People on France's street signs

Charles de Gaulle

1151 Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany and Vichy France in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of...

Jean Moulin

666 Jean Pierre Moulin was a French civil servant and hero of the French Resistance who succeeded in unifying the main networks of the Resistance in World War II. He served as the first President of the...

Jean Jaurès

598 Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès, commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès, was a French socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became a social democrat and one of the first...

Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque

536 Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque was a Free-French general during World War II. He became Marshal of France posthumously in 1952, and is known in France simply as le maréchal Leclerc...

Louis Pasteur

486 Louis Pasteur was a French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was...

Victor Hugo

470 Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.

Jean de La Fontaine

459 Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists...

Léon Gambetta

386 Léon Gambetta was a French lawyer and republican politician who proclaimed the French Third Republic in 1870 and played a prominent role in its early government.

Ferdinand Foch

326 Ferdinand Foch was a French general, Marshal of France and a member of the Académie Française and Académie des Sciences. He distinguished himself as Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front...

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

297 Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was a French military engineer and physicist. A graduate of the École polytechnique, Carnot served as an officer in the Engineering Arm of the French Army. He also pursued...

Georges Clemenceau

256 Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman who was prime minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A physician turned journalist, he played a central role in the...

Aristide Briand

253 Aristide Pierre Henri Briand was a French statesman who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic. He is mainly remembered for his focus on international issues...

Jules Ferry

248 Jules François Camille Ferry was a French statesman and republican philosopher. He was one of the leaders of the Moderate Republicans and served as Prime Minister of France from 1880 to 1881 and 1883...

Jean de Lattre de Tassigny

154 Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny was a French général d'armée during World War II and the First Indochina War. He was posthumously elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France in 1952.

Émile Zola

150 Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of...

François Mitterrand

149 François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was a French politician and statesman who served as President of France from 1981 to 1995, the longest holder of that position in the history of France. As a...

John the Baptist

149 John the Baptist was a Jewish preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early first century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy,...

Roger Salengro

146 Roger Henri Charles Salengro was a French politician. He achieved fame as Minister of the Interior during the Popular Front government in 1936. He committed suicide a few months after taking office,...

Pierre Curie

146 Pierre Curie was a French physicist and chemist, and a pioneer in crystallography and magnetism. He shared one half of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Curie, for their work on...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

145 Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator.

Saint Peter

145 Saint Peter, also known as Peter the Apostle, Simon Peter, Simeon, Simon, or Cephas, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus and one of the first leaders of the early Christian Church. He appears...

Anatole France

142 Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the...

Martin of Tours

141 Martin of Tours was the third bishop of Tours. He is the patron saint of many communities and organizations across Europe, including France's Third Republic. A native of Pannonia, he converted to...

Gabriel Péri

138 Gabriel Péri was a prominent French communist journalist and politician who served in the Chamber of Deputies from 1932 to 1940 for Seine-et-Oise. A member of the French Resistance in World War II,...

Voltaire

135 François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and...

Joseph Joffre

128 Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre LH was a French general who served as Commander-in-Chief of French forces on the Western Front from the start of World War I until the end of 1916. He is best known for...

Jean Mermoz

126 Jean Mermoz was a French aviator, viewed as a hero by other pilots such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and in his native France, where many schools bear his name. In Brazil, he also is recognized as a...

Josquin des Prez

122 Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez was a singer and composer of Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he...

Joan of Arc

119 Joan of Arc is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronation of Charles VII of France during the...

Jean de La Bruyère

119 Jean de La Bruyère was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire.             

Alphonse de Lamartine

112 Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French author, poet, and statesman. Initially a moderate royalist, he became one of the leading critics of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe,...

Jean Monnet

107 Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet was a French civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, and administrator. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered one of the founding...

Pierre Brossolette

103 Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II.

Antoine Lavoisier

99 Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large...

Robert Schuman

98 Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian democratic political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of...

André-Marie Ampère

98 André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as electrodynamics. He made also important...

Henri Barbusse

97 Henri Barbusse was a French novelist, short story writer, journalist, poet and political activist. He began his literary career in the 1890s as a Symbolist poet and continued as a neo-Naturalist...

Adolphe Thiers

96 Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French statesman and historian who served as President of France from 1871 to 1873. He was the second elected president and the first of the Third French...

Salvador Allende

92 Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 29th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a socialist committed to democracy, he has been...

Alphonse Juin

92 Army-General Alphonse Pierre Juin was a French Army officer who served in both world wars. A graduate of the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr class of 1912, he served in Morocco in 1914 in...

Léon Blum

91 André Léon Blum was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister of France. As a Jew, he was heavily influenced by the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century.

Michael (archangel)

90 Michael, also called Archangel Michael or Michael the Taxiarch, is an archangel and the warrior of God in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam while additionally being a saint in Christianity. The...

John F. Kennedy

90 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president, at 43 years,...

Frédéric Mistral

89 Joseph Étienne Frédéric Mistral was an Occitan writer and lexicographer of the Provençal form of the language. He received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of the fresh originality...

Pierre Mendès France

84 Pierre Isaac Isidore Mendès France was a French politician who served as prime minister of France for eight months from 1954 to 1955. As a member of the Radical Party, he headed a government...

Pierre de Coubertin

83 Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, also known as Pierre de Coubertin and Baron de Coubertin, was a French educator and historian, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC),...

René Cassin

81 René Samuel Cassin was a French jurist known for co-authoring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Albert Schweitzer

77 Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was a German polymath from Alsace. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. As a Lutheran minister, Schweitzer...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

76 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, philosophe, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects...

Henry Dunant

75 Henry Dunant, also known as Henri Dunant, was a Swiss humanitarian, businessman, social activist, and co-founder of the Red Cross. His humanitarian efforts won him the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Jules Verne

75 Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.                                   

Georges Brassens

74 Georges Charles Brassens was a French singer-songwriter and poet.                                   

Pierre Semard

74 Pierre Semard was a trade unionist, secretary general of the federation of railway-workers and leader of the French Communist Party. He was shot in prison by the Nazi occupiers in 1942, and is buried...

Joseph Gallieni

73 Joseph Simon Gallieni was a French military officer, active for most of his career as a military commander and administrator in the French colonies where he wrote several books on colonial affairs.

Saint Anne

72 According to Christian tradition, Saint Anne was the mother of Mary, the wife of Joachim and the maternal grandmother of Jesus. Mary's mother is not named in the Bible's canonical gospels. In...

Georges Pompidou

71 Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou was a French politician who served as President of France from 1969 until his death in 1974. He had previously served from 1962 to 1968 as Prime Minister of France under...

George Sand

71 Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. Being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in...

Blaise Pascal

70 Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.   

James the Great

70 James the Great was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. According to the New Testament, he was the second of the apostles to die, after Judas Iscariot, and the first to be martyred. Saint James is...

Louis IX of France

70 Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis, was King of France from 1226 until his death in 1270. He is widely recognized as the most distinguished of the Direct Capetians. Following the death of his...

Jules Guesde

70 Jules Bazile, known as Jules Guesde was a French socialist journalist and politician. For a period he was editor of the socialist newspaper La Petite République.

Paul Bert

70 Paul Bert was a French zoologist, physiologist and politician. He is sometimes given the nickname "Father of Aviation Medicine".

Georges Guynemer

70 Georges Marie Lodovic Jules Guynemer was the second highest-scoring French fighter ace with 54 victories during World War I, and a French national hero at the time of his death. Guynemer's death was...

Molière

70 Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. His extant...

Marcellin Berthelot

68 Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the Thomsen–Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic...

Louise Michel

68 Louise Michel, also known by her nickname of Enjolras, was a French teacher, writer, poet, philosopher, Communard, and anarchist. A major figure in the Paris Commune, where she was militarily and...

Albert Camus

67 Albert Camus was a French philosopher, novelist, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44,...

Hector Berlioz

67 Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and...

Saint Nicholas

67 Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as Nicholas of Bari, was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Patara in Anatolia during the time of the Roman Empire. Because of the...

Gustave Eiffel

64 Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, he made his name with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the...

Irène Joliot-Curie

63 Irène Joliot-Curie was a French chemist and physicist who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were...

Louis Blériot

62 Louis Charles Joseph Blériot was a French aviator, inventor, and engineer. He developed the first practical headlamp for cars and established a profitable business manufacturing them, using much of...

Maurice Ravel

62 Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the...

Édouard Branly

61 Édouard Eugène Désiré Branly was a French physicist and inventor known for his early involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the coherer in 1890.

Saint Roch

61 Roch, also called Rock in English, was a Majorcan Catholic confessor whose death is commemorated on 16 August and 9 September in Italy; he was especially invoked against the plague. He has the...

Auguste and Louis Lumière

59 The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the...

Woodrow Wilson

59 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only Democrat to serve as president during the Progressive Era, when Republicans dominated the...

François Arago

59 Dominique François Jean Arago, known simply as François Arago, was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries, and politician.

René Laennec

59 René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was a French medical doctor and musician. His skill at carving his own wooden flutes led him to invent the stethoscope in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker....

Leonardo da Vinci

59 Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame...

Alphonse Daudet

58 Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the husband of Julia Daudet and father of Edmée, Léon and Lucien Daudet.

Rossignols

58 The Rossignols, a family of French cryptographers and cryptanalysts, included Antoine Rossignol (1600–1682), Bonaventure Rossignol and Antoine-Bonaventure Rossignol. The family name means...

Jacques Brel

58 Jacques Romain Georges Brel was a Belgian singer and actor who composed and performed theatrical songs. He generated a large, devoted following—initially in Belgium and France, but later throughout...

Paul Doumer

56 Joseph Athanase Doumer, commonly known as Paul Doumer, was a French politician who served as the President of France from June 1931 until his assassination in May 1932. He is described as "the Father...

Marcel Pagnol

56 Marcel Paul Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Regarded as an auteur, in 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie française. Pagnol is generally regarded as...

Albert Calmette

56 Albert Calmette, né le 12 juillet 1863 à Nice et mort le 29 octobre 1933 à Paris, est un médecin et bactériologiste militaire français.

Lazare Hoche

55 Louis Lazare Hoche was a French military leader of the French Revolutionary Wars. He won a victory over Royalist forces in Brittany. His surname is one of the names inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe,...

Marie Curie

55 Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie, better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie "for...

Paul Vaillant-Couturier

53 Paul Vaillant-Couturier was a French writer, journalist and communist politician. He participated in the founding of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1920.

Claude Debussy

53 Achille Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the...

Marcel Marceau

52 Marcel Marceau was a French mime artist and actor most famous for his stage persona, "Bip the Clown". He referred to mime as the "art of silence", performing professionally worldwide for more than 60...

Jules Michelet

52 Jules Michelet was a French historian and writer, best known for his multi-volume work Histoire de France, which chronicles the history of France from its earliest origins to the French Revolution....

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

52 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Classical composer and musician. In his brief life, he completed more than 800 works including outstanding examples of most of the genres of his time: symphonies,...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

52 Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. It has been said that, as a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality,...

Léo Lagrange

52 Léo Lagrange was a French Socialist, member of the SFIO, named secretary of State in the Popular Front government of Léon Blum.

Paul Gauguin

52 Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also...

Pierre Corneille

51 Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great 17th-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.

Paul Langevin

51 Paul Langevin was a French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. He was one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an anti-fascist...

Jacques Prévert

51 Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best-regarded films formed part of the poetic...

François-René de Chateaubriand

51 François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who influenced French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family...

Paul Verlaine

51 Paul Marie Verlaine was a French poet, writer and critic associated with the Symbolist, Parnassianist and Decadent movements. He is considered one of the paramount exponents of the fin de siècle in...

Paul Cézanne

50 Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation, influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century and formed the bridge...

Pablo Picasso

49 Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century,...

Ernest Renan

49 Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He...

Jean Macé

49 Jean François Macé was a French educator, journalist, active freemason and politician. He was perhaps best known as the founder of Ligue de l'enseignement to promote free, universal and secular...

Clément Ader

47 Clément Ader was a French inventor and engineer who was born near Toulouse in Muret, Haute-Garonne, and died in Toulouse. He is remembered primarily for his pioneering work in aviation. In 1870 he...

Denis Diderot

46 Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a...

Pierre Loti

46 Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories. 

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

46 Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau was a French writer, orator, and statesman, and a prominent figure of the early stages of the French Revolution.

Henri Matisse

46 Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known...

André Malraux

46 Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, member of the French Resistance, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine (1933) is set during the 1927...

Yves Rocher

45 Yves Rocher was a French businessman and founder of the cosmetics company that bears his name. He was a pioneer of the modern use of natural ingredients in cosmetics.

Maryse Bastié

45 Maryse Bastié was a French aviator who set several international records for female aviators during the 1930s.

Simone Veil

45 Simone Veil was a French magistrate, Holocaust survivor and politician. Deported as a teenager to Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen, she became a prominent advocate for human dignity and...

Albert I of Belgium

44 Albert I was King of the Belgians from 23 December 1909 until his death in 1934. He is popularly referred to as the Knight King or Soldier King in Belgium in reference to his role during World War I.

Vincent de Paul

44 Vincent de Paul, CM was an Occitan French Catholic priest who dedicated himself to serving the poor.

Marquis de Condorcet

43 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, political economist, politician, and mathematician. His ideas, including support...

Georges Danton

43 Georges Jacques Danton was a French politician and leading figure of the French Revolution. A modest and unknown lawyer on the eve of the Revolution, Danton became a famous orator of the Cordeliers...

Louis Faidherbe

43 Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French general and colonial administrator. He created the Senegalese Tirailleurs when he was governor of Senegal.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

43 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the US, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving US president and the only one to have served more...

Frédéric Chopin

43 Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading composer of his era...

Lucie Aubrac

43 Lucie Samuel, known as Lucie Aubrac, was a member of the French Resistance in World War II. A history teacher by occupation, she earned a history agrégation in 1938, a highly uncommon achievement for...

Hélène Boucher

43 Hélène Boucher was a well-known French pilot in the early 1930s, when she set several women's world speed records and the all-comers record for 1,000 km in 1934. She was killed in an accident in the...

Napoleon

42 Napoleon I was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, with a brief restoration during the Hundred Days in 1815. He rose to prominence as a general during the...

Louis Blanc

42 Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French socialist politician, journalist and historian. He called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor. Although...

Count of St. Germain

42 The Count of St. Germain whose real name and origins remain unknown, was a European adventurer who had interests and achievements in science, alchemy, philosophy, and the arts. He rose to prominence...

Rosa Luxemburg

42 Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20th century.

Antoine de Padoue

42 Fernando Martins de Bulhões, souvent appelé en latin Antonius Ulyssiponensis, en religion frère Antoine, né en 1195 à Lisbonne (Portugal) et mort le 13 juin 1231 près de Padoue (Italie), est un...

Georges Bizet

42 Georges Bizet was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has...

Alfred de Musset

41 Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing the autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle.

Saint Joseph

41 According to the canonical Gospels, Joseph was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who was married to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was the legal father of Jesus.

Winston Churchill

41 Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from...

Henri Becquerel

41 Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French experimental physicist who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Pierre Curie for his discovery of radioactivity.

Jean-Baptiste Kléber

41 Jean-Baptiste Kléber was a French army officer and architect who served in the War of the Bavarian Succession and French Revolutionary Wars. After serving for one year in the French Royal Army, he...

Michel de Montaigne

40 Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, commonly known as just Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularising the essay as a...

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

39 Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French statesman who served as First Minister of State from 1661 until his death in 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His lasting impact on the organization of the...

Saint George

39 Saint George, also George of Lydda, was an early Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to holy tradition, he was a soldier in the Roman army. Of Cappadocian Greek...

Claude Monet

39 Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long...

Roger Vivier

39 Roger Henri Vivier was a French fashion designer who specialized in shoes. He is best known for creating the modern day stiletto heel and for placing a chrome-plated buckle on an elegant black pump,...

Raymond Poincaré

38 Raymond Nicolas Landry Poincaré was a French statesman who served as President of France from 1913 to 1920, and three times as Prime Minister of France. He was a conservative leader, primarily...

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

37 Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle was a French army officer of the French Revolutionary Wars. Lisle is known for writing the words and music of the Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin, which would later...

Charles Péguy

37 Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a...

Johannes Gutenberg

37 Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was a German inventor and craftsman who invented the movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg's...

Yves Saint Laurent (designer)

37 Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, better known as Yves Saint Laurent or YSL, was a French fashion designer who, in 1962, founded his eponymous fashion label. He is regarded as being among the...

Ambroise Croizat

37 Ambroise Croizat was a French syndicalist and communist politician. As the minister of Labour and of Social security, he founded the French Social security system and the retirement system, between...

Louis Armand

36 Louis François Armand was a French engineer and senior civil servant who managed several public companies, as well as had a significant role in World War II as an officer in the Resistance. He became...

Galileo Galilei

36 Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei, commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei, was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of...

Romain Rolland

36 Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary...

Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves

36 Henri Louis Honoré, comte d'Estienne d'Orves was a French Navy officer and one of the major heroes of the French Resistance, said to be the "first martyr of Free France".

Pierre de Ronsard

36 Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet known in his generation as a "prince of poets". His works include Les Amours de Cassandre (1552), Les Hymnes (1555-1556), Les Discours (1562-1563), La Franciade...

