set out the chemistry of radium, the establishment of the radium standard, and where she thought the field would go next.
What It Cost Her Physically
Immediately afterwards she collapsed.
She spent most of 1912 seriously ill with a kidney condition, had surgery, and convalesced for months, part of the time in England, registered under her sister’s married name, Madame Dluska, to avoid the press. She did not return properly to work until late 1912, and she never fully recovered her health, although the radiation exposure that eventually killed her in 1934 is a separate and larger cause.
A year of the working life of the only person then capable of certain measurements was removed, and the thing that removed it was a newspaper campaign about her private life.
The Asymmetry
Paul Langevin’s career was not damaged. He continued at the Collège de France, became director of the ESPCI, did important work on magnetism and on acoustic detection of submarines during the First World War, and in 1927 he sat in the front row of the most famous group photograph in the history of physics.
In that photograph he is two places from Marie Curie, both of them in the front row of the fifth Solvay Conference, sixteen years later, among the senior figures of the discipline. Whatever either of them felt about being placed there, they were both still doing physics at the highest level, and only one of them had had to fight for the right to be in the room.
The double standard was noticed at the time by people close to her, and it was noticed that the attacks arrived in a very particular order: first the Académie rejection in January, on grounds of sex and nationality, then the personal campaign in November, using the same vocabulary. The second was easier because the first had established that she was fair game.
What She Did Next
The sequel is the part that tends to be forgotten, and it is the answer to the campaign.
She built the Radium Institute in Paris, which opened in 1914 and became one of the great research laboratories of Europe, and she trained a generation of researchers in it, a remarkable number of them women.
When the war came she stopped research and organised radiography for the French army, equipping vehicles with X ray apparatus, driving them to the front herself, and training around 150 women to operate the equipment.
Her daughter Irène worked alongside her in that programme as a teenager and later won a Nobel Prize of her own in 1935, with her husband Frédéric Joliot, for the synthesis of new radioactive elements.
There is one more closing fact that nobody would dare invent. Marie Curie’s granddaughter, Hélène Joliot, a nuclear physicist, married Michel Langevin, a nuclear physicist, who was Paul Langevin’s grandson. Two generations later, the families whose names were used to humiliate her were working in the same laboratories and were related by marriage.
The Work the Prize Was For
The 1911 prize citation is specific: the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium, and the study of its nature and compounds. All of that rests on the research she presented as her doctoral thesis in 1903, Recherches sur les substances radioactives, which set out the measurements, the separation chemistry and the conclusion that radioactivity is a property of the atom.
Our edition of the 1903 thesis presents the original French alongside the 1904 English translation, each starting from its own cover. It is the document that Arrhenius was proposing she stay at home rather than be honoured for, and reading it is the most direct rebuttal of everything the newspapers printed about her.
For the rest of what she published and where to find it, our guide to Marie Curie’s papers in order works through the whole sequence.
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