Jean Nicot
Jean Nicot (born 1530, Nîmes, France—died 1600/1604, Paris) was a French diplomat and scholar who introduced tobacco to the French court in the 16th century, which gave rise to the culture of snuffing and to the plant’s eventual dissemination and popularization throughout Europe.
Nicot was raised in the quiet town of Nîmes in southern France, where his father worked as a notary. Nicot studied in Toulouse and Paris before entering into service of the French court in 1553. In 1559, having fallen into favour with King Henry II, Nicot became the French ambassador to Portugal. He was sent to Lisbon to oversee French trade concerns and to arrange a marriage between Margaret of Valois and Sebastian, who had become king of Portugal in 1557, at age three. The marriage arrangement fell through, but while in Lisbon, Nicot was introduced to tobacco, the plant that would ultimately make him famous. He learned of the plant and its medicinal properties from Portuguese humanist Damião de Góis. Intrigued by the details related by de Góis, Nicot decided to test a tobacco ointment on a Lisbon man with a tumour. The man was cured, and further investigation of the plant’s medicinal applications convinced Nicot that it was a medical nostrum, effecting cures for conditions from cancer to gout to headache.
In 1560 Nicot sent tobacco seeds—as well as figs, oranges, and lemons—to the queen of France, Catherine de Médicis, at Paris. Along with the specimens, Nicot included a letter expounding the medicinal properties of tobacco. In 1561 Nicot returned to the court in Paris, where he presented the queen with leaves from a tobacco plant. It is believed that the queen received instructions from Nicot for preparing a simple headache remedy by crushing the leaves into a powder that could be inhaled through the nose. The remedy, which proved satisfactory, soon became popular with members of the French court, who used tobacco powder to stave off various illnesses. In this preventative role, tobacco became identified with the pleasures of nobility, and it is likely that many users developed addictions to it. Eventually the plant was cultivated in France and other parts of northern Europe to fulfill demand. In the 17th century in England the crushed preparation became widely known as snuff.
Following Nicot’s return to Paris, he was granted the title Villemain and given land near the village of Brie-Comte-Robert, located in the north-central region of Île-de-France. Nicot subsequently retired to his new home, where he composed the French dictionary Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606; “Treasure of the French Language”). The work was an extension of French humanist Robert Estienne’s Dictionaire françois-latin (1531; “French-Latin Dictionary”).
In 1753 Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus named the genus of tobacco cultivars Nicotiana in recognition of Nicot’s role in popularizing the plant. (The plant Nicot knew was probably N. rustica.) Nicot’s name was also immortalized by the term nicotine, the name given to the active ingredient in tobacco, first isolated from the plant’s leaves in 1828.