Real Life Romance: Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie

This month in Real Life Romance, we talk about a particularly brilliant couple, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The Curie women all had amazing real life romances. Marie Curie’s real life romance with her husband, Pierre, is quite well known. If you’d like to learn more about it, I recommend a stunningly beautiful graphic novel, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, by Lauren Redniss. I gave it an A.

Less famous, but equally productive, was the romance between Curie’s daughter Irène and Irène’s husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie. They were a bit star-crossed at first, since Irène’s mother did not approve of the match, but they ended up having a long and apparently happy marriage during which they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, had two children, and fought Fascism in the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

Irène Curie was homeschooled by her parents and their many prize-winning friends. She showed interest and aptitude for science from an early age. In 1918 she became her mother’s assistant at The University of Paris. Her doctoral thesis was on the alpha rays of polonium. During WWI, she worked alongside her mother, Marie Curie, using rudimentary X-Ray machines field hospitals (Marie Curie established twenty of these hospitals during the war). After the war, Irène studied at the Radium Institute in Paris.

A young Irene does science with her mom, Marie
Irene and Marie Curie

Meanwhile, Frédéric stumbled into science almost accidentally. Unlike Irène, who was homeschooled with an experimental curriculum, Frédéric went to boarding school where he did better at sports than academics. When his family lost their money, he had to transfer to a free school and from then he attended École de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle. He graduated with a degree in Engineering, and served in WWI.

Irène met Frédéric in 1925 (the same year she presented her doctoral thesis). He had been hired as one of Marie’s research assistants. Marie Curie was not dazzled – but Irène certainly was. She and Frédéric married one year after they met. Marie insisted that Irène get a pre-nup, and insisted that they make a legally binding agreement that, regardless of what happened with the marriage, Irène would inherit the use of the radium in Marie Curie’s lab. Marie also encouraged Frédéric to get a second Bachelor’s Degree and a Doctorate. His thesis was on the electrochemistry of radioelements.

Irene and Frederic in their lab
Irene and Frederic in their lab

Frédéric and Irène won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 (Marie and Pierre won a joint Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, and Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911).

They won the prize for discovering a way to create artificial radioactivity. From the American Institute of Physics:

A critical experiment in their basement lab at the Radium Institute led them to a correct and very significant conclusion in mid-January 1934. By bombarding stable elements with nuclear projectiles, they were the first to discover artificial radioactivity–a normal element was changed to a radioactive one through human intervention.

Thanks to their discovery, artificially radioactive atoms could now be prepared relatively inexpensively. The tedious labor and high cost of separating naturally occurring radioactive elements like radium from their ores would no longer impede the progress of nuclear physics and medicine.

During WWII, the Curies struggled to fight the Nazis both before and during the occupation of France. Irène spent much of the war in Switzerland, where she was recovering from tuberculosis. Eventually she was able to get her two children out of Occupied France so they could stay with her (their daughter, Helene, is a nuclear physicist and their son, Pierre, is a biochemist). Frédéric stayed in France. He smuggled his research papers to England to keep potential weapons informations away from the Germans. He was an active member of the French Resistance, for which he manufactured radio parts and explosives.

In 1942, Frédéric joined the French Communist Party, which took a strong stance against the Nazis. Irene never joined the party, but she was associated with it, in part because the French Communist Party was a leader in the Women’s Rights Movement. Their communist affiliations led to them losing their position on the French Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War.

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Like her mother, Irène paid a heavy price for years of working with radioactive materials. She died of leukemia at the age of 58, at the Curie hospital in Paris. Frédéric died of liver disease two years later. His exposure to radiation may have been a factor in his illness as well.

By the way, it turns out that Irène Curie’s sister, Eve, was a total badass who also had a great real life romance. Seriously, the Curie women could easily corner both the Real Life Romance column and the Kickass Women in History column for months.