Eugeniu Botez

35 Eugeniu Botez, who also wrote under the pseudonym Jean Bart, was a Romanian writer, best known for his novel Europolis (1933).

Jacques Cartier

35 Jacques Cartier was a French maritime explorer from Brittany. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which...

Paul Éluard

35 Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel, was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement.

Éric Tabarly

34 Éric Marcel Guy Tabarly was a French naval officer and yachtsman. He developed a passion for offshore racing very early on and won several ocean races such as the Ostar in 1964 and 1976, ending...

Marcel Paul

34 Marcel Paul was a French trade unionist and communist politician. He was also a Nazi concentration camp survivor and later served as a member of the French parliament.

Denis of Paris

33 Denis of Paris was a 3rd-century Christian martyr and saint. According to his hagiographies, he was bishop of Paris in the third century and, together with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius,...

François Rabelais

33 François Rabelais was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both Protestant...

Vincent van Gogh

33 Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately...

Hubert Lyautey

33 Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey was a French Army general and colonial administrator.                 

Ferdinand Buisson

33 Ferdinand Édouard Buisson was a French educational public servant, pacifist, and Radical-Socialist politician. He presided over the League of Education from 1902 to 1906 and over the Human Rights...

Sully Prudhomme

33 René François Armand "Sully" Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist. He was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901.

Bernard Palissy

33 Bernard Palissy was a French Huguenot potter, hydraulics engineer and craftsman, famous for having struggled for sixteen years to imitate Chinese porcelain. He is best known for his so-called...

Alexandre Dumas

33 Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.         

Émile Roux

32 Pierre Paul Émile Roux, né le 17 décembre 1853 à Confolens (Charente) et mort le 3 novembre 1933 à Paris, est un médecin, bactériologiste et immunologiste français. Il fut l'un des plus proches...

Montesquieu

32 Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, intellectual, historian, and political philosopher.

Saint Barbara

32 Saint Barbara, known in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the Great Martyr Barbara, was an early Christian Syrian Greek saint and martyr.

Jean Rostand

32 Jean Edmond Cyrus Rostand was a French biologist, historian of science, and philosopher.           

Charles Baudelaire

32 Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the...

Théodore Botrel

32 Jean-Baptiste-Théodore-Marie Botrel was a French singer-songwriter, poet and playwright. He is best known for his popular songs about his native Brittany, of which the most famous is La Paimpolaise....

Édith Piaf

32 Édith Giovanna Gassion, known as Édith Piaf, was a French singer and lyricist best known for performing songs in the cabaret and modern chanson genres. She is widely regarded as France's greatest...

Félix Faure

31 Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death in 1899. A native of Paris, he worked as a tanner in his younger years. Faure became a member of the Chamber of Deputies for...

Joseph Marie Jacquard

31 Joseph Marie Charles dit Jacquard was a French weaver and merchant. He played an important role in the development of the earliest programmable loom, which in turn played an important role in the...

Louis Aragon

31 Louis Aragon was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France. He co-founded with André Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review Littérature. He was...

Gaspard Monge

30 Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry.

Paul Arène

30 Paul-Auguste Arène was a Provençal poet and French writer.                                         

Jeanbon Saint-André

30 Jeanbon Saint-André was a French politician of the Revolutionary era.                               

Jean-Baptiste Charcot

30 Jean-Baptiste Étienne Auguste Charcot, better known in France as Commandant Charcot, (15 July 1867 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris – 16 September 1936 at sea, was a French scientist, medical doctor...

Jean Zay

30 Jean Élie Paul Zay was a French politician. He served as Minister of National Education and Fine Arts from 1936 until 1939. He was imprisoned by the Vichy government from August 1940 until he was...

Nicolaus Copernicus

30 Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. The publication of Copernicus's model in his book De...

Clare of Assisi

29 Chiara Offreduccio, known as Clare of Assisi, is an Italian saint who was one of the first followers of Francis of Assisi.

Édouard Vaillant

29 Marie Édouard Vaillant was a French politician.                                                     

Édouard Herriot

29 Édouard Marie Herriot was a French Radical politician of the Third Republic who served three times as Prime Minister and twice as President of the Chamber of Deputies. He led the first Cartel des...

Albert Einstein

29 Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence...

Jacqueline Auriol

28 Jacqueline Marie-Thérèse Suzanne Auriol was a French aviator who set several world speed records.   

Catherine of Alexandria

28 Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine, was, according to tradition, a Christian saint and virgin, who was martyred in the early 4th century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According...

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

28 Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume, for two laws related to gases,...

Marx Dormoy

28 René Marx Dormoy was a French socialist politician, noted for his opposition to the far right. Under his leadership as Minister of the Interior in the government of Léon Blum, the French police...

Camille Saint-Saëns

28 Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano...

Mary, mother of Jesus

28 Mary was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus. She is an important figure of Christianity, venerated under various titles such as virgin or queen, many...

Charles Gounod

28 Charles-François Gounod was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust (1859); his Roméo et Juliette (1867) also remains in the international...

Paul Valéry

28 Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current...

Benjamin Franklin

27 Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath: a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the most influential intellectuals of his time,...

Julian the Hospitaller

27 Saint Julian the Hospitaller is a saint venerated in the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. He is the patron saint of the cities of Ghent, Belgium; Saint Julian's, Malta; and Macerata,...

Martin Luther King Jr.

27 Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil...

Saint Eligius

27 Eligius, venerated as Saint Eligius, was a Frankish goldsmith, courtier, and bishop who was chief counsellor to Dagobert I and later Bishop of Noyon–Tournai. His deeds were recorded in Vita Sancti...

Honoré de Balzac

27 Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, described as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

Jean Perrin

27 Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French atomic physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids, verified Albert Einstein's explanation of this phenomenon and...

Camille Claudel

26 Camille Rosalie Claudel was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity. Later in the 20th century, she gained renewed attention and...

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

26 Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin was a French lawyer, politician and journalist who emerged as one of the leaders of the French Revolution of 1848. He served as Minister of the Interior and on the...

Nelson Mandela

26 Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid activist and statesman who was the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first Black head of state and...

Léon Jouhaux

26 Léon Jouhaux was a French trade union leader who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.           

Paul the Apostle

26 Paul, commonly known as Paul the Apostle or Saint Paul, was a Christian apostle who spread the teachings of Jesus in the first-century AD. For his contributions towards the New Testament, he is...

Gustave Flaubert

26 Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert,...

Edmond Rostand

26 Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with...

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné

26 Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, also widely known as Madame de Sévigné or Mme de Sévigné, was a French aristocrat, remembered for her letter-writing. Most of her letters, celebrated...

Camille Desmoulins

26 Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoît Desmoulins was a French journalist, politician and a prominent figure of the French Revolution. He is best known for playing an instrumental role in the events that led...

Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne

25 Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, commonly known as Turenne, was a French general and one of only six marshals to have been promoted Marshal General of France. The most illustrious...

Saint Stephen

25 Stephen is traditionally venerated as the protomartyr or first martyr of Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, he was a deacon in the early church at Jerusalem who angered members of...

Benjamin Raspail

25 Benjamin Raspail, was a painter-engraver and politician of the French Third Republic. He was the son of François-Vincent Raspail. Like his father, he was classed as extreme-left, and he went into...

Thomas Edison

25 Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which...

Marcel Sembat

25 Marcel Sembat was a French Socialist politician. He served as a member of the National Assembly of France from 1893 to 1922, and as Minister of Public Works from August 26, 1914, to December 12, 1916.

Pierre Bérégovoy

25 Pierre Eugène Bérégovoy was a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France under President François Mitterrand from 2 April 1992 to 29 March 1993. He was a member of the Socialist Party...

Auguste Rodin

25 François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a...

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot

25 Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was a French inventor who built the world's first full-size and working self-propelled mechanical land-vehicle, the "Fardier à vapeur" – effectively the world's first automobile.

François Mauriac

25 François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française, and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the...

Roland Garros (aviator)

24 Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros was a French aviation pioneer and fighter pilot. Garros began a career in aviation in 1909 and performed many early feats such as the first-ever airplane crossing...

Danielle Casanova

24 Danielle Casanova was a French communist activist and member of the French Resistance during World War II. A dentist by occupation, she was a high-ranking figure within the Communist Youth and...

Isaac Newton

24 Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath who was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, author and inventor. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the...

Simone de Beauvoir

24 Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was...

Claude Bernard

23 Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". He originated the term milieu intérieur and the associated...

Albert Thomas (American politician)

23 Albert Langston Thomas was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 29 years. From Houston, Texas, he was responsible for bringing the Johnson Space Center to Houston.

Jean Giono

23 Jean Giono was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.

Gustave Courbet

23 Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the...

Louis Pergaud

23 Louis Pergaud was a French novelist, war poet, and soldier, whose principal works were known as "Animal Stories" due to his featuring animals of the Franche-Comté in lead roles. His most notable work...

Jean Cocteau

23 Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century and...

Saint Maurice

23 Maurice was an Egyptian military leader who headed the legendary Theban Legion of Rome in the 3rd century, and is one of the favourite and most widely venerated saints of that martyred group. He is...

Francisco Ferrer

23 Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, widely known as Francisco Ferrer, was a Spanish radical freethinker, anarchist, and educationist behind a network of secular, private, libertarian schools in and around...

Hilary of Poitiers

23 Hilary of Poitiers was Bishop of Poitiers and a Doctor of the Church. He was sometimes referred to as the "Hammer of the Arians" and the "Athanasius of the West". His name comes from the Latin word...

Eugène Delacroix

23 Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist who was regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school.

Alexander Fleming

23 Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain "for the discovery of penicillin and its...

Arthur Rimbaud

23 Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism.

Jules Vallès

22 Jules Vallès (1832–1885) was a French journalist, author, and left-wing political activist.         

Giuseppe Garibaldi

22 Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi was an Italian general, revolutionary and republican. He contributed to the Unification of Italy (Risorgimento) and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He is considered to...

René Coty

22 Gustave Jules René Coty was President of France from 1954 to 1959. He was the second and last president of the Fourth French Republic.

Henri Maurice Berteaux

22 Henri Maurice Berteaux was the Minister of War in France from November 1904 to November 1905, and from 2 March 1911 until his accidental death on 21 May 1911.

François Villon

22 François Villon is the best known French poet of the Late Middle Ages. He was involved in criminal behavior and had multiple encounters with law enforcement authorities. Villon wrote about some of...

Saint Sebastian

22 Sebastian was an early Christian saint and martyr. According to traditional belief, he was killed during the Diocletianic Persecution of Christians. He was initially tied to a post or tree and shot...

François-Alexandre Verdier

22 François-Alexandre Verdier was a French painter, draftsman and engraver. He was a student and assistant of Charles Le Brun.

Camille Pelletan

22 Charles Camille Pelletan was a French politician, historian and journalist, Minister of Marine in Emile Combes' Bloc des gauches cabinet from 1902 to 1905. He was part of the left wing of the...

Saint Quentin

22 Quentin also known as Quentin of Amiens, was an early Christian saint.                             

Louis Braille

22 Louis Braille was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains...

Pierre Georges

22 Pierre Georges, better known as Colonel Fabien, was one of the two members of the French Communist Party who perpetrated the first assassinations of German personnel during the Nazi Occupation of...

Louis Jouvet

21 Jules Eugène Louis Jouvet was a French actor, theatre director and filmmaker.                       

Jean-Martin Charcot

21 Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. He worked on groundbreaking work about hypnosis and hysteria, in particular with his hysteria patient Louise...

Amédée Courbet

21 Anatole-Amédée-Prosper Courbet was a French admiral who won a series of important land and naval victories during the Tonkin Campaign (1883–86) and the Sino-French War.

Boris Vian

21 Boris Vian was a French polymath who is primarily remembered for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the...

Aristide Bergès

21 Aristide Bergès né à Lorp-Sentaraille le 4 septembre 1833 et mort à Villard-Bonnot le 28 février 1904, est un industriel papetier et ingénieur hydraulicien français du XIXe siècle.

Guy de Maupassant

21 Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a 19th-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story, as well as a representative of the naturalist school, depicting human lives, destinies...

Jean-Baptiste Lebas

21 Jean-Baptiste Lebas was a French Socialist politician, deputy to the National Assembly of France during the Third Republic, who served twice as minister under Léon Blum’s governments. He was mayor of...

Étienne Dolet

21 Étienne Dolet was a French scholar, translator and printer. He was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime, which was buffeted by the opposing forces of the Renaissance and the French...

Tristan Corbière

21 Tristan Corbière, born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 29. He was a...

Ferdinand de Lesseps

21 Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps was a French Orientalist diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869, joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and...

Victor Schœlcher

21 Victor Schœlcher was a French abolitionist, writer, politician and journalist, best known for his leading role in the abolition of slavery in France in 1848, during the Second Republic.

Audomar

21 Audomar, better known as Omer, was a bishop of Thérouanne, after whom the nearby Saint-Omer in northern France is named. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

Hubert of Liège

21 Hubert of Liège was a Christian saint who became the first bishop of Liège in 708 A.D. He is a patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers. Known as the "Apostle of the...

Marcel Dassault

21 Marcel Dassault was a French engineer and industrialist who spent his career in aircraft manufacturing. He was also involved in politics, serving intermittently over more than three decades in both...

Guy Môquet

21 Guy Prosper Eustache Môquet was a young French Communist activist. During the German occupation of France in World War II, he was taken hostage by the Nazis and executed by firing squad in...

Vincent Auriol

20 Vincent Jules Auriol was a French politician who served as President of France from 1947 to 1954. A member of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), he was the first president...

Elsa Triolet

20 Ella Yuryevna Kagan, known as Elsa Triolet, was a Russian-French writer and translator known for being the first woman to be awarded the Prix Goncourt.

Maurice Thorez

20 Maurice Thorez was a French politician and longtime leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1930 until his death. He also served as Deputy Prime Minister of France from 1946 to 1947.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel

20 Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, fully supplanting Newton's corpuscular...

Georges Charpak

20 Hersz Georges Charpak was a Polish-born French physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992 for his invention of the multiwire proportional chamber.

Albinus of Angers

20 Saint Albinus of Angers, also known as Saint Albin in English, was a French abbot and bishop. Born to a noble Gallo-Roman family at Vannes, Brittany, St. Albinus was a monk and from 504 A.D. Abbot of...

Aimé Césaire

20 Aimé Fernand David Césaire was an Afro-Martiniquan French poet, author, and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word "négritude"...

René Descartes

19 René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, logician, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science during Renaissance era....

Mark the Evangelist

19 Mark the Evangelist, also known as John Mark or Saint Mark, was a Libyan who is traditionally ascribed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark. Most modern scholars agree that the Gospel of Mark is...

Abbé Pierre

19 Abbé Pierre was a French Catholic priest. He was a member of the Resistance during World War II and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement. In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal...

Françoise Dolto

19 Françoise Dolto was a French pediatrician and psychoanalyst.                                       

Alain Colas

19 Alain Colas was a French sailor, the first to complete a solitary round-the-world race in a multihull. He met Éric Tabarly in Sydney in 1967, and bought Pen Duick IV from him in 1970, and won the...

Jean-Baptiste Clément

19 Jean-Baptiste Clément was a French chansonnier, journalist, socialist activist and communard. He is mostly known for his work Le Temps des cerises, which is strongly associated with the Paris Commune.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

19 Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, sometimes nicknamed the Archangel of Terror, was a French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, a Jacobin...

Joachim du Bellay

19 Joachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a founder of La Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French...

Saint Christopher

19 Saint Christopher is venerated by several Christian denominations. According to these traditions, he was a martyr killed in the reign of the 3rd-century Roman emperor Decius, or alternatively under...

Anatole Le Braz

19 Anatole le Braz, the "Bard of Brittany", was a French poet, folklore collector, and translator. He was highly regarded amongst both European and American scholars, and was known for his warmth and...

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

19 Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa, known as Toulouse-Lautrec, was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator. His immersion in the colourful and...

Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester

18 Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, 1st Earl of Chester, also known as Simon V de Montfort, was an English nobleman of French origin and a member of the English peerage, who led the baronial...

Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare

18 Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare was a French physicist and a member of the Society of Sciences of Montpellier. He was known for his experiments with electricity.

Yuri Gagarin

18 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful crewed spaceflight, became the first person to journey into outer space. Travelling on Vostok 1, Gagarin...

Jean-François Millet

18 Jean-François Millet was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the...

Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau

18 Pierre Marie René Ernest Waldeck-Rousseau was a French Republican politician who served as the Prime Minister of France from 1899 to 1902. He served as Minister of the Interior at the same time,...

Samuel de Champlain

18 Samuel de Champlain was a French explorer, navigator, cartographer, soldier, geographer, diplomat, and chronicler who founded Quebec City and established New France as a permanent French colony in...

Alfred Kastler

18 Alfred Kastler was a German-born French physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics. He is known for the development of optical pumping.

Saint Blaise

18 Blaise of Sebaste was a physician and bishop of Sebastea in historical Lesser Armenia who is venerated as a Christian saint and martyr. He is counted as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

Nicolas Appert

18 Nicolas Appert was a French confectioner and inventor who, in the early 19th century, invented airtight food preservation. Appert, known as the "father of food science", described his invention as a...

Marc Sangnier

18 Marc Sangnier was a French Roman Catholic thinker and politician, who in 1894 founded Le Sillon, a social Catholic movement.

