Jean Nicot

Jean Nicot de Villemain was a French diplomat and scholar born in 1530. In 1560, while serving abroad, he dispatched tobacco plants and seeds to Paris and presented them to King Francis II, championing their supposed medicinal properties. Smoking, he and others believed, could protect against illness—the plague especially. He introduced snuff tobacco to France and became the plant's most prominent early advocate at court. The tobacco plant was named Nicotiana tabacum in his honor, and from that came nicotine, the substance that would define the drug's grip on the world. He died on 4 May 1604.