Auguste Scheurer-Kestner was born in Mulhouse in 1833 and died in Bagnères-de- Luchon in the Pyrenees in 1899.

He was born into a leading protestant republican family of industrialists and initially worked in Paris in Adolphe Wurtz's chemistry laboratory, before starting work for his father’s printing and dyeing plant in Thann, Alsace in 1842.

He married a local girl, Céline Kestner in 1856, and then worked at his father-in-law’s chemical plant. In 1862, he was sentenced to four months imprisonment at Sainte-Pélagie for republican propaganda.

When the German armies invaded Alsace in 1870, he offered his services to the National Defence Government, and was put in charge of the Sète munitions plant.
On 8th February 1871, he was elected to the National Assembly as the representative of the Haut-Rhin département, then on the 2nd of July as a member of parliament for Seyne, in honour of annexed Alsace-Lorraine.

He became a life senator in September 1875 and Chairman of the House four years later. When his friend Léon Gambetta became Chairman of the House, he made Scheurer-Kestner political editor of La République française.

He took over management of the Kestner plant in 1883, when it became a public limited company. Until his death, his time was shared between political and professional activities.

The month after he became Vice-Chairman of the Senate (January 1895), he arranged a meeting with Mathieu Dreyfus and started to take an interest in the Dreyfus affair. When, in July 1897, Louis Leblois, Colonel Picquart's lawyer, told him what he knew, Scheurer-Kestner did not hesitate to announce his resolution to campaign for Dreyfus's rehabilitation.

However, he failed to convince his fellow members in the Senate in a vote on 7th December, and when he ran for Vice-Chairman again on 13 January 1898, he only received 80 votes out of a possible 229.
By then, he was suffering from throat cancer and soon had to step back from the breach.