Émile Basly

18 Émile Basly is one of the great figures of trade unionism in mining in the mineral field of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, along with Arthur Lamendin. He is primarily known for his participation in the...

Alphonse, Count of Poitiers

17 Alphonse was the Count of Poitou from 1225 and Count of Toulouse from 1249. As count of Toulouse, he also governed the Marquisate of Provence.

Pablo Neruda

17 Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including...

Vladimir Lenin

17 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death...

Olivier de Serres

17 Olivier de Serres was a French author and soil scientist whose Théâtre d'Agriculture (1600) became the standard reference on French agriculture in the 17th century.

Simone Signoret

17 Simone Signoret was a French actress. She received various accolades, including an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, a César Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and the Cannes Film Festival Award for...

Antonio Vivaldi

17 Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, Vivaldi's influence during his lifetime was...

Jean Bouin

17 Alexandre François Étienne Jean Bouin was a French middle-distance runner. He competed in the 1500m at the 1908 Olympics and the 5000m at the 1912 Olympics. He won a silver medal in the 5000m in...

Montgolfier brothers

17 The Montgolfier brothers – Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier – were aviation pioneers, balloonists and paper manufacturers from the commune Annonay in Ardèche, France. They...

Marie-Pierre Kœnig

16 Marie Joseph Pierre François Kœnig or Koenig was a French general during World War II during which he commanded a Free French Brigade at the Battle of Bir Hakeim in North Africa in 1942. He started a...

Lazare Carnot

16 Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His...

Paul Lafargue

16 Paul Lafargue was a Cuban-born French political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Creole parents,...

Maurice Sarrail

16 Maurice Paul Emmanuel Sarrail was a French general of the First World War. Sarrail's openly socialist political connections made him a rarity amongst the Catholics, conservatives and monarchists who...

Julius Caesar

16 Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general, statesman, and author who was the dictator of the Roman Republic almost continuously from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. A member of the First...

Gabriel Fauré

16 Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers....

Anne of Brittany

16 Anne of Brittany was reigning Duchess of Brittany from 1488 until her death, and Queen of France from 1491 to 1498 and from 1499 to her death. She was the only woman to have been queen consort of...

Joseph Lakanal

16 Joseph Lakanal was a French politician, and an original member of the Institut de France.           

Alfred Nobel

16 Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, inventor, engineer, and businessman. He is known for inventing dynamite, as well as having bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes. He also...

Marguerite Yourcenar

16 Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie...

Genevieve

16 Genevieve was a consecrated virgin, and is one of the two patron saints of Paris in the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. Her feast day is on 3 January.

Louis de Broglie

16 Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie was a French theoretical physicist and aristocrat known for his contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 Ph.D. thesis, he postulated the wave...

Charles Nungesser

16 Charles Eugène Jules Marie Nungesser was a French ace pilot and adventurer. Nungesser was a renowned ace in France, ranking third highest in the country with 43 air combat victories during World War...

Yves Montand

16 Ivo Livi, better known as Yves Montand, was an Italian-born French actor and singer. He is said to be one of France's greatest 20th-century artists.

Auguste Comte

15 Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in...

Jean-Pierre Timbaud

15 Jean-Pierre Timbaud was the secretary of the steelworkers’ trade union section of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). He took part in the strikes which preceded the Popular Front. During the...

Saint Giles

15 Saint Giles, also known as Giles the Hermit, was a hermit or monk active in the lower Rhône most likely in the 7th century. Revered as a saint, his cult became widely diffused but his hagiography is...

Francis of Assisi

15 Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, known as Francis of Assisi, was an Italian mystic, poet and Catholic friar who founded the religious order of the Franciscans. Inspired to lead a Christian life of...

Auguste Brizeux

15 Julien Pélage Auguste Brizeux was a French poet. He was said to belong to a family of Irish origin, but long settled in Brittany. He was educated for the law, but in 1827 he produced at the Théâtre...

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

15 Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.     

Jacques Monod

15 Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biochemist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme...

Olivier V de Clisson

15 Olivier V de Clisson, nicknamed "The Butcher", was a Breton soldier, the Constable of France, and the son of Olivier IV de Clisson. His father had been put to death by the French in 1343 on the...

Fernand Léger

15 Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style....

Antoine Watteau

15 Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter and draughtsman whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. He revitalized...

Paul Claudel

15 Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.

Leonard of Port Maurice

15 Leonard of Port Maurice, O.F.M., was an Italian Franciscan preacher and ascetic writer.             

Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart

15 Anne de Rochechouart, was a wealthy French aristocrat. She inherited a large fortune from her great-grandmother, the founder of the Veuve Clicquot Champagne house. She was known for her involvement...

Johann Sebastian Bach

15 Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the orchestral...

Philippe Lebon

15 Philippe le Bon (D'Humbersin) was a French engineer, born in Brachay, France.                       

Henri Bergson

15 Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the...

Édouard Manet

15 Édouard Manet was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

Amandus

15 Amandus, commonly called Saint Amand, was a bishop of Tongeren-Maastricht and one of the catholic missionaries of Flanders. He is venerated as a saint, particularly in France and Belgium.

Alfred de Vigny

15 Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.

Gérard Philipe

14 Gérard Philipe was a prominent French actor who appeared in 32 films between 1944 and 1959. He came to prominence during the later period of the poetic realism movement of French Cinema in the late...

Henri Poincaré

14 Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since...

Arthur Lamendin

14 Arthur Lamendin, né le 2 mars 1852 à Lourches dans le Nord et mort le 3 novembre 1920 à Neuville-sur-Escaut, est un syndicaliste et homme politique français. Il est avec Émile Basly l'une des grandes...

Edgar Degas

14 Edgar Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.     

Nicéphore Niépce

14 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving products of a...

Jean-Baptiste de La Salle

14 Jean-Baptiste de La Salle was a French priest, educational reformer, and founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. He is a saint of the Catholic Church and the patron saint...

Christopher Columbus

14 Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four Spanish-based voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, opening...

Jules Auguste Lemire

14 Jules Auguste Lemire, French priest and social reformer, was born at Vieux-Berquin (Nord).         

Germaine Tillion

14 Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the Government of France. A member of the French Resistance in World War II, she spent time in...

Jacques de Vaucanson

13 Jacques de Vaucanson was a French inventor and artist who built the first all-metal lathe. This invention was crucial for the Industrial Revolution. The lathe is known as the mother of machine tools,...

Pope John XXIII

13 Pope John XXIII was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 28 October 1958 until his death on 3 June 1963.

Eugène Varlin

13 Eugène Varlin was a French socialist, anarchist, communard and member of the First International. He was one of the pioneers of French syndicalism.

Camille Guérin

13 Jean-Marie Camille Guérin was a French veterinarian, bacteriologist and immunologist who, together with Albert Calmette, developed the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), a vaccine for immunization...

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

13 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter known for his mural painting, who came to be known as "the painter for France". He became the co-founder and president of the Société Nationale des...

Cecilia of Rome

13 Cecilia of Rome, also spelled Cecelia, was a Christian virgin martyr, who is venerated in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the...

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

13 Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the...

Nicolas Brémontier

13 Nicolas-Thomas Brémontier est un ingénieur français, né le 30 juillet 1738 au Tronquay, dans l'Eure, et mort de tuberculose le 16 août 1809 à Paris. Sa renommée est liée à la fixation des dunes, dont...

Dieudonné Costes

13 Dieudonné Costes was a French fighter ace during World War I, and later distance records-breaking aviator.

Jean-Paul Sartre

13 Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French...

André Gide

13 André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author whose writing spanned a wide variety of styles and topics. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide's career ranged from his beginnings in...

Max Jacob

13 Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.                                           

Marcel Cachin

13 Marcel Cachin was a French Communist politician and editor of the daily newspaper L'Humanite.       

Xavier Grall

13 Xavier Grall (1930–1981) was a journalist and poet from Brittany, France, who was a strong advocate of Breton nationalism during the Third Emsav. His work glorifies a mystical Brittany.

Ludwig van Beethoven

13 Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of classical music, and his symphonies redefined the medium for later...

Paul Painlevé

13 Paul Painlevé was a French mathematician and statesman who served as Prime Minister of the French Third Republic in 1917 and 1925. After working as a professor at the Sorbonne University, he entered...

Helena, mother of Constantine I

13 Flavia Julia Helena, also known as Helena of Constantinople and in Christianity as Saint Helena, was a Greek Augusta of the Roman Empire and mother of Emperor Constantine the Great as well as a...

François La Vieille

13 François-Sébastien La Vieille, né le 20 janvier 1829 à Urville-Hague et mort le 24 août 1886 à Panama, est un homme politique français.

Jeanne de Laval

13 Jeanne de Laval, was the second wife and titular queen consort of René, Duke of Anjou and Bar and former King of Naples and Sicily.

Georges Méliès

13 Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French filmmaker, actor, magician, and toymaker. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of cinema, primarily in the fantasy and science...

Constantine the Great

13 Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He played a pivotal role in elevating the status of...

Arnaud Beltrame

13 Arnaud Jean-Georges Beltrame was a lieutenant colonel in the French Gendarmerie nationale and deputy commander of the Departmental Gendarmerie's Aude unit, who was murdered by an Islamic terrorist at...

Jean-Baptiste Lully

13 Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian-French composer, dancer and instrumentalist, who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life...

Louis Antoine de Bougainville

12 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville was a French military officer and explorer. After having served in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War, Bougainville later gained fame for his...

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe

12 Jean (?) de Sainte-Colombe (c. 1640 – c. 1700) was a French composer and violist. He was a celebrated master of the viola da gamba and was credited (by Jean Rousseau in his Traité de la viole (1687))...

Melaine

12 Saint Melaine was a 6th-century Bishop of Rennes in Brittany.                                       

Guillaume Apollinaire

12 Guillaume Apollinaire was a Polish-French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish, Swiss and Italian descent.

Paul Féval, père

12 Paul Henri Corentin Féval, père was a French novelist and dramatist.                               

Honoré Daumier

12 Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the...

Marguerite de Navarre

12 Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was a princess of France, Duchess of Alençon and Berry, and Queen of Navarre by her second marriage to King Henry...

Louis-Auguste Blanqui

12 Louis-Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist revolutionary and philosopher. A pivotal figure of the 19th-century French radical left, he was a staunch advocate for communism and a proponent of...

Louis Guilloux

12 Louis Guilloux was a Breton writer born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, where he lived throughout his life. He is known for his Social Realist novels describing working-class life and political struggles...

Jacques Duclos

12 Jacques Duclos was a French Communist politician and member of the Communist International (Comintern) who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly...

Robert Desnos

12 Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.                   

Berthe Morisot

12 Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter, printmaker and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.

House of Montmorency

12 The House of Montmorency was one of the oldest and most distinguished noble families in France.     

Louis Barthou

12 Jean Louis Barthou was a French politician of the Third Republic who served as Prime Minister of France for eight months in 1913. In social policy, his time as prime minister saw the introduction of...

Pierre Dupont

12 Pierre Dupont was a French songwriter.                                                             

Jean Ferrat

12 Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.

Henri Giraud

12 Henri Honoré Giraud was a French Army general best known for his escape from German captivity in 1942 and subsequently as one of the leaders of the French Resistance and a rival of Charles de Gaulle....

Ferdinand Magellan

12 Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for planning and leading the 1519–22 Spanish expedition to the East Indies. During this expedition, he discovered the Strait of Magellan,...

Marguerite Duras

12 Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour...

Erik Satie

12 Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, better known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire but was undistinguished...

Jean-Philippe Rameau

12 Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer and music theorist of the late Baroque era. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced...

Jacques Cousteau

12 Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called...

Mathurin Méheut

12 Mathurin Méheut was a French painter, ceramist, engraver, and etcher best known for his depictions of Breton scenes, the sea, and nature.

Colette Besson

12 Colette Besson was a French athlete, the surprise winner of the 400 m at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Karl Marx

11 Karl Marx was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, and his...

Léon Bourgeois

11 Léon Victor Auguste Bourgeois was a French statesman. His ideas influenced the Radical Party regarding a wide range of issues.

Arthur Le Moyne de La Borderie

11 Arthur Le Moyne de La Borderie, was a Breton historian, regarded as a father of Brittany's historiography.

Rosa Bonheur

11 Rosa Bonheur was a French artist known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculptures in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the...

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

11 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, often known simply as Boileau, was a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way that Blaise Pascal did to reform...

William the Conqueror

11 William the Conqueror, sometimes called William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death. A descendant of Rollo, he was Duke of Normandy from 1035 onward....

Jean Guéhenno

11 Jean Guéhenno born Marcel-Jules-Marie Guéhenno was a French essayist, writer and literary critic.   

André Chénier

11 André Marie Chénier was a French poet associated with the events of the French Revolution, during which he was sentenced to death. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of...

Stendhal

11 Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis...

Emmanuel Chabrier

11 Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant...

Sadi Carnot (statesman)

11 Marie François Sadi Carnot was a French statesman who served as President of France from 1887 until his assassination in 1894.

Georges Courteline

11 Georges Courteline born Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux was a French dramatist and novelist, a satirist notable for his sharp wit and cynical humor.

Théophile Gautier

11 Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.

Gustave Delory

11 Gustave Delory, né le 10 septembre 1857 à Lille et mort le 17 août 1925 dans cette même ville au 3 rue Ovigneur, est un homme politique français. Élu maire de Lille en 1896, il devient l'un des...

Georges Besse

11 Georges Besse was a French businessman who helped lead several large state-controlled companies. He was assassinated outside his Paris home in front of one of his children by the armed group Action...

Paul-Émile Victor

11 Paul-Émile Victor was a French ethnologist and explorer.                                           

Eugène Pottier

11 Eugène Edine Pottier was a French revolutionary, poet, song-writer, and freemason. He is most known for writing the lyrics of "The Internationale", a left-wing anthem.

Bernard Montgomery

11 Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein,, nicknamed "Monty", was a senior British Army officer who served in the First World War, the Irish War of Independence and...

Maurice Genevoix

11 Maurice Genevoix was a French author and WWI veteran who is best known for his book Ceux de 14.     

Franz Schubert

11 Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre of thousands of works, including more than 600...

Hervé Bazin

11 Hervé Bazin was a French writer, whose best-known novels covered semi-autobiographical topics of teenage rebellion and dysfunctional families.

Anita Conti

11 Anita Conti was a French-Armenian explorer and photographer, and the first female oceanographer in France.

Charlemagne

11 Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of what is now known as the Carolingian Empire from 800. He united most of Western and Central Europe and was...

Léo Ferré

11 Léo Ferré was a Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer. He released some forty albums over this period, composing the music and the majority of the lyrics. He...

Jean Aicard

11 Jean François Victor Aicard was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist.                             

Albert de Mun

11 Adrien Albert Marie, Comte de Mun, was a French political figure, nobleman, journalist, and social reformer of the nineteenth century. Born into a noble family de Mun joined the French army at a...

Alessandro Volta

11 Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian chemist and physicist who was a pioneer of electricity and power, and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer...

Eugène Le Roy

11 Eugène Le Roy was a French author.                                                                 

Henri Fabre

11 Henri Fabre was a French aviator and the inventor of the first successful seaplane, the Fabre Hydravion.

Maurice Chevalier

11 Maurice Auguste Chevalier was a French singer, actor, and entertainer. He is best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven...

Archimedes

11 Archimedes of Syracuse was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, based on his...

Saint Fiacre

11 Fiacre is the name of three different Irish saints, the most famous of which is Fiacre of Breuil, the priest, abbot, hermit, and gardener of the seventh century who was famous for his sanctity and...

Raoul Dufy

11 Raoul Dufy was a French painter associated with the Fauvist movement. He gained recognition for his vibrant and decorative style, which became popular in various forms, such as textile designs, and...

Louise Weiss

11 Louise Weiss was a French author, journalist, feminist, and European politician. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974.

Henri Farman

11 Henri Farman was a British-French aviator and aircraft designer and manufacturer with his brother Maurice Farman. Before dedicating himself to aviation he gained fame as a sportsman, specifically in...

Pierre-Simon Laplace

10 Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French polymath, a scholar whose work has been instrumental in the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering, statistics, and philosophy. He...

George de Villebois-Mareuil

10 George Henri Anne-Marie Victor, Count de Villebois-Mareuil was a French army officer and writer who served in the Franco-Prussian War, French conquest of Tunisia and Second Boer War. In 1899, he went...

Dwight D. Eisenhower

10 Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. Earlier, during World War II, he became a General of the Army, and was Supreme Commander of the...

Émile Combes

10 Émile Justin Louis Combes was a French politician and freemason who led the Lefts Bloc cabinet from June 1902 to January 1905.

François Christophe de Kellermann

10 François-Étienne-Christophe Kellermann or de Kellermann, 1st Duke of Valmy was a French military commander and politician who served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. One...

Thomas the Apostle

10 Thomas the Apostle also known as Didymus, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament. Thomas is commonly known as "doubting Thomas" because he initially doubted the...

André Maginot

10 André Maginot was a French civil servant, soldier and Member of Parliament. He is best known for his advocacy of the string of forts known as the Maginot Line.

Honoratus of Amiens

10 Saint Honoratus of Amiens was the seventh bishop of Amiens. His feast day is May 16.               

Anne Frank

10 Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim. She gained worldwide notability posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German...

