[4] In the late 1880s, Gustave Bouchereau asked him to go to Scotland to study the open care systems that had already existed in that country since the 1830s, thanks to the work of Robert Gardiner Hill and John Conolly.

The conclusion that Marie drew from his visit to Scotland and from the Belgian experience is that certain psychiatric patients who were cared for in well managed, more open systems could get better.

[5] After a virulent debate among medical professionals, public officials and the press, the département of the Seine (a now-disbanded, non-central government that represented Paris and surrounding regions until it was disbanded in 1968) tasked Auguste Marie with creating, on a trial basis, a 'family colony' to serve its psychiatric patients.

In addition to enhancing patient well-being, the goal was to relieve the asylums of the Seine département which were overcrowded and becoming a heavy financial burden.

Families in the region needed alternative sources of income (provision of foster care was remunerated) and it is for that reason that the local authorities welcomed Marie's initiative.

[5] In October 1892, Auguste Marie was named director of the newly founded colony and selected the first group of 100 patients to be enrolled in the new system.

[5] There were some unanticipated problems, notably that, once the patients were transferred from the asylum, nothing in their legal status prevented them from abandoning foster care or asserting control over their own financial affairs.

At this time, he began to envisage the possibility of exhibiting their artwork,[8] an idea he argued for in his 1905 article Le musée de la folie (The madness museum).

[11] He recalled this experience in 1911 in an article in which he explained the risks that psychiatric doctors took after his colleague Aimé Guinard was killed in similar circumstances.

"[12] In 1914, although he was far past the age of mandatory mobilisation, he volunteered in the army and became médecin-major for the 95th infantry regiment but his service was short : on September 26, he was wounded in the forest of Apremont and was evacuated from the frontline.

He was among the first psychiatrists in France to experiment with malaria therapy, a method of curing neurosyphilis invented by Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg, for which he received the Nobel Prize in medicine.

In malaria therapy, patients are deliberately infected with malarial parasites (Plasmodium) in order to induce fever, under the theory that an elevated body temperature cures the disease or reduces its symptoms.

A 2917 study of the treatment in a Dutch psychiatric hospital over the 1924-1954 period found that "well tolerated and Malaria Fever Treated patients had a significantly longer survival.

As a hygienist and member of the republican-Socialist Party, he worked on the electrification and installation of running water on the commune's territory, and founded a garden-city in 1927.