You can read more about Eve Curie at pajiba.com. Eve was a writer who, among other things, wrote the first biography of Marie Curie. According to the Pajiba article by Steven Lloyd Wilson,

Eve’s experiences during World War II were even more adventurous. She fled to England when France fell, and joined the Free French forces there. Gaining access from her mother’s name that would have been barred to nearly anyone else, she set out on a world tour of the allied war zones. Visiting the front and writing dispatches from Africa, Asia, and the Russian Front, she compiled fascinating interviews with both common soldiers and leaders who would become household names after the war. Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, Zou Enlai, Churchill, the Shah of Iran. It was like Forrest Gump if the protagonist had twice the IQ. The dispatches were published in a volume called Journey Among Warriors, [which] was nominated (though it lost) for a Pulitzer, and sadly faded out of print after the forties. Sixty-year-old copies can still be tracked down used from either Amazon or musty old bookstores.

Eve married Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., a diplomat who became the head of UNICEF and who received a Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965. She was known as “The First Lady of UNICEF” and visited over a hundred countries as part of her work with her husband.

Eve Curie on the cover of TIME magazine
Eve Curie

Then there are Marie Curie’s grandchildren, both of whom had distinguished scientific careers of their own with impressive Real Life Romances to boot. After Pierre Curie died, Marie had an affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin. In an epic plot twist, her granddaughter, Helene, married Michael Langevin, the grandson of Paul Langevin.

Sometimes women in the sciences find that their scientific achievements are overshadowed by their private lives (male scientists rarely have this problem). It is most certainly not my intention to suggest that the most interesting thing about the members of the Curie family is that they all had a knack for having apparently happy marriages with other brilliant scientists. The Curie family is famous for their contributions to science, not their love lives, and rightly so. But as Real Life Romances go, you’d be hard pressed to find another family whose marriages involved so many Nobel Prizes – and you’d also be hard-pressed to find a family in which the husbands, consistently and without regard to the time period, staunchly supported their wives’ careers.

In addition to the article linked above, you can learn more about the Curies at:

Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie,” Encyclopedia Britannica

“A Second Generation of Curies,” American Institute of Physics

You can learn more about Frédéric and Irène’s science achievements and read their Nobel acceptance speech at Nobelprize.org

I am never too proud to admit that I also rely on Wikipedia as a starting point, so if you want to get a quick introduction to the Curie family you’ll find Wikipedia entries on most of the members of the family.

Comments are Closed

  1. Heather S says:

    Eve’s book sounds awesome! Copies start at 17 cents on Amazon if you aren’t particular about condition and having dust jackets.

  2. HollyG says:

    I just bought the Eve Curie book for my sister – thanks for write up on this amazing family.

  3. Nataka says:

    That’s funny I was just thinking about irene and Frederic today, reminding how a friend of mine insisted once about the fact that Frederic’s last name was always Joliot-Curie, and that it was a total coincidence that he eventually married a woman named Curie, and I kept insisting that he was wrong. Of course they both took each other’s names when they married, and even if that’s for the obvious reason that in the scientific community the name Curie was already important whereas Joliot meant little, I still think it was a very modern and open-minded choice.

  4. Karin says:

    Fantastic real-life romance, Carrie, keep ’em coming! I checked out Frédéric Joliot-Curie on Wikipedia, and he was quite a looker in his youth.
    I also found it amazing that he and Irene both hypenated their surnames, to be Joliet-Curie. And this was back in the 1920’s!
    You could make half a dozen really great movies about his family’s story.

  5. Karin says:

    I meant, *this* family’s story.

  6. Jan says:

    Thank you, Carrie, for this fascinating post. I ordered Eve’s book “Journey Among Warriors” and, at my library, put holds on the other titles mentioned.

  7. Heather S says:

    Just got my copy of “Journey Among Warriors” in the mail today! Mmmm… Old Book Smell. And it is deckle edged! (Just in case you’re a total nerd for deckle edged books like I am. lol)

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