Édouard Marie Heckel

Heckel was born in Toulon, studied pharmacy and medicine, and in 1861 visited the Caribbean and Australia.

In 1893 he founded the Colonial Institute and Museum of Marseille and creates a tropical pathology professorship at the medical school.

[1] In 1896, French botanist Jean Baptiste Louis Pierre named a genus of flowering plants (belonging to the family Meliaceae) from western central Tropical Africa, Heckeldora in his honour.

This project would be supported by Jules Charles-Roux, who would become the Commissioner General while Heckel was his deputy.

The exhibition was held at Parc Chanot in Marseille and was a great success from its opening on 14 April 1906 to its closure on 18 November 1906.