Born on 6 April 1838 in Mayenne, Edmond Goupil moved to Paris in 1860 to complete his medical thesis and opened a medical practice where he provided free care to the poorest people.
He frequented cabarets and café concerts, writing poems and ditties that many composers set to music. He met his wife, Estelle, a young singer and playwright with whom he had 3 daughters.

A committed man, a free thinker and a member of the International, Edmond Goupil was a supporter of the Commune and wrote in November 1870:
" Why doesn't the Commune come into being? All power comes from below, sovereignty is delegated by the power of the people". In February 1871, he was elected to the Chambre Fédérale des sociétés ouvrières.

On 26 March, he was elected to the council of the ^6th arrondissement and put in charge of the education commission. He resigned in April, as a supporter of the Commune as a municipal management body, he argued that the Central Committee had pushed him towards "general and excessive measures". He was nevertheless sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment and was released in 1874 by obtaining a remission of sentence.

A profound humanist, he realised that the artists he frequented had no social protection and helped to set up a mutual insurance company, the "Association des Artistes Lyriques".

After the Commune, with Victor Hugo, he created "la ligue de l'intérêt public", a society to protect citizens against abuse. This association foreshadowed the "League of Human Rights". In 1908, as honorary president, he launched a petition against the death penalty.

In 1914, Edmond Goupil chaired "La ligue pour la protection de l'enfance" (the league for the protection of children), now known as L'ASE (l'aide sociale à l'enfance).

He wrote for a number of medical journals and took an interest in hygiene, devising a device for purifying and purifying the air. He also created uroscopy, a technique that bases diagnoses on urine tests. In 1892, concerned about housing problems, he experimented with a low-cost model of houses for workers.

A forerunner, he invented the traffic signal kiosk, the forerunner of traffic lights. A police officer in a booth turned a wheel to rotate the word Stop or Pass. Tested in 1912 "at the carrefour des écrasés" (intersection of Boulevard Montmartre and Boulevard Poissonnière), nicknamed the "Goupillon" by Parisians, this system was quickly withdrawn because it caused crowds of curious onlookers and the signals were not respected.

Following the amnesty of 1880, Edmond Goupil became involved in supporting Communards returning from exile.
He was behind the monument to his friend Eugène Pottier in Père-Lachaise and the monument to the Communards here in Montparnasse cemetery.

He founded the association "Solidarité des proscrits de 1871" ("Solidarity of the outcasts of 1871"), which was initially intended to provide mutual aid between former Communards, but was later dedicated to the memory of the Commune and became the "Association fraternelle des anciens combattants et amis de la Commune" ("Fraternal Association of veterans and friends of the Commune"). He was its president until 1918.
 Today, the association is known as "Les amies et amis de la commune de Paris 1871" (Friends of the Paris Commune 1871).

For information: the two people in the same grave are Roger GUESSARIAN, his grandson, and Pierre ADAM, the husband of his granddaughter.

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