Jean Alfred Fournier (1832-1914) was the first French syphilologist, the first professor of cutaneous and syphilitic diseases at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, and the most prominent European venereologist of the second half of the 19th century. He described many characteristic features of congenital and acquired syphilis. Moreover, he introduced, in opposition to Charcot, Brown-Sequard, Vulpian, and Duchenne, the concept that tabes was of syphilitic origin. It is paradoxical that he is remembered for his description of scrotal gangrene, a disease with no relation to syphilis.