Claude Chappe

10 Claude Chappe was a French inventor who in 1792 demonstrated a practical semaphore system that eventually spanned all of France. His system consisted of a series of towers, each within line of sight...

Cyricus and Julitta

10 Cyricus and his mother Julitta are venerated as early Christian martyrs. According to traditional stories, they were put to death at Tarsus in AD 304.

Édouard Belin

10 Édouard Belin was a French photographer and inventor. In 1907 Belin invented a phototelegraphic apparatus called the Bélinographe (télestéréographe)—a system for receiving photographs over telephone...

Didier of Cahors

10 Saint Didier, also known as Desiderius, was a Merovingian-era royal official of aristocratic Gallo-Roman extraction.

Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz

10 Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was a member of the French Resistance in World War II, during which she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the war, she was a human rights defender and...

Victor Basch

10 Basch Viktor Vilém, or Victor-Guillaume Basch was a French Jewish politician and professor of germanistics and philosophy at the Sorbonne descending from Hungary. He was engaged in the Zionist...

Louis Charles Breguet

10 Louis Charles Breguet was a French aircraft designer and builder, one of the early aviation pioneers.

René Guy Cadou

10 René Guy Cadou est un poète français, né le 15 février 1920 à Sainte-Reine-de-Bretagne et mort le 20 mars 1951 à 31 ans à Louisfert (Loire-Atlantique).

Raoul Follereau

10 Raoul Follereau, né le 17 août 1903 à Nevers et mort le 6 décembre 1977 dans le 16e arrondissement de Paris, est un écrivain et journaliste français. Il s'engage publiquement à l'extrême-droite...

Georges Braque

10 Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he...

Robert Surcouf

10 Robert Surcouf was a French privateer, businessman and slave trader who operated in the Indian Ocean from 1789 to 1808 during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Capturing over 40 prizes,...

Raoul Briquet

10 Raoul Briquet, né le 4 novembre 1875 à Douai (Nord) et mort le 25 mars 1917 à Bapaume (Pas-de-Calais), est un homme politique français.

Medardus

10 Medardus or Medard was the Bishop of Noyon. He moved the seat of the diocese from Vermand to Noviomagus Veromanduorum in northern France. Medardus was one of the most honored bishops of his time,...

Théodore Monod

10 Théodore André Monod was a French naturalist, humanist, scholar and explorer.                       

Didier Daurat

10 Didier Daurat was a pioneer of French aviation. He was a fighter pilot during World War I, distinguishing himself by spotting the Paris Gun which was pounding Paris. After the war, he joined an...

Edgar Quinet

10 Edgar Quinet was a French historian and intellectual.                                               

René Mouchotte

10 Commandant René Mouchotte DFC was a World War II pilot of the French Air Force, who escaped from Vichy French–controlled Oran to join the Free French forces. Serving with RAF Fighter Command, he rose...

Stéphane Hessel

10 Stéphane Frédéric Hessel was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, Resistance member and BCRA agent. Born German, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He...

Jean Gabin

10 Jean Gabin Alexis Moncorgé, known as Jean Gabin, was a French actor and singer. Considered a key figure in French cinema, he starred in several classic films, including Pépé le Moko (1937), La grande...

Roland Barthes

10 Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western...

Añjela Duval

10 Marie-Angèle Duval was a Breton writer and poet of Breton literature, best remembered for her works Kan an douar (1973), Traoñ an Dour (1982), Tad-kozh Roperz-Huon (1822-1902) (1982), and Me, Anjela...

André Citroën

10 André-Gustave Citroën was a French industrialist and the founder of French automaker Citroën. He is also remembered for his application of double helical gears.

Clément Marot

10 Clément Marot was a French Renaissance poet. He was influenced by the writers of the late 15th century and paved the way for the Pléiade, and is undoubtedly the most important poet at the court of...

René Dumont

10 René Dumont was a French engineer in agronomy, a sociologist, and an environmental politician.     

Flora Tristan

10 Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso, better known as Flora Tristan, was a French-Peruvian writer and socialist activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory. She...

Josephine Baker

10 Freda Josephine Baker, also spelled Joséphine Baker, was an American and French dancer, singer, and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first Black...

François Mansart

9 François Mansart was a French architect credited with introducing classicism into the Baroque architecture of France. The Encyclopædia Britannica identifies him as the most accomplished of...

Raymond Queneau

9 Raymond Auguste Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo, notable for his wit and cynical humour.

Henri de Saint-Simon

9 Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, better known as Henri de Saint-Simon, was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence...

Charles Mangin

9 Charles Emmanuel Marie Mangin was a French general during World War I.                             

François Truffaut

9 François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a...

Théodore Aubanel

9 Théodore Aubanel was a Provençal poet. He was born in Avignon in a family of printers.             

Guglielmo Marconi

9 Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquess, was an Italian radio-frequency engineer, inventor, and politician known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system....

Sarah Bernhardt

9 Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy...

Charles Le Goffic

9 Charles Le Goffic was a Breton poet, novelist and historian whose influence was especially strong in his native Brittany. He was a member of the Académie française.

Paul Fort

9 Jules-Jean-Paul Fort was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. At the age of 18, reacting against the Naturalistic theatre, Fort founded the Théâtre d'Art (1890–93). He also founded...

Raoul Dautry

9 Raoul Dautry was a French engineer, business leader and politician. He was born on 16 September 1880 at Montluçon in the department of Allier; he died on 21 August 1951 at Lourmarin in the department...

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

9 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter during the Second Empire under Napoleon III.

Aristide Maillol

9 Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor, painter, and printmaker.         

Françoise Giroud

9 Françoise Giroud was a French journalist, screenwriter, writer, and politician.                     

Alfred Sisley

9 Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born to British parents, but spent most of his life in France. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to...

Louison Bobet

9 Louis "Louison" Bobet was a French professional road racing cyclist. He was the first great French rider of the post-war period and the first rider to win the Tour de France in three successive...

Jacques Anquetil

9 Jacques Anquetil was a French road racing cyclist and the first cyclist to win the Tour de France five times, in 1957 and from 1961 to 1964.

Edmond Michelet

9 Edmond Michelet was a French politician. He was the father of the writer Claude Michelet.           

Pierre-Georges Latécoère

9 Pierre-Georges Latécoère was a French pioneer of aeronautics. Born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, France, he studied in the École Centrale Paris and, during the First World War, started a business in...

Eugène Freyssinet

9 Eugène Freyssinet was a French structural and civil engineer. He was the major pioneer of prestressed concrete.

Salvador Dalí

9 Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí de Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the...

Léo Delibes

9 Clément Philibert Léo Delibes was a French Romantic composer, best known for his ballets and operas. His works include the ballets Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876) and the opera Lakmé (1883), which...

Konrad Adenauer

9 Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman and politician who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian...

Marcel Proust

9 Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which was published in seven volumes between...

Eugène Sue

8 Marie-Joseph "Eugène" Sue was a French novelist. He was one of several authors who popularized the genre of the serial novel in France with his very popular and widely imitated The Mysteries of...

Simone Morand

8 Simone Morand, est une professeure de musique française.                                           

Henri Sellier

8 Henri Charles Sellier was a French administrator, urban planner and Socialist politician. He did much to develop garden cities in the Paris region. He was Minister of Health in 1936–37.

Joseph Bertrand

8 Joseph Louis François Bertrand was a French mathematician and historian of science whose work emphasized number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics.

Paul Louis Courier

8 Paul Louis Courier was a French Hellenist and political writer.                                     

Noël du Fail

8 Noël du Fail, seigneur de La Hérissaye was a French jurist and writer of the Renaissance. His collections of tales are an important document of rural life in the sixteenth century in Brittany.

Frédéric Passy

8 Frédéric Passy was a French economist and pacifist who was a founding member of several peace societies and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He was also an author and politician, sitting in the Chamber...

Horace Vernet

8 Émile Jean-Horace Vernet, better known as Horace Vernet, was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist subjects.

Romanus of Rouen

8 Saint Romanus of Rouen was a scribe, clerical sage, and bishop of Rouen. He would have lived under Dagobert I (629–39), though his date of birth is unknown. His life is known in legend and tradition...

Francis I of France

8 Francis I was King of France from 1515 until his death in 1547. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. He succeeded his first cousin once removed and father-in-law Louis...

Vercingetorix

8 Vercingetorix was a Gallic nobleman and chieftain of the Arverni who united the Gauls in a failed revolt against Rome during the Gallic Wars.

Marc Seguin

8 Marc Seguin was a French engineer, inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge and the multi-tubular steam-engine boiler.

Célestin Freinet

8 Célestin Freinet was a noted French pedagogue and educational reformer.                             

Prosper Mérimée

8 Prosper Mérimée was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, an...

Henri Durre

8 Henri Durre, né le 15 septembre 1867 à Maubeuge (Nord) et mort le 28 octobre 1918 à Anzin (Nord), est un homme politique français.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

8 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the...

Francis de Pressensé

8 Francis Charles Dehault de Pressensé was a French politician and journalist.                       

Mahatma Gandhi

8 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political thinker who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from...

Jeanne Jugan

8 Jeanne Jugan, LSP, in religion Mary of the Cross, was a French Catholic religious sister who became known for the dedication of her life to the neediest of the elderly poor. Her service resulted in...

Henri Guillaumet

8 Henri Guillaumet was a French aviator.                                                             

Louis Franchet d'Espèrey

8 Louis Félix Marie François Franchet d'Espèrey was a French general during World War I. In September 1914, as the new commander of the French 5th Army, he played a notable role in organising the...

Fernand Pelloutier

8 Fernand Léonce Émile Pelloutier (1867–1901) was a French journalist, trade union organiser and anarcho-syndicalist theoretician. A revolutionary from an early age, after beginning a career in...

Baptiste Marcet

8 Baptiste Marcet est le fondateur de la Fédération nationale des mutilés du travail.                 

Alain Fournier

8 Alain Fournier may refer to:Alain Fournier (academic), French/Canadian computer graphics researcher Alain Fournier (animator), Canadian animator and filmmaker Alain-Fournier, French writer

Fernand Forest

8 Pierre dit Fernand Forest est un inventeur français, né à Clermont-Ferrand le 13 octobre 1851 et mort à La Condamine (Monaco) le 12 avril 1914.

René Char

8 René Émile Char was a French poet and member of the French Resistance in World War II.             

Jean Vilar

8 Jean Vilar was a French actor and theatre director. He was the founder of the Festival d'Avignon and the Théâtre National Populaire.

Olof Palme

8 Sven Olof Joachim Palme was a Swedish politician and statesman who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986. Palme led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 until...

Paul Bourget

8 Paul Charles Joseph Bourget was a French poet, novelist and critic. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

Marcel Cerdan

8 Marcellin "Marcel" Cerdan was a French professional boxer and world middleweight champion in 1948-1949. He was considered by many boxing experts and fans to be France's greatest boxer, and beyond to...

César Franck

8 César Auguste Jean Guillaume Hubert Franck was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium.

Angèle Vannier

8 Angèle Vannier, née le 12 août 1917 à Saint-Servan et morte le 2 décembre 1980 à Bazouges-la-Pérouse, est une poétesse française.

Claude Nougaro

8 Claude Nougaro was a French jazz singer and poet.                                                   

Winwaloe

8 Winwaloe was the founder and first abbot of Landévennec Abbey, also known as the Monastery of Winwaloe. It was just south of Brest in Brittany, now part of France.

Marc Chagall

8 Marc Chagall was a Russian and French artist of Jewish ancestry. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris, as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide...

Suzanne Lenglen

8 Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was a French tennis player. She was the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning eight Grand Slam titles in singles and twenty-one in total. She was also a...

Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville

8 Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville was a French chemist.                                           

Bartholomew Columbus

8 Bartholomew Columbus was a Genoese explorer and the younger brother of Christopher Columbus.       

Maurice Utrillo

7 Maurice Utrillo was a French painter of the School of Paris who specialized in cityscapes. From the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre to...

Jacques Tati

7 Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors he was voted 46th, though he had directed only six feature-length...

Benjamin Delessert

7 Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert was a French banker and naturalist with Swiss family origins who was educated at the University of Edinburgh. He was an honorary member of the Académie des Sciences and...

Étienne Marcel

7 Étienne Marcel was provost of the merchants of Paris under King John II of France, called John the Good. He distinguished himself in the defence of the small craftsmen and guildsmen who made up most...

Queen Victoria

7 Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days, which was longer than those of any of her...

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

7 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first...

Saturnin

7 Saturnin of Toulouse was one of the "Apostles to the Gauls" sent out during the consulate of Decius and Gratus (250–251) to Christianise Gaul after the persecutions under Emperor Decius had all but...

Saint Alban

7 Saint Alban is venerated as the first-recorded British Christian martyr, for which reason he is considered to be the protomartyr of Britain. Along with fellow Saints Julius and Aaron, Alban is one of...

Gioachino Rossini

7 Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. He gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano...

Henri Grégoire

7 Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, often referred to as the Abbé Grégoire, was a French Catholic priest, constitutional bishop of Blois and a revolutionary leader. He was an ardent abolitionist and...

Emmanuel Brousse

7 Emmanuel Brousse, né le 23 août 1866 à Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales) et mort le 17 novembre 1926 à Paris, est un imprimeur, journaliste et homme politique français, membre de l'Alliance...

Eugénie de Montijo

7 Eugénie de Montijo was Empress of the French from her marriage to Napoleon III on 30 January 1853 until he was overthrown on 4 September 1870. From 28 July to 4 September 1870, she was the de facto...

Joseph Roumanille

7 Joseph Roumanille was a Provençal poet. He was born at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), and is commonly known in southern France as the father of the Félibrige, for he first conceived the...

Brioc

7 Brioc was a 6th-century Welsh holy man who became the first abbot of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany. He is one of the seven founder saints of Brittany.

Michael Faraday

7 Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist who contributed vastly to the study of electrochemistry and electromagnetism. His main discoveries include the principles underlying...

Hippolytus of Rome

7 Hippolytus of Rome was one of the most important Christian thinkers of the second and third centuries, though his provenance, identity, and corpus remain elusive to scholars and historians. Suggested...

Saint Dominic

7 Saint Dominic, also known as Dominic de Guzmán, was a Castilian Catholic priest and the founder of the Dominican Order. He is the patron saint of astronomers and natural scientists, and he and his...

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

7 Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian-French mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the...

Lucien Sampaix

7 Lucien Sampaix est un journaliste communiste français, né à Sedan le 13 mai 1899 et otage fusillé par les nazis durant l'Occupation, à Caen, le 15 décembre 1941.

Edgar Faure

7 Edgar Jean Faure was a French politician, lawyer, essayist, historian and memoirist who served as Prime Minister of France in 1952 and again between 1955 and 1956. Prior to his election to the...

Raymond Aron

7 Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century.

Victor Grignard

7 Francois Auguste Victor Grignard was a French chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the eponymously named Grignard reagent and Grignard reaction, both of which are important in the...

Paul Sabatier

7 Paul Sabatier may refer to:Paul Sabatier (chemist) (1854–1941), French chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Sabatier (theologian) (1858–1928), French clergyman and historian

Napoleon III

7 Napoleon III was President of France from 1848 to 1852 and then Emperor of the French from 1852 until his deposition in 1870. He was the first president, second emperor, and last monarch of France....

Jean Renoir

7 Jean Renoir was a French filmmaker, actor, producer and author. His La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. In...

Michel Ney

7 Michel Ney, 1st Prince de la Moskowa, 1st Duke of Elchingen, was a French military commander and Marshal of the Empire who fought in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.

Maurice Barrès

7 Auguste-Maurice Barrès was a French novelist, journalist, philosopher, and politician. Spending some time in Italy, he became a figure in French literature with the release of his work The Cult of...

Charles Darwin

7 Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a...

André Breton

7 André Robert Breton was a French writer and poet, known as a principal theorist and co-founder of surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined...

Élisée Reclus

7 Jacques Élisée Reclus was a French geographer, writer, and anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork, La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes , over a period of nearly 20...

Charles Perrault

7 Charles Perrault was a French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from earlier folk tales, published...

Charles Fourier

7 François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of his views, held to be radical in his lifetime,...

Cosmas and Damian

7 Cosmas and Damian were two Arab physicians and early Christian martyrs. They practised their profession in the seaport of Aegeae, then in the Roman province of Cilicia.

King Arthur

7 King Arthur was a legendary king of Britain. He is a folk hero and a central figure in the medieval literary tradition known as the Matter of Britain.

Sophie Germain

7 Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her...

Guy Mollet

7 Guy Alcide Mollet was a French politician. He led the socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) from 1946 to 1969 and was the French Prime Minister from 1956 to 1957.

Giuseppe Verdi

7 Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto, a small town in the modern province of Parma, to a family of moderate means, receiving...

Madeleine Brès

7 Madeleine Alexandrine Brès was a French pediatrician and the first French woman to obtain a medical degree. In 1875, she defended her thesis on breastfeeding.

Louise de Bettignies

7 Louise Marie Jeanne Henriette de Bettignies was a French secret agent who spied on the Germans for the British during World War I using the pseudonym of Alice Dubois.

Pierre Landais

7 Pierre Landais was a Breton politician who became the principal adviser and chief minister to Francis II, Duke of Brittany. Francis left Landais in control of the affairs of the duchy, producing...

Eugène Boudin

7 Eugène Louis Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. His...

Lancelot

7 Lancelot du Lac, alternatively written as Launcelot and other variants, is a popular character in the Arthurian legend's chivalric romance tradition. He is typically depicted as King Arthur's close...

Françoise Sagan

7 Françoise Sagan was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known...

Léon Faye

7 Léon Faye, né le 10 juin 1899 à Vergt (Dordogne) et mort le 30 janvier 1945 au camp de concentration de Sonnenburg à l'âge de 45 ans, est un officier français qui, pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,...

Alain Gerbault

7 Alain Jacques Georges Marie Gerbault was a French sailor, writer and tennis champion, who made a circumnavigation of the world as a single-handed sailor. He eventually settled in the islands of south...

Zéphyrin Camélinat

7 Zéphyrin Camélinat was a French politician, communard, socialist and communist.                     

Jean de La Varende

7 Jean de La Varende was a French writer. He wrote novels, short stories, biographies and monographs, in particular on the subject of Normandy. He initially tried to become a naval officer like his...

Marguerite Perey

7 Marguerite Catherine Perey was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. In 1962, she...

Charles Trenet

7 Louis Charles Augustin Georges Trenet was a renowned French singer-songwriter who composed both the music and the lyrics for nearly 1,000 songs over a career that lasted more than 60 years. These...

Marco Polo

7 Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, a book that...

Charles Delestraint

7 Charles Delestraint was a French general, hero of the French Resistance and the first commander of the Armée secrète during World War II. He was a Companion of the Liberation. Delestraint was killed...

Ettore Bugatti

7 Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti was an Italian-French automobile designer and manufacturer. He received French citizenship in 1946 and is remembered as the founder and proprietor of the automobile...

François Couperin

7 François Couperin was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as Couperin le Grand to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family.

Raimu

7 Jules Auguste Muraire, whose stage name was Raimu, was a French actor. He is most famous for playing César in the 'Marseilles trilogy'.

Jules Mousseron

7 Jules Mousseron, né le 1er janvier 1868 à Denain (Nord) où il est mort le 24 novembre 1943, est un poète français de langue picarde et mineur de fond à la Compagnie des mines d'Anzin. Il est...

Paul Signac

6 Paul Victor Jules Signac was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, with Georges Seurat, helped develop the artistic technique Pointillism.

François de Sales

6 François de Sales, né le 21 août 1567 au château de Sales près de Thorens-Glières, bourg du duché de Savoie et mort le 28 décembre 1622 à Lyon, est un prélat savoyard.

Jean Lurçat

6 Jean Lurçat was a French artist noted for his role in the revival of contemporary tapestry. He was also a painter and ceramist.

Guy Ropartz

6 Joseph Guy Marie Ropartz was a French composer and conductor. His compositions included five symphonies, three violin sonatas, cello sonatas, six string quartets, a piano trio and string trio, stage...

Émile Driant

6 Émile Augustin Cyprien Driant was a French writer, politician, and army officer. He was the first high-ranking casualty of the Battle of Verdun during World War I.

Jacques Cassard

6 Jacques Cassard was a French naval officer and privateer.                                           

Louis Néel

6 Louis Eugène Félix Néel was a French physicist born in Lyon who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his studies of the magnetic properties of solids.

Martha

6 Martha is a biblical figure described in the Gospels of Luke and John. Together with her siblings Lazarus and Mary of Bethany, she is described as living in the village of Bethany near Jerusalem and...

Alexandre Ribot

6 Alexandre-Félix-Joseph Ribot was a French politician, four times Prime Minister.                   

Willy Brandt

6 Willy Brandt was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1964 to 1987 and concurrently served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1969...

Benoît Frachon

6 Benoît Frachon, a French metalworker and trade union leader, was one of the leaders of the French Communist Party and of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45). He was Secretary-General...

Charles Floquet

6 Charles Thomas Floquet was a French lawyer and statesman.                                           

André Messager

6 André Charles Prosper Messager was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty opéras comiques, opérettes and other stage works, among which...

Michel-Joseph Maunoury

6 Michel-Joseph Maunoury was a commander of the French forces in the early days of World War I who was posthumously elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France.

Gérard de Nerval

6 Gérard de Nerval, was the pen name of Gérard Labrunie, a French travel writer, essayist, poet, and translator. He was a major figure during the era of French romanticism, and best known for his...

Ludovic Trarieux

6 Jacques Ludovic Trarieux was a French Republican statesman, lawyer, prominent Dreyfusard, and pioneer of international human rights.

Caroline Aigle

6 Commandant Caroline Aigle was a French aviator who achieved a historical first when at the age of 25, she became the first woman fighter pilot in the French Air Force. Her promising military career...

Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus

6 Madeleine Hutin, taking the name Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus, founded a Roman Catholic community of religious sisters, the Little Sisters of Jesus, on 8 September 1939 in Touggourt, French...

Vincent Scotto

6 Vincent Scotto was a French composer.                                                               

Charles Garnier (architect)

6 Jean-Louis Charles Garnier was a French architect, best known as the architect of the Palais Garnier in Paris and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.

Louis Daguerre

6 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French scientist, artist and photographer recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers...

George V

6 George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin

6 Henri-Jean Guillaume "Henri" Martin was a French painter. Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1917, he has been described as a prolific master whose work has touches of melancholy, dreaminess...

René Clair

6 René Clair, born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with...

Lino Ventura

6 Angiolino Giuseppe Pasquale Ventura, known as Lino Ventura, was an Italian-born actor and philanthropist, who lived and worked for most of his life in France. He was considered one of the greatest...

Marcel Carné

6 Marcel Albert Carné was a French film director. A key figure in the poetic realism movement, Carné's best known films include Port of Shadows (1938), Le Jour Se Lève (1939), Les Visiteurs du Soir...

Frédéric Joliot-Curie

6 Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a French chemist and physicist who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his wife, Irène Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were...

Robert Doisneau

6 Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and, with Henri Cartier-Bresson, a pioneer of...

René Viviani

6 Jean Raphaël Adrien René Viviani was a French politician of the Third Republic, who served as Prime Minister for the first year of World War I. He was born in Sidi Bel Abbès, in French Algeria. In...

Charles Michels

6 Charles Michels was a trade unionist and communist activist. He was député of the 15th arrondissement in Paris. During the Second World War, Michels was one of the 48 hostages shot in Chateaubriant,...

Alexis de Tocqueville

6 Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the...

Bernard Moitessier

6 Bernard Moitessier was a French sailor, most notable for his participation in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first non-stop, singlehanded, round the world yacht race. With the fastest...

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

6 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output...

Georges Frêche

6 Georges Frêche was a French politician. He served as President of the Languedoc-Roussillon Region from 2004 until his death: prior to that, he had been mayor of Montpellier for 27 years, and was also...

Charles de Foucauld

6 Charles de Foucauld, born as Charles Eugène, vicomte de Foucauld de Pontbriand,, religious name Charles of Jesus, was a French monk, Catholic priest and hermit who lived among the Tuareg people in...

Jean Giraudoux

6 Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II.

Paul Sérusier

6 Paul Sérusier was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism.

Jean-François Le Gonidec

6 Jean François Marie Le Gonidec de Kerdaniel was a Breton grammarian who codified the Breton language.

Bernard Chochoy

6 Bernard Chochoy, né le 14 août 1908 à Nielles-lès-Bléquin (Pas-de-Calais) et mort le 23 avril 1981 à Versailles (Yvelines), est un homme politique français.

Jean-Henri Fabre

6 Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre was a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects.

Charles Tillon

6 Charles Joseph Tillon was a French metal worker, Communist, trade union leader, politician and leader of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–1945).

Francis Garnier

6 Marie Joseph François Garnier was a French officer, inspector of Indigenous Affairs of Cochinchina and explorer. He eventually became mission leader of the Mekong Exploration Commission in 19th...

Savinian and Potentian

6 Saints Savinian and Potentian are martyrs commemorated as the patron saints and founders of the diocese of Sens, France. Savinian should not be confused with another early French martyr, Sabinian of...

Marie Laurencin

6 Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or.

Henri Verneuil

6 Henri Verneuil was a French-Armenian playwright and filmmaker, who made a successful career in France. He was nominated for Oscar and Palme d'Or awards, and won Locarno International Film Festival,...

Lady of the Lake

6 The Lady of the Lake is a title used by multiple characters in the Matter of Britain, the body of medieval literature and mythology associated with the legend of King Arthur. As either actually fairy...

Adrienne Bolland

6 Adrienne Bolland, born Boland, was a French test pilot. She was the first woman to fly over the Andes between Chile and Argentina. She was later described as "France's most accomplished female...

Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville

6 Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville, Marquis Duquesne was a French Navy officer and colonial administrator who served as Governor General of New France from 1752 to 1755.

Brice of Tours

6 Brice of Tours was a 5th-century Frankish bishop, the fourth Bishop of Tours, succeeding Martin of Tours in 397.

Jean Yole

6 Jean Yole, né Léopold Robert à Soullans (Vendée) le 7 septembre 1878 et mort à Vendrennes (Vendée) le 2 novembre 1956, est un écrivain et homme politique français, maire de Vendrennes et sénateur de...

Alfred Sauvy

6 Alfred Sauvy was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy made an important early use of the phrase Third World in reference to countries that were unaligned with...

Annie Girardot

6 Annie Suzanne Girardot was a French actress. She often played strong-willed, independent, hard-working, and often lonely women, imbuing her characters with an earthiness and reality that endeared her...

Charles Bourseul

6 Charles Bourseul was a pioneer in development of the "make and break" telephone about 20 years before Bell made a practical telephone.

Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin

6 Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, commonly known as Louise de Vilmorin, was a French novelist, poet and journalist. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in...

Théodore de Banville

6 Étienne Jean Baptiste Claude Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century.

Jean Lannes

6 Jean Lannes, 1st Duke of Montebello, Prince of Siewierz, was a French military commander and a Marshal of the Empire who served during both the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Hector Malot

5 Hector-Henri Malot was a French writer born in La Bouille, Seine-Maritime. He studied law in Rouen and Paris, but eventually literature became his passion. He worked as a dramatic critic for Lloyd...

Hospitaller Malta

5 Hospitaller Malta, known in Maltese history as the Knights' Period, was a de facto state which existed between 1530 and 1806 when the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo were ruled by the Order...

Charles Nicolle

5 Charles Jules Henri Nicolle was a French bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus.

Charles Cros

5 Charles Cros or Émile-Hortensius-Charles Cros was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude.

Michelangelo

5 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. He was born in the Republic of Florence...

Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau

5 Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau was a French military officer and Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces during the First World War. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1919 for...

Henry Bordeaux

5 Henry Bordeaux was a French writer and lawyer.                                                     

Jules Simon

5 Jules François Simon was a French statesman and philosopher, and one of the leaders of the Moderate Republicans in the Third French Republic.

Paul Héroult

5 Paul (Louis-Toussaint) Héroult was a French scientist. He was one of the inventors of the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminium, and developed the first successful commercial electric arc...

Federico García Lorca

5 Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of...

Charles Dullin

5 Charles Dullin was a French actor, theater manager and director.                                   

Henri Wallon (psychologist)

5 Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist, neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon.

Stéphane Mallarmé

5 Étienne Mallarmé, known professionally as Stéphane Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French Symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic...

Henri Moissan

5 Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was a French chemist and pharmacist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds. Among his other contributions,...

Gustave Toudouze

5 Gustave Toudouze, né le 19 mai 1847 à Paris et mort le 2 juillet 1904 dans la même ville, est un romancier, auteur dramatique et journaliste français. Il est le père de l'écrivain Georges-Gustave...

Berty Albrecht

5 Berty Albrecht was a French feminist and French Resistance martyr of the Second World War.         

Vasco da Gama

5 Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese mariner, explorer and nobleman. His discovery of the first direct maritime route between Europe and India via the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean from...

Charles Gide

5 Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His...

Darius Milhaud

5 Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced...

Louis Lépine

5 Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine was a French lawyer, politician and administrator who was Governor General of Algeria from 1897 to 1898 and twice Prefect of Police with the Paris Police Prefecture from...

Charles Saint-Venant (1898-1953)

5 Charles Louis Saint-Venant, né le 7 novembre 1898 à Lille (Nord) et mort le 14 avril 1953 dans la même ville, est un homme politique français.

Henri Ghesquière

5 Henri Ghesquière, né le 28 août 1863 à Lille (Nord) et mort le 1er septembre 1918 dans la même ville, est un homme politique français.

Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

5 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French zoologist and an authority on deviation from normal structure. In 1854 he coined the term éthologie (ethology).

Pierre-Paul Riquet

5 Pierre-Paul Riquet, Baron de Bonrepos was the engineer and canal-builder responsible for the construction of the Canal du Midi.

Diego Brosset

5 Diego Brosset, né le 3 octobre 1898 à Buenos Aires (Argentine) et mort le 20 novembre 1944 à Champagney (Haute-Saône), est un officier français, rallié à la France libre dès juin 1940, général de...

Alain Savary

5 Alain Savary was a French Socialist politician, deputy to the National Assembly of France during the Fourth and Fifth Republic, chairman of the Socialist Party (PS) and a government minister in the...

André Maurois

5 André Maurois was a French author.                                                                 

Gaston Defferre

5 Gaston Defferre was a French Socialist politician. He served as mayor of Marseille for 33 years until his death in 1986. He was minister for overseas territories in Guy Mollet’s socialist government...

Andrée Récipon

5 Andrée Récipon, née le 8 mai 1885 à Paris 8e et morte le 1er mars 1956 à Laillé (Ille-et-Vilaine), est une résistante française.

Rembrandt

5 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, mononymously known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the...

Albert Londres

5 Albert Londres was a French journalist and writer. One of the inventors of investigative journalism, Londres not only reported news but created it, and reported it from a personal perspective. He...

Albert Samain

5 Albert Victor Samain was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school.                         

Henri Pourrat

5 Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) was a French writer and folklore collector.                               

Arthur Honegger

5 Oscar-Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. Honegger was a member of Les Six. For Halbreich, Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher is "more even...

Vincent d'Indy

5 Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher. His influence as a teacher, in particular, was considerable. He was a co-founder of the Schola Cantorum de Paris and also taught...

Blaise Cendrars

5 Frédéric-Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European...

Albert Joly

5 Albert Joly, né le 10 novembre 1844 à Versailles (Yvelines) et mort le 4 décembre 1880 à Versailles, est un avocat et homme politique français.

François Boucher

5 François Boucher was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories,...

Jean Marais

5 Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais, known professionally as Jean Marais, was a French actor, theatre director, painter, sculptor, visual artist, writer and photographer. In 1937, Marais became the lover of...

Charles Dupuy

5 Charles Alexandre Dupuy was a French statesman, three times prime minister.                         

Ernest Jacques Barbot

5 Ernest Jacques Barbot, né le 19 août 1855 à Toulouse et mort le 10 mai 1915 Villers-Châtel, est un officier général français. C'est l'un des 42 généraux français morts au combat durant la Première...

Pierre Mauroy

5 Pierre Mauroy was a French politician who was Prime Minister of France from 1981 to 1984 under President François Mitterrand. Mauroy also served as Mayor of Lille from 1973 to 2001 and President of...

Albert Lebrun

5 Albert François Lebrun was a French politician who served as President of France from 1932 to 1940. He was the last president of the Third Republic. He was a member of the centre-right Democratic...

Ambrose

5 Ambrose of Milan, canonized as Saint Ambrose, was a theologian and statesman who served as Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397. He expressed himself prominently as a public figure, fiercely promoting...

Léopold Sédar Senghor

5 Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese politician, cultural theorist and poet who served as the first president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980.

Édouard Lalo

5 Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer, violist, violinist, and academic teacher. His most celebrated piece is the Symphonie Espagnole, a five-movement concerto for violin and orchestra...

Georges Bernanos

5 Louis Émile Clément Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. A Catholic with monarchist leanings, he was critical of elitist thought and was opposed to what he identified...

René Bonpain

5 René Bonpain, dit L'Abbé Bonpain, est un résistant et homme d'Église français né le 15 octobre 1908 à Dunkerque (Nord) et mort fusillé le 30 mars 1943 à Bondues (Nord). Il reste à ce jour le...

David d'Angers

5 Pierre-Jean David was a French sculptor, medalist and active freemason. He adopted the name David d'Angers, following his entry into the studio of the painter Jacques-Louis David in 1809 as a way of...

Antoine Chanzy

5 Antoine Eugène Alfred Chanzy was a French general, notable for his successes during the Franco-Prussian War and as a governor of Algeria.

Henri Gouraud

5 Henri Gouraud was a French army general. He played a central role in the colonization of French Africa and the Levant. During World War I, he fought in major battles such as those of the Argonne, the...

Julián Grimau

5 Julián Grimau García was a Spanish politician, member of the Communist Party of Spain, executed during Francisco Franco's Francoist State.

André Theuriet

5 Claude Adhémar André Theuriet was a 19th-century French poet and novelist.                         

Barthélemy Thimonnier

5 Barthélemy Thimonnier was a French inventor, who is attributed with the invention of the first sewing machine that replicated sewing by hand. He was born in L'Arbresle, in Rhône in France.

