Alphonse Francois Lacroix

Alphonse Francois Lacroix (1799-1859) was originally from Switzerland. Lacroix served in Napoleon’s army for a time, but was converted and commissioned in Rotterdam as a missionary of the Netherlands Missionary Society, after which he was sent to the mission at Chinsurah, Bengal, where he arrived in March 1821. In 1825 Lacroix joined the London Missionary Society, working in villages in the south of Calcutta. He moved to Bhowanipore in 1837 to concentrate on native evangelism. He was a close friend of Alexander Duff, even though he disagreed with the latter’s promotion of English as the language of education. Lacroix spoke fluent Bengali and was an impressive figure among the missionaries in India in his day. See Lacroix’s memoir, Missionary Devotedness: A Brief Memoir of the Rev. A. Lacroix, of Calcutta, Thirty-Nine Years a Missionary to the Heathen (London, 1860).