Paul Le Flem

5 Marie-Paul Achille Auguste Le Flem was a French composer and music critic.                         

Louis Vicat

5 Louis Vicat was a French engineer.                                                                 

Émile Romanet

5 Émile Romanet est un ingénieur français considéré comme un des précurseurs des caisses d'allocations familiales.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux

5 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was one of the earliest exponents of French Neoclassical architecture. He used his knowledge of architectural theory to design not only domestic architecture but also town...

Suzanne Lanoy

5 Suzanne Lanoy, née Suzanne Julie Blin le 8 juillet 1913 à Bully-en-Gohelle et morte sous la torture le 6 mars 1944 à Douai, est une enseignante et une résistante française.

Richard Wagner

5 Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor, best known for his operas, although his mature works are often referred to as music dramas. Unlike most...

Alexander Graham Bell

5 Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone...

Francis Jammes

5 Francis Jammes was a French poet. He spent most of his life in his native region of Béarn and the Basque Country and his poems are known for their lyricism and for singing the pleasures of a humble...

Henri Queffélec

5 Henri Queffélec was a French writer and screenwriter.                                               

Gaston Ramon

5 Gaston Ramon was a French veterinarian and biologist best known for his role in the treatment of diphtheria and tetanus.

Roland Dorgelès

5 Roland Dorgelès was a French novelist and a member of the Académie Goncourt.                       

Georges Duhamel

5 Georges Duhamel may refer to:Georges Duhamel (politician) (1855–1892), Canadian lawyer and political Georges Duhamel (footballer) (1879–?), French footballer Georges Duhamel (author) (1884–1966),...

Toussaint Louverture

5 François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda, was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. During his life,...

Jules Renard

5 Pierre-Jules Renard was a French author and member of the Académie Goncourt, most famous for the works Poil de carotte and Les Histoires Naturelles. Among his other works are Le Plaisir de rompre and...

Léon Foucault

5 Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was a French physicist who invented the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light,...

Louis Hémon

5 Louis Hémon, was a French writer, best known for his novel Maria Chapdelaine.                       

Haroun Tazieff

5 Haroun Tazieff was a Franco-Belgian volcanologist and geologist. He was a famous cinematographer of volcanic eruptions and lava flows, and the author of several books on volcanoes. He was also a...

Georges Cadoudal

5 Georges Cadoudal, sometimes called simply Georges, was a Breton counter-revolutionary and leader of the Chouannerie during the French Revolution. He was posthumously named a Marshal of France in 1814...

André Le Nôtre

5 André Le Nôtre, originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the...

Serge Gainsbourg

5 Serge Gainsbourg was a French singer-songwriter, actor, composer, and director. Regarded as one of the most important figures in French pop, he was renowned for often provocative releases which...

Django Reinhardt

5 Jean Reinhardt, known by his Romani nickname Django, was a Belgian-born Romani jazz guitarist and composer who lived most of his life in France. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge...

Francis Poulenc

5 Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the...

Roland Moreno

5 Roland Moreno was a French inventor, engineer, humorist and author who was the inventor of the smart card. Moreno's smart card, or la carte à puce in French, was little known internationally....

Marcel Mérieux

5 Marcel Mérieux, né le 16 janvier 1870 à Lyon 6e et mort le 13 août 1937 à Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or, est un biochimiste français. Il est le fondateur de l'Institut Mérieux en 1897.

Maryse Hilsz

5 Maryse Hilsz was a French aviator known for high altitude and endurance flights. She served with the French Resistance during World War II and died in an air crash in 1946.

Lionel Terray

5 Lionel Terray was a French climber who made many first ascents, including on the 1955 French Makalu expedition in the Himalaya and Cerro Fitz Roy in the Patagonian Andes.

Charles Lindbergh

5 Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, military officer, and author. On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km),...

Yves du Manoir

5 Yves Frantz Loys Marie Le Pelley du Manoir, known as Yves du Manoir was a French rugby player.     

Paul Ramadier

5 Paul Ramadier was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France in 1947.               

Florence Arthaud

5 Florence Arthaud, was a French sailor. In 1990, she became the first woman to win the Route du Rhum.

James Watt

5 James Watt was a Scottish inventor, engineer and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought...

Maxence Van der Meersch

5 Maxence Van der Meersch was a French Flemish writer.                                               

Franz Liszt

5 Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the...

Tony Garnier (architect)

4 Tony Garnier was a noted French architect and city planner. He was most active in his home city of Lyon, where he notably designed the Halle Tony Garnier and Stade de Gerland. Garnier is considered...

Armand Carrel

4 Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Armand Carrel was a French journalist and political writer.                   

Ferréol of Uzès

4 Saint Ferréol (Ferreolus) of Uzès was bishop of Uzès and possibly bishop of Nîmes (553-581). His Feast Day is January 4.

Jules Uhry

4 Jules Uhry, né le 12 novembre 1877 à Constantine (Algérie) et mort le 13 février 1936 à Neuilly-sur-Seine, est un homme politique français.

Pierre Lescot

4 Pierre Lescot was a French architect of the French Renaissance period. He is known for designing the Fontaine des Innocents and the Lescot wing of the Louvre in Paris. Lescot contributed to the...

Michel Simon

4 Michel Simon was a Swiss actor of German origin active primarily in France. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), L'Atalante (1934),...

François Cuzin

4 François Cuzin, né le 15 août 1914 à Dolomieu (Isère) et mort le 19 juillet 1944 à Signes (Var), est un enseignant et résistant français de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Morvan Lebesque

4 Morvan Lebesque, was the Breton language name of Maurice Lebesque, a Breton nationalist activist and French journalist.

Camille Jullian

4 Camille Jullian was a French historian, philologist, archaeologist and historian of literature.     

François Richard-Lenoir

4 François Richard, dit Richard-Lenoir, né le 16 avril 1765 à Épinay-sur-Odon (France) et mort le 19 octobre 1839 à Paris, est un industriel manufacturier d’étoffe français qui devint l’un des...

Frédéric Bastiat

4 Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist, writer, and prominent member of the French liberal school.

Jerome

4 Jerome, also known as Jerome of Stridon, was an early Christian priest, confessor, theologian, translator, and historian; he is commonly known as Saint Jerome.

Camille Flammarion

4 Nicolas Camille Flammarion FRAS was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science...

Neil Armstrong

4 Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who, as the commander of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator,...

Daniel Balavoine

4 Daniel Xavier-Marie Balavoine was a French singer and songwriter. He was popular in the French-speaking world in the early 1980s; he inspired many singers of his generation such as Jean-Jacques...

Jules Sandeau

4 Léonard Sylvain Julien (Jules) Sandeau was a French novelist.                                       

François Coppée

4 François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.                                     

Edgar Allan Poe

4 Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely...

Jean Goujon

4 Jean Goujon was a French Renaissance sculptor and architect.                                       

Joseph Kessel

4 Joseph Kessel, also known as "Jef", was a French journalist and novelist. He was a member of the Académie française and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Charlie Chaplin

4 Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was an English comic actor, filmmaker, film editor and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the...

Caprasius of Agen

4 Saint Caprasius of Agen is venerated as a Christian martyr and saint of the fourth century. Relics associated with him were discovered at Agen in south-west France in the fifth century. Local legends...

François Joseph Lefebvre

4 François Joseph Lefebvre, Duke of Danzig was a French military commander of the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, and one of the original eighteen Marshals of the Empire created by...

Abel Gance

4 Abel Gance was a French film director, producer, writer, and actor. A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, he is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1923),...

François Coli

4 François Coli was a French pilot and navigator best known as the flying partner of Charles Nungesser in their fatal attempt to achieve the first transatlantic flight.

Merlin

4 Merlin is a mythical figure prominently featured in the legend of King Arthur and best known as a magician, along with several other main roles. The familiar depiction of Merlin, based on an...

Aristide Boucicaut

4 Aristide Boucicaut was a French entrepreneur who turned Le Bon Marché into the first modern department store.

Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma

4 Marie Louise was Duchess of Parma from 11 April 1814 until her death in 1847. She was Napoleon's second wife and as such Empress of the French and Queen of Italy from their marriage on 2 April 1810...

Jacques Cœur

4 Jacques Cœur was a French government official and state-sponsored merchant whose personal fortune became legendary and led to his eventual disgrace. He initiated regular trade routes between France...

Pierre Gassendi

4 Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, Catholic priest, astronomer, and mathematician. While he held a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader...

Gaston Berger

4 Gaston Berger was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for his...

Claire Fontaine

4 Claire Fontaine is a feminist conceptual art persona created in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her "assistants". Since...

Charles Pathé

4 Charles Morand Pathé was a pioneer of the French film and recording industries. As the founder of Pathé Frères, its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Pathé and his brothers pioneered the...

Paul Déroulède

4 Paul Déroulède was a French author and politician, one of the founders of the nationalist League of Patriots.

Maximilien Robespierre

4 Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman, widely recognised as one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution. Robespierre fervently campaigned...

Maurice Schumann

4 Maurice Schumann was a French politician, journalist, writer, and hero of the Second World War who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Georges Pompidou from 22 June 1969 to 15 March 1973....

Michael Trotobas

4 Michael Alfred Raymond Trotobas, code named Sylvestre and known in France as Capitaine Michel, was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization during...

Pierre Larousse

4 Pierre Athanase Larousse was a French grammarian, lexicographer and encyclopaedist. He published many of the outstanding educational and reference works of 19th-century France, including the...

Gabriel Lippmann

4 Gabriel Lippmann was a French applied physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for his invention of the Lippmann plate, a method of photographically reproducing colours based on the...

Fernand David

4 Fernand David was a French lawyer and politician who served as a minister on six occasions. Especially interested in agricultural questions, he served as Minister of Agriculture under seven...

Victor Duruy

4 Jean Victor Duruy was a French historian and statesman.                                             

Augustine of Hippo

4 Augustine of Hippo was a Christian theologian and philosopher from Roman Africa. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius from Thagaste in Numidia Cirtensis,. His writings deeply influenced the development...

Théophile Roussel

4 Jean-Baptiste Victor Théophile Roussel, né le 28 juillet 1816 à Saint-Chély-d'Apcher (Lozère) et mort le 27 septembre 1903 au château d'Orfeuillette, est un médecin, homme politique et philanthrope...

Jean Bouveri

4 Jean Bouveri, né à Charolles en Saône-et-Loire le 18 juillet 1865 et mort le 3 juillet 1927 à Montceau-les-Mines, est un syndicaliste, député et sénateur français. Il est un des "pionniers" du...

Abel Servien

4 Abel Servien, marquis de Sablé et de Boisdauphin and Comte de La Roche des Aubiers was a French diplomat who served Cardinal Mazarin and signed for the French the Treaty of Westphalia. He was an...

Nathalie Sarraute

4 Nathalie Sarraute was a French writer and lawyer. She was nominated in 1969 for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Nobel Committee member Lars Gyllensten.

Alain Bombard

4 Alain Bombard was a French biologist, physician and politician, famous for sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a small boat without provisions. In 1951, while working as a physician, he was unable...

Eugène Thomas

4 Eugène Thomas was a French socialist teacher, trade unionist and politician. He was a member of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45). He was Minister or Secretary of State for PTT...

Louis de Funès

4 Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza was a French actor and comedian. According to a series of polls conducted since the late 1960s, he is France's favourite actor, having played over 150 roles in...

Jean Bertin

4 Jean Henri Bertin was a French scientist, engineer and inventor who is best known as the lead engineer for the French experimental Aérotrain mass transit system.

Louis Delâge

4 Louis Delâge was a French pioneer automotive engineer and manufacturer.                             

Jeanne Labourbe

4 Jeanne Marie Labourbe was a French Bolshevik and activist who participated in the October Revolution. She died in 1919 in Odessa, executed by the police as ordered by the White Russians.

Benoît Malon

4 Benoît Malon, was a French Socialist, writer, communard, and political leader.                     

Nathalie Lemel

4 Nathalie Lemel was a militant anarchist and feminist who participated on the barricades at the Commune de Paris of 1871. She was deported to Nouvelle Calédonie with Louise Michel.

Joseph Bara

4 François Joseph Bara was a French soldier best known for his death during the War in the Vendée. At the age of twelve, he joined the French Revolutionary Army as a drummer boy after the outbreak of...

Saint Martial

4 Martial of Limoges, whose name is also rendered as Marcial, Martialis, and Marcialis, and is also called "the Apostle of the Gauls" or "the Apostle of Aquitaine," was the first bishop of Limoges....

Agatha of Sicily

4 Saint Agatha of Sicily is an early Christian virgin and martyr. Her feast is on 5 February; traditionally, it is considered the last date by which one can send New Year's greetings.

Michel Debré

4 Michel Jean-Pierre Debré was the first Prime Minister of the French Fifth Republic. He is considered the "father" of the current Constitution of France. He served under President Charles de Gaulle...

Lech Wałęsa

4 Lech Wałęsa is a Polish statesman, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as the president of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first...

Jean-Marie Tjibaou

4 Jean-Marie Tjibaou was a French politician in New Caledonia and leader of the Kanak independence movement.

Henri Manhès

4 Henri Manhès est un résistant français, compagnon de route du Parti communiste, né le 9 juin 1889 à Étampes et mort à Nice le 24 juin 1959.

Maturinus

4 Maturinus, or Mathurin was a Gallo-Roman exorcist and missionary venerated as a saint.             

Clovis Hugues

4 Clovis Hugues was a French poet, journalist, dramatist, novelist, and socialist activist. He wrote some of his works in Provençal and un 1898 was elected a majoral of the Félibrige, a society for the...

Élisabeth Boselli

4 Élisabeth Thérèse Marie Juliette Boselli, was a French military and civilian pilot. She was the first female fighter pilot to serve in the French Air Force, and held eight world records for distance,...

Jean Richepin

4 Jean Richepin was a French poet, novelist and dramatist.                                           

Émile Bernard

4 Émile Henri Bernard was a French Post-Impressionist painter and writer, who had artistic friendships with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch, and at a later time, Paul Cézanne. Most of...

Charles-Michel de l'Épée

4 Charles-Michel de l'Épée was an 18th-century French Catholic priest and philanthropic educator who advocated for sign language as the preferred method of teaching deaf people, and has become known as...

Suzanne Valadon

4 Marie-Clémentine "Suzanne" Valadon was a French painter who was born at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale...

Dreyfus affair

4 The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. The scandal began in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old...

Francisco Goya

4 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings,...

Lou Martin

4 Louis Michael Martin was a piano and organ player from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was an original member of the London-based band Killing Floor, and also worked with fellow Irish musician Rory...

Pierre Benoit (novelist)

4 Pierre Benoit was a French novelist, screenwriter and member of the Académie française. He is perhaps best known for his second novel L'Atlantide (1919) that has been filmed several times.

Marion du Faouët

4 Marie-Louise Tromel, better known as Marion du Faouët or Marie Finefont, born on May 6, 1717, was the leader of a group of highwaymen who were active near Le Faouët, Morbihan, Brittany. She was...

Tudwal

4 Saint Tudwal, also known as Tual, Tudgual, Tugdual, Tugual, Pabu, Papu, or Tugdualus (Latin), was a Breton monk, considered to be one of the seven founder saints of Brittany.

Eugène de Mazenod

4 Eugène de Mazenod, OMI was a French aristocrat and Catholic bishop who founded the congregation of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

René Goscinny

4 René Goscinny was a French comic editor and writer, who created the Asterix comic book series with illustrator Albert Uderzo. Born in France to a Jewish family from Poland, he spent his childhood in...

René Bazin

4 René François Nicolas Marie Bazin was a French novelist.                                           

Andrei Sakharov

4 Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.

Charles VII of France

4 Charles VII, called the Victorious or the Well-Served, was King of France from 1422 to his death in 1461. His reign saw the end of the Hundred Years' War and a de facto end of the English claims to...

Octave Mirbeau

4 Octave Henri Marie Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still...

Maximilien Sébastien Foy

4 Divisional-General Maximilien Sébastien Foy was a French Army officer and politician who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Michel Gérard

4 Michel Gérard est un réalisateur français, né le 28 avril 1933 à Nancy (France).                   

Danielle Mitterrand

4 Danielle Émilienne Isabelle Mitterrand was the wife of French President François Mitterrand, and president of the Fondation Danielle-Mitterrand - France Libertés.

Philibert of Jumièges

4 Philibert of Jumièges was an abbot and monastic founder, particularly associated with Jumièges Abbey.

Nina Simone

4 Nina Simone was an American pianist, singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. Her piano playing was...

Fernand Braudel

4 Fernand Paul Achille Braudel was a French historian. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France...

Émile Souvestre

4 Émile Souvestre was a Breton novelist who was a native of Morlaix, Brittany. Initially unsuccessful as a writer of drama, he fared better as a novelist and as a researcher and writer of Breton...

Camille Pissarro

4 Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism...

Alcide De Gasperi

4 Alcide Amedeo Francesco De Gasperi was an Italian politician and statesman who founded the Christian Democracy party and served as prime minister of Italy in eight successive coalition governments...

Gustave Charpentier

4 Gustave Charpentier was a French composer, best known for his opera Louise.                         

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

4 Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly was a French novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary critic. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being...

Micheline Ostermeyer

4 Micheline Ostermeyer was a French athlete and concert pianist. She won three medals at the 1948 Summer Olympics in shot put, discus throw, and high jump. After retiring from sports in 1950, she...

Philippe Séguin

4 Philippe Séguin was a French political figure who was President of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1997 and President of the Cour des Comptes of France from 2004 to 2010.

Henri Rol-Tanguy

4 Henri Rol-Tanguy was a French communist and leader in the Resistance against Nazi Germany in World War II. At his death The New York Times called him "one of France's most decorated Resistance...

Charles Tellier

4 Charles Tellier was a French engineer, born in Amiens. He early made a study of motors and compressed air. In 1868, he began experiments in refrigeration, which resulted ultimately in the...

Gaston III, Count of Foix

4 Gaston III, known as Gaston Phoebus or Fébus, was the eleventh Count of Foix and twenty-fourth Viscount of Béarn from 1343 until his death.

François Cevert

4 Albert François Cevert was a French racing driver, who competed in Formula One from 1969 to 1973. Cevert won the 1971 United States Grand Prix with Tyrrell.

Albert Sorel

4 Albert Sorel was a French historian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. 

Jean Prévost

4 Jean Prévost was a French writer, journalist, and Resistance fighter.                               

Henri Regnault

4 Alexandre Georges Henri Regnault was a French painter.                                             

Philippe Kieffer

4 Philippe Kieffer, né le 24 octobre 1899 à Port-au-Prince (Haïti) et mort le 20 novembre 1962 à Cormeilles-en-Parisis, est un officier de marine français nommé compagnon de la Libération. Durant la...

Aignan of Orleans

4 Aignan or Agnan (358–453), seventh Bishop of Orléans, France, assisted Roman general Flavius Aetius in the defense of the city against Attila the Hun in 451. He is known as Saint Aignan.

François Billoux

4 François Billoux was a French communist politician.                                                 

Michel Rondet (syndicaliste)

4 Michel Rondet est un syndicaliste français, né le 17 août 1841 au Chambon-Feugerolles et mort le 21 septembre 1908 à Pont de l’Enceinte à Grazac, vers Yssingeaux (Haute-Loire).

Joseph Fontaine

4 Joseph Louis-Rosario Fontaine was a Liberal party member of the House of Commons of Canada. He was born at Saint-Damase, Quebec. He was a master butcher, meat cutter, farmer and merchant by career.

Alexis Maneyrol

4 Alexis Maneyrol, né le 26 août 1891 à Frossay (Loire-Atlantique) et mort le 13 octobre 1923 à Lympne (Royaume-Uni), est l'un des pionniers français de l'aviation.

Romy Schneider

4 Rosemarie Magdalena Albach, known professionally as Romy Schneider, was a German and French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due...

François Jacob

4 François Jacob was a French biologist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and...

Maurice Rollinat

4 Maurice Rollinat was a French poet and musician.                                                   

Daniel Mayer

4 Daniel Raphaël Mayer was a French politician and a member of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and president of the Ligue des droits de l'homme from 1958 to 1975. He founded the...

Évariste Galois

4 Évariste Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals,...

Jacques Chirac

4 Jacques René Chirac was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and 1986 to 1988, as well as Mayor of...

Maurice de Vlaminck

4 Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to...

Charles Nodier

4 Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier was a French author and librarian who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, and vampire tales. His dream related...

André Pantigny

4 André Pantigny est un militant socialiste et résistant français de la Seconde Guerre mondiale né à Oignies dans le Pas-de-Calais, le 3 juin 1900, et mort le 4 décembre 1944 au camp de concentration...

René Fonck

4 Colonel René Paul Fonck was a French aviator who ended the First World War as the top Entente fighter ace and, when all succeeding aerial conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries are also considered,...

Pierre Bonnard

4 Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the...

Bourvil

4 André Robert Raimbourg, better known as André Bourvil, and mononymously as Bourvil, was a French actor and singer best known for his roles in comedy films, most notably in his collaboration with...

Auguste Delaune

3 Auguste Delaune, né le 26 septembre 1908 à Graville-Sainte-Honorine, est un secrétaire général de la Fédération sportive et gymnique du travail. Membre du Parti communiste français, dirigeant...

Pierre Leroux

3 Pierre Henri Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist.                               

Juliette Récamier

3 Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier, known as Juliette, was a French socialite whose salon drew people from the leading literary and political circles of early 19th-century Paris. An icon of...

Alberto Giacometti

3 Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker, who was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. His work was particularly influenced by artistic styles...

Paul Demange (actor)

3 Paul Demange was a French film actor who had roles in over 200 films from 1933 to 1977.             

Jean Froissart

3 Jean Froissart was a French-speaking medieval author and court historian from the Low Countries who wrote several works, including Chronicles and Meliador, a long Arthurian romance, and a large body...

Victorien Sardou

3 Victorien Sardou was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular...

Déodat de Séverac

3 Marie-Joseph Alexandre Déodat de Séverac was a French composer.                                     

Aristide Aubert du Petit-Thouars

3 Aristide Aubert du Petit-Thouars was a French naval officer, and participant of the French defeat at the Battle of the Nile, where he was killed in action.

Émile Jamais

3 Émile Jamais, né le 10 décembre 1856 à Aigues-Vives et mort le 10 novembre 1893 dans la même ville, est un homme politique français.

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza

3 Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de Brazza was an Italian-French explorer. With his family's financial help, he explored the Ogooué region of Central Africa, and later with the backing of the...

Peter Abelard

3 Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic, philosopher, leading logician, theologian, teacher, musician, composer, and poet.

Philippe de Girard

3 Philippe Henri de Girard was a French engineer and inventor of the first flax spinning frame in 1810, and the person after whom the town of Żyrardów in Poland was named. He was also the uncredited...

Gabriel Voisin

3 Gabriel Voisin was a French aviation pioneer and the creator of Europe's first manned, engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft capable of a sustained (1 km), circular, controlled flight, which was...

Henri Frenay

3 Henri Frenay Sandoval was a French military officer and French Resistance member, who served as minister of prisoners, refugees and deportees in Charles de Gaulle's Provisional Government of the...

Louis de Foix (ingénieur)

3 Louis de Foix, né vers 1535 à Paris et mort vers 1604, est un horloger, ingénieur et architecte français.

Louis Tiercelin

3 Louis Tiercelin, was a French writer, poet and playwright associated with the Breton cultural renaissance of the early 20th century.

Bernard Délicieux

3 Bernard Délicieux was a Spiritual Franciscan friar who resisted the Inquisition in Carcassonne and Languedoc region of southern France.

Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier

3 Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier, French classical scholar, and secretary of the Académie française, was born at Nîmes.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

3 Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr was a French critic, journalist, and novelist.                         

Charles Grad

3 Charles Grad, né le 8 décembre 1842 à Turckheim et mort le 3 juillet 1890 à Wintzenheim-Logelbach, est un homme politique catholique – député protestataire – et écrivain scientifique alsacien, auteur...

Queen Mathilde of Belgium

3 Mathilde Marie Christine Ghislaine d'Udekem d'Acoz is Queen of the Belgians as the wife of King Philippe.

Nicolas Poussin

3 Nicolas Poussin was a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted...

Fermin

3 Fermin was a holy man and martyr, traditionally venerated as the co-patron saint of Navarre, Spain. He was born in the mid 3rd century, so his death may be associated with the Diocletianic...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and a major figure in the tradition of German idealism. His influence on Western philosophy extends across a wide range of topics—from...

Olivier Messiaen

3 Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th century, he was also an outstanding teacher of composition and...

Nicolas Leblanc

3 Nicolas Leblanc was a French chemist and surgeon who discovered how to manufacture soda ash from common salt.

Ambroise Thomas

3 Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).

René Schmitt

3 René Jean Schmitt, né le 17 mars 1907 à Cormeilles (Eure) et mort le 14 mars 1968 à Équeurdreville-Hainneville (Manche), est un homme politique français.

Commandant Dumont

3 Paul Héraud, né le 25 mai 1906 à Saint-Victor-la-Coste (Gard) et mort le 9 août 1944 à Tallard, est un résistant français, Compagnon de la Libération à titre posthume par décret du 19 octobre 1945.

Joseph d'Arbaud

3 Joseph d'Arbaud was a French poet and writer from Provence. He was a leading figure in the Provençal Revival, a literary movement of the nineteenth century.

Clémence Isaure

3 Clémence Isaure is a legendary Occitan medieval figure credited with founding or restoring the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals or Academy of the Floral Games. She is supposed to have left a legacy to fund...

Robert of Arbrissel

3 Robert of Arbrissel was an itinerant preacher, and founder of Fontevraud Abbey. He was born at Arbrissel and died at Orsan Priory in the present department of Cher.

Agrippa d'Aubigné

3 Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné was a French poet, soldier, propagandist and chronicler. His epic poem Les Tragiques (1616) is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In a book about his Catholic contemporary...

Quiteria

3 St. Quiteria was a fifth-century saint and virgin martyr about whom little is certain except her name, the date, place, and cause of her death, and existence of her cult. She is listed under the date...

Dante Alighieri

3 Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is...

Zénaïde Fleuriot

3 Zénaïde-Marie-Anne Fleuriot, was a French novelist. She wrote eighty three novels, all aimed at young women, most of which were published in the series Bibliothèque rose and Bibliothèque bleue. Her...

Albert Caquot

3 Albert Irénée Caquot was a French engineer. He received the “Croix de Guerre 1914–1918 (France)” and was Grand-croix of the Légion d’Honneur (1951). In 1962, he was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal....

Sylvain Eugène Raynal

3 Sylvain Eugène Raynal was a French military officer.                                               

Guillaume Fichet

3 Guillaume Fichet was a French scholar, who cooperated with Johann Heynlin to establish the first printing press in France (Paris) in 1470.

Agnès Sorel

3 Agnès Sorel, known by the sobriquet Dame de beauté, was a favourite and chief mistress of King Charles VII of France, by whom she bore four daughters. She is considered the first officially...

Anna Politkovskaya

3 Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a Russian investigative journalist who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005). She was found murdered...

Philip the Apostle

3 Philip the Apostle was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament. Later Christian traditions describe Philip as the apostle who preached in Carthage, Greece, Syria, and...

Jean Wiener

3 Jean Wiener was a French pianist and composer. He was of some significance in the promotion of new music, both by his friends in the Les Six, and by composers such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. His...

Marcel Brindejonc des Moulinais

3 Marcel-Georges Brindejonc des Moulinais was a French aviator best known for long-distance flights, including crossing the Baltic Sea. He also flew as an exhibition and racing pilot. He flew...

François Rude

3 François Rude was a French sculptor, best known for the Departure of the Volunteers, also known as La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. (1835–36). His work often expressed patriotic...

Alberto Santos-Dumont

3 Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian aeronaut, sportsman, inventor, and one of the few people to have contributed significantly to the early development of both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air...

Étienne Billières

3 Étienne Billières, né le 21 mars 1876 à Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) et mort le 3 février 1935 à Alger, est un homme politique français. Il est élu maire socialiste de Toulouse en 1925, fonction qu'il...

Alexandre Cabanel

3 Alexandre Cabanel was a French painter. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well known as a portrait painter. He was Napoleon III's preferred...

Pierre Lefaucheux

3 Pierre-André Lefaucheux was a leading French industrialist and recipient of the Order of Liberation, awarded to heroes of France's Liberation during World War II.

Poniatowski

3 The House of Poniatowski is a prominent Polish family that was part of the nobility of Poland. A member of this family, Stanisław Poniatowski, was elected as King of Poland and reigned from 1764...

Claude Farrère

3 Claude Farrère, pseudonym of Frédéric-Charles Bargone, was a French Navy officer and writer. Many of his novels are based in exotic locations such as Istanbul, Saigon, or Nagasaki.

Valentin Haüy

3 Valentin Haüy was the founder, in 1785, of the first school for the blind, the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. In 1819, Louis Braille entered this school.

Sacha Guitry

3 Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry,...

Gaston Doumergue

3 Pierre Paul Henri Gaston Doumergue was a French politician who served as President of France from 1924 to 1931.

Fabre d'Églantine

3 Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d'Églantine, commonly known as Fabre d'Églantine, was a French actor, dramatist, poet, and politician of the French Revolution.

Gustave Nadaud

3 Gustave Nadaud was a French composer and chansonnier.                                               

Lucien Bossoutrot

3 Jean Baptiste Lucien Bossoutrot, né le 16 mai 1890 à Tulle (Corrèze) au 42, rue de la Barrière et mort le 1er septembre 1958 à Viry-Châtillon (Seine-et-Oise), est un aviateur et homme politique...

Francisque Sarcey

3 Francisque Sarcey was a French journalist and dramatic critic.                                     

Alexis Carrel

3 Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who spent most of his scientific career in the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular...

Henri Moll

3 Alexandre Marie Frédéric Henry Moll dit Henri Moll, né le 17 mars 1871 à Saulx- de-Vesoul (Haute-Saône) et tombé au champ d'honneur le 9 novembre 1910 au Tchad au cours du combat de Doroté, était un...

Jacques Bingen

3 Jacques Bingen was a high-ranking member of the French Resistance during World War II who, when captured by the Gestapo, chose to commit suicide rather than risk divulging what he knew under torture.

Eugène Adrien Ducretet

3 Eugène Adrien Ducretet was a French scientific instrument manufacturer, who performed some of the first experiments on wireless telegraphy in France. His father, Louis Joseph Ducretet, was a Savoy...

Antoine Brun

3 Anthoine Brun (1599–1654), baron d'Aspremont, was a Burgundian (Franche-Comté) diplomat in the service of Philip IV of Spain.

Henry Chéron

3 Henry Frédéric Chéron was a French lawyer and politician who became active in local politics in the Calvados department of Normandy while still a young man, and always maintained his roots in...

Victor Massé

3 Victor Massé was a French composer.                                                                 

Cécile Brunschvicg

3 Cécile Brunschvicg, born Cécile Kahn, was a French feminist politician. From the 1920s until her death she was regarded as "the grande dame of the feminist movement" in France.

Raymond Sommer

3 Pierre Raymond Sommer was a French racing driver. He raced both before and after WWII with some success, particularly in endurance racing. He won the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in both 1932...

Paul Machy

3 Paul, Emile Amand Machy, né le 17 octobre 1887 à Oye-Plage (Pas-de-Calais) et Mort pour la France fin mars 1945 lors de son transfert à Buchenwald (Allemagne), est un homme politique français.

Jan Masaryk

3 Jan Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. American journalist John Gunther described Masaryk as "a brave,...

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

3 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel, Paul et Virginie, a very popular 18th-century classic of French literature.

Louis XIV

3 Louis XIV was King of France from 14 May 1643 until his death in 1715. He is a symbol of the Age of Absolutism in Europe for styling himself as Le Roi Soleil, which portrayed him as a total ruler. He...

Jean-François Champollion

3 Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field...

Niki de Saint Phalle

3 Niki de Saint Phalle was a French American sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was...

François-Joseph-Victor Broussais

3 François-Joseph-Victor Broussais was a French medical doctor.                                       

Georges Carpentier

3 Georges Carpentier was a French boxer, actor and World War I pilot. A precocious pugilist, Carpentier fought in numerous categories. He fought mainly as a light heavyweight and heavyweight in a...

Ernest Pérochon

3 Ernest Pérochon (1885–1942) was a French writer who won the Prix Goncourt in 1920 for his novel Nêne. Initially a teacher, he left his career in education in 1921 to pursue writing. He wrote poems,...

Louis Comte

3 Louis Apollinaire Christien Emmanuel Comte "The King's Conjurer", also known simply as Comte, was a celebrated nineteenth-century Parisian magician, greatly admired by Robert-Houdin.

Jules Siegfried

3 Jules Siegfried was a French politician. He served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1885 to 1897, and from 1902 to 1922.

Guy Bouriat

3 Guy Bouriat est un pilote automobile français.                                                     

François de Tessan

3 François de Tessan, issu d'une famille de l'aristocratie cévenole, du Vigan, né le 16 février 1883 à Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët (Manche) et mort en déportation le 24 avril 1944 à Buchenwald...

Louis Daquin

3 Louis Daquin was a French film director, screenwriter and actor. He directed 14 films between 1938 and 1963. He also appeared in 11 films between 1937 and 1979.

Emmanuel Vitria

3 Emmanuel Vitria, né le 24 janvier 1920 et mort le 11 mai 1987 à Marseille, est un des premiers hommes à bénéficier d'une transplantation cardiaque. Il détient pendant de nombreuses années le record...

René Gasnier

3 René Gasnier, né le 24 mars 1874 à Quimperlé (Finistère) et mort le 3 octobre 1913 à Bouchemaine (Maine-et-Loire), né dans une vieille famille angevine, est un sportif français, un des principaux...

Victor Segalen

3 Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic.

Michael Strogoff

3 Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar is a novel written by Jules Verne in 1876. Unlike some of Verne's other novels, it is not science fiction, but its plot device is a scientific phenomenon.

Georges Mandel

3 Georges Mandel was a French journalist and politician who was a member of the Chamber of Deputies representing Gironde from 1919 to 1924 and from 1928 until the dissolution of the French Third...

Jules Méline

3 Félix Jules Méline was a French statesman, Prime Minister of France from 1896 to 1898.             

Robert Buron

3 Robert Buron was a French politician. Buron represented Mayenne as a deputy in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1958 and was a minister in several French governments during France’s Fourth...

Émile Durkheim

3 David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science,...

Gaston Monmousseau

3 Gaston René Léon Monmousseau was a French railway worker, trade union leader, politician and author, from a rural working-class background. He became an anarcho-syndicalist, then a communist, and...

Hyacinthe Rigaud

3 Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra, known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud, was a Catalan-French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility.

Oscar Niemeyer

3 Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, known as Oscar Niemeyer, was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best...

François Camel

3 François Camel, né le 3 mai 1893 à Esplas-de-Sérou (Ariège) et mort le 1er mai 1941 à Lasserre (Ariège), est un instituteur, syndicaliste, résistant et homme politique socialiste français.

Jacqueline de Romilly

3 Jacqueline Worms de Romilly was a French philologist, classical scholar and fiction writer. She was the first woman nominated to the Collège de France, and in 1988, the second woman to enter the...

Gilles Gahinet

3 Gilles Gahinet est un navigateur et architecte naval français, né le 25 août 1947 à Larmor-Baden, et mort le 10 octobre 1984 à Nantes.

Émile Fayolle

3 Marie Émile Fayolle was a French general during World War I and a diplomat, elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France.

Bertran de Born

3 Bertran de Born was a baron from the Limousin in France, and one of the major Occitan troubadours of the 12th-13th century. He composed love songs (cansos) but was better known for his political...

Joseph Fourier

3 Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre, Burgundy and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into...

Jean Auguste Margueritte

3 Jean Auguste Margueritte, French General, father of Victor Margueritte and Paul Margueritte.       

François Joseph Paul de Grasse

3 Lieutenant général des armées navales François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, Marquis of Grasse-Tilly, KM was a French naval officer. He is best known for his crucial victory over the Royal Navy at...

Bertrand d'Argentré

3 Bertrand d'Argentré was a Breton jurist and historian.                                             

Étienne Méhul

3 Étienne Nicolas Méhul was a French composer of the late classical and early romantic periods. He was known as "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the...

Gabriel Deshayes

3 Gabriel Deshayes, né le 4 décembre 1767 à Beignon et mort le 28 décembre 1841 à Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, est un prêtre catholique français, supérieur général et fondateur de plusieurs congrégations.

Albert Christophle

3 Albert Christophle, né le 13 juillet 1830 à Domfront et mort le 23 janvier 1904 à Paris 16e, est un avocat, jurisconsulte et homme politique français, son fils George est le gendre d'Émile de Marcère.

Roger Martin du Gard

3 Roger Martin du Gard was a French novelist, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature.           

Georges Simenon

3 Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was a Belgian writer who created the fictional detective Jules Maigret. One of the most prolific and successful authors of the 20th century, he published around 400...

Albin Roussin

3 Albin Reine Roussin was a French Navy officer and politician.                                       

Gustave Caillebotte

3 Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter who was a member and patron of the Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was known for his...

Marie Pape-Carpantier

3 Marie Pape-Carpantier (1815–1878) was a French educator born on 11 September 1815 in Sarthe, France and died in Villiers-le-Bel (Val-d'Oise) on 31 July 1878. She grew to play a major part in...

Alain de Boissieu

3 Alain de Boissieu Déan de Luigné was a French general who served in the Free French Forces during World War II, later becoming Army chief of staff (1971–1975). He was the son-in-law of General...

Isabelle Romée

3 Isabelle Romée, also known as Isabelle de Vouthon and Isabelle d'Arc (1377–1458) and Ysabeau Romee, was the mother of Joan of Arc. She grew up in Vouthon-Bas and later married Jacques d'Arc. The...

René-Marie Madec

3 René-Marie Madec, called Medoc in Anglo-Indian writings, was a French adventurer in India.         

Maurice Denis

3 Maurice Denis was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art, he is associated with Les Nabis, symbolism, and...

Victor Petit

3 Victor Petit est un dessinateur d'architecture, lithographe et écrivain français né en 1817 à Troyes (Aube) et mort en 1871 à Aix-les-Bains (Savoie). Il est connu pour ses vues de paysages, de...

Raymonde de Laroche

3 Raymonde de Laroche was a French pilot who became the world's first licensed female pilot on 8 March 1910. She is thought to be the first woman to pilot a plane.

Émile Guépratte

3 Émile Paul Aimable Guépratte was a French admiral.                                                 

Jacques de Thézac

3 Jacques de Thézac est un yachtman, ethnologue, photographe et philanthrope français, fondateur de l'Œuvre des Abris du marin.

Jules Romains

3 Jules Romains was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement. His works include the play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine, and a cycle of works called Les Hommes...

Eugène Guillevic

3 Eugène Guillevic was a French poet. Professionally, he went by the single name Guillevic.           

Maurice Noguès

3 Maurice Noguès was a French aviator from Brittany.                                                 

Frédéric Le Guyader

3 Frédéric Le Guyader, né le 14 mars 1847 à Brasparts et mort le 24 novembre 1926 à Kerfeunteun, est un écrivain français.

Paul Sébillot

3 Paul Sébillot was a French folklorist, painter, and writer. Many of his works are about his native province, Brittany.

Samson of Dol

3 Samson of Dol was a Welsh saint, who is also counted among the seven founder saints of Brittany with Pol Aurelian, Tugdual or Tudwal, Brieuc, Malo, Patern (Paternus) and Corentin. Born in southern...

Jacques Chaban-Delmas

3 Jacques Chaban-Delmas was a French Gaullist politician. He served as Prime Minister under Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1972. He was the Mayor of Bordeaux from 1947 to 1995 and a deputy for the...

Paulin Talabot

3 François "Paulin" Talabot, also known as Paulin-François Talabot, was a French railway and canal engineer and politician.

Henri Rivière (naval officer)

3 Henri Laurent Rivière (1827–1883) was a French naval officer and a writer who is chiefly remembered today for advancing the French conquest of Tonkin in the 1880s. Rivière's seizure of the citadel of...

Charles Robin

3 Charles Robin was a merchant from the Isle of Jersey, who traded between the maritime region of Canada and the British Isles.

Victor Baltard

3 Victor Baltard was a French architect famed for work in Paris including designing Les Halles market and the Saint-Augustin church.

Émile Dewoitine

3 Émile Dewoitine was a French aviation industrialist.                                               

Jean Marie Le Bris

3 Jean Marie Le Bris was a French aviator, born in Concarneau, Brittany who built two glider aircraft and performed at least one flight on board of his first machine in late 1856. His name is sometimes...

Maurice Bellonte

3 Maurice Bellonte was a French aviator who set flight distance records.                             

Christine de Pizan

3 Christine de Pizan or Pisan, was an Italian-born French court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French royal dukes, in both prose and poetry.

Jean Nicot

3 Jean Nicot de Villemain was a French diplomat and scholar. He is famous for being the first to bring tobacco to France, including snuff tobacco. Nicotine is named after the tobacco plant Nicotiana...

François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas

3 François-Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas, Count of the Empire (1756–1826) was a French writer, lawyer and politician during the Revolution and the Empire.

Marcel Bernard

3 Marcel Bernard was a French tennis player. He is best remembered for having won the French Championships in 1946. Bernard initially intended to play only in the doubles event but was persuaded to...

Pierre de Fermat

3 Pierre de Fermat was a French magistrate, polymath, and above all, a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of...

Marcel Callo

3 Marcel Callo was a French Catholic member of the Young Christian Workers, a Catholic Action movement inspiring lay participation and solidarity with the poor.

Frida Kahlo

3 Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular...

Laurent Fignon

3 Laurent Patrick Fignon was a French professional road bicycle racer who won the Tour de France in 1983 and 1984, as well as the Giro d'Italia in 1989. He held the title of FICP World No. 1 in 1989....

Alain Mimoun

3 Alain Mimoun, born Ali Mimoun Ould Kacha, was a French long-distance runner who competed in track events, cross-country running and the marathon. He was the 1956 Olympic champion in the marathon. He...

Germaine de Staël

3 Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a prominent French novelist, woman of letters, philosopher, and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan...

Yvonne Jean-Haffen

3 Yvonne Jean-Haffen, née à Paris le 27 octobre 1895 et morte à Dinan le 24 novembre 1993, est une artiste peintre, dessinatrice, graveuse et céramiste française.

Félix Leclerc

3 Félix Leclerc was a Quebecer singer-songwriter, poet, writer, actor and political activist. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 20, 1968. Leclerc was posthumously inducted into...

Théophile Briant

3 Théophile Briant, né le 2 août 1891 à Douai, et mort le 5 août 1956 à Paramé, est un poète français.

Louis Rossel

3 Louis-Nathaniel Rossel was a French army officer and a politician. On 19 March 1871, he became the only senior French officer to join up with the Paris Commune, playing an important role as Minister...

Ella Fitzgerald

3 Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American singer, songwriter and composer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone,...

Georges de La Tour

3 Georges de La Tour was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648. He painted mostly...

Amédée Guillotin de Corson

3 Amédée Guillotin de Corson ou abbé Guillotin de Corson, né le 26 mai 1837 à Nozay (Loire-Atlantique) et mort le 7 août 1905 à Bain-de-Bretagne (Ille-et-Vilaine), est un prêtre catholique et historien...

Charlotte Perriand

3 Charlotte Perriand was a French architect and designer. Her work aimed to create functional living spaces in the belief that better design helps in creating a better society. In her article "L'Art de...

Étienne Lenoir

3 Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, also known as Jean J. Lenoir, was a Belgian-French engineer who invented the internal combustion engine in 1858. Prior designs for such engines were patented as early as...

Auguste Pavie

3 Auguste Jean-Marie Pavie was a French colonial civil servant, explorer and diplomat who was instrumental in establishing French control over Laos in the last two decades of the 19th century. After a...

Jean Coquelin

3 Jean Coquelin (1865–1944) was a French film and stage actor and the son of Benoît-Constant Coquelin.

Vincent Ferrer

3 Vincent Ferrer, OP was a Valencian Dominican friar who gained acclaim as a preacher, missionary and logician. After supporting Antipope Benedict XIII during the Western Schism, Ferrer travelled to...

Conwoïon

3 Saint Conwoïon was a Breton saint and abbot. He was probably born around 800 at Comblessac (Ille-et-Vilaine) into a Gallo-Roman family descended, or claiming descent, from Roman senators.

John James Audubon

3 John James Audubon was a French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist. His combined interests in painting and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete...

Jacques Offenbach

3 Jacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann....

Albert Bayet

3 Albert Pierre Jules Joseph Bayet was a French sociologist, professor at both the Sorbonne and the École pratique des hautes études.

Alexandra David-Néel

3 Alexandra David-Néel was a French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners....

Marie Durand

3 Marie Durand (1711–1776), was a French Protestant. She was famously imprisoned in the Tour de Constance (Aigues-Mortes) from 25 August 1730 for attending a Huguenot assembly with her mother, or...

Paul Séramy

3 Paul Séramy, né le 4 février 1920 à Saint-Voir (Allier) et mort le 23 février 1992 à Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), est un homme politique français, sénateur de Seine-et-Marne et maire de Fontainebleau.

Jean Lamy

3 Jean Lamy is a former French slalom canoeist who competed from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. He won a silver medal in the C-2 team event at the 1979 ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships in...

Jules Lemaître

3 François Élie Jules Lemaître was a French critic and dramatist.                                     

Fanfonne Guillierme

3 Fanfonne Guillierme born Antoinette Guillierme was a French manadière. She is known as "the Grande Dame of the Camargue".

Charlotte Delbo

3 Charlotte Delbo was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French Resistance.

Marcellin Champagnat

3 Marcellin Joseph Benedict Champagnat, FMS was a French Catholic priest who founded the Marist Brothers, a religious congregation of brothers devoted to Mary and dedicated to education. He was...

Gustave Zédé

3 Gustave Zédé (1825–1891) was a French naval engineer and pioneering designer of submarines.         

Eugène Labiche

3 Eugène Marin Labiche was a French dramatist. He remains famous for his contribution to the vaudeville genre and his passionate and domestic pochades.

Philibert de l'Orme

3 Philibert de l'Orme was a French architect and writer, and one of the great masters of French Renaissance architecture. His surname is also written De l'Orme, de L'Orme, or Delorme.

Jean-Loup Chrétien

3 Jean-Loup Jacques Marie Chrétien is a French retired Général de Brigade in the Armée de l'Air, and a former CNES spationaut. He flew on two Franco-Soviet space missions and a NASA Space Shuttle...

Joseph Claussat

3 Pierre Clovis François Joseph Claussat was a French politician. He served as the mayor of Châteldon from 1908 until his death in 1925. He also served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1911...

Louis Gallouédec

3 Louis Gallouédec was a French geographer.                                                           

Antoine Pinay

3 Antoine Pinay was a French conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 1952 to 1953 and French Foreign Minister from 1955 to 1956.

Jules Grévy

3 François Judith Paul Grévy, known as Jules Grévy, was a French lawyer and politician who served as President of France from 1879 to 1887. He was a leader of the Moderate Republicans, and given that...

Hubert Dubedout

3 Hubert Dubedout, né le 9 décembre 1922 à Paris 12e et mort le 25 juillet 1986 à Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, est un homme politique français.

Alphonse Beau de Rochas

3 Alphonse Eugène Beau de Rochas was a French engineer. He was the first to patent the four-stroke engine in 1862, but he did not build one and the idea was subsequently developed by Nicolaus Otto and...

Paul-Henri Spaak

3 Paul-Henri Charles Spaak was an influential Belgian Socialist politician, diplomat and statesman who thrice served as the prime minister of Belgium and later as the second secretary general of NATO....

Pauline Kergomard

3 Pauline Kergomard was a French educator. She is known as the founder of the nursery school in France.

François Fabié

3 François Fabié, né au Moulin de Roupeyrac à Durenque (Aveyron) le 3 novembre 1846 et mort le 18 juillet 1928 à La Valette-du-Var (Var), est un poète régionaliste français. Le Moulin de Roupeyrac, sa...

René Payot

3 René Payot, né le 11 août 1894 à Monthey (Valais) et mort le 15 mai 1970 à Genève, est un journaliste suisse.

Anatole de Monzie

3 Anatole de Monzie was a French administrator, encyclopaedist, political figure and scholar. His father was a tax collector in Bazas, Gironde where Anatole – a name he disliked from an early age – was...

Louise Labé

3 Louise Charlin Perrin Labé, also identified as La Belle Cordière after her father's job, was a French Renaissance poet from Lyon.

Eugène Pelletan

3 Pierre Clément Eugène Pelletan was a French writer, journalist and politician.                     

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

3 Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet...

William of Saint-Thierry

3 William of Saint-Thierry, O. Cist was a twelfth-century Benedictine, theologian and mystic from Liège who became abbot of Saint-Thierry in France, and later joined the Cistercian Order.

Sébastienne Guyot

3 Sébastienne Marie Henriette Guyot was a French engineer who specialised in aerodynamic flying. A top athlete, she participated in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam in the 800 meters and was...

Marie Mauron

3 Marie Mauron, née Marie-Antoinette Roumanille le 5 avril 1896 à Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, dans les Bouches-du-Rhône et morte le 31 octobre 1986 dans la même ville, dans son Mas d'Angirany, est une...

Pierre Bachelet

3 Pierre Bachelet was a French singer-songwriter and film score composer.                             

Michel Berger

3 Michel Jean Hamburger, known professionally as Michel Berger, was a French singer and songwriter. He was a figure of France's pop music scene for two decades as a singer. As a songwriter he wrote for...

Jacques Simon (cyclist)

3 Jacques Simon was a French cyclist. He competed at the 1960 Summer Olympics in the 100 km team time trial and finished in seventh place. Between 1961 and 1977 he won at least 14 one-day races.

Charles Debarge

3 Charles Debarge, né le 12 février 1909 à Harnes (Pas-de-Calais) et mort de ses blessures le 23 septembre 1942 à la prison d’Arras (Pas-de-Calais), est l'un des héros de la Résistance communiste dans...

Uriane Sorriaux

3 Uriane Sorriaux, né le 12 juillet 1859 à Bouchain et mort le 26 juillet 1918 à Vilvorde, est un homme politique français.

Marius Berliet

3 Marius Berliet, né le 21 janvier 1866 à Lyon 1er et mort le 17 mai 1949 à Cannes, est le fondateur de la société des Automobiles Marius Berliet, constructeur automobile de voitures et camions...

Lazare Ponticelli

3 Lazare Ponticelli, Knight of Vittorio Veneto, was at 110, the last surviving officially recognized veteran of the First World War from France and the last poilu of its trenches to die.

Ferdinand Fabre

3 Ferdinand Simon Fabre was a French novelist whose novels depict the life of the peasants and clergy of his native region, the upper valley of the river Orb, in the département of Hérault.

Casimir Delavigne

3 Jean-François Casimir Delavigne was a French poet and dramatist.                                   

Antonio Machado

3 Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado, was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the...

Pierre Sauvaigo

3 Pierre Sauvaigo, né le 3 mai 1921 à Paris et mort le 28 février 1983 à Cagnes-sur-Mer, est un homme politique et avocat français.

Rudolf Diesel

3 Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, best known for inventing the diesel engine, which burns diesel fuel; both are named after him.

Emma Calvé

3 Emma Calvé, born Rosa Emma Calvet was a French operatic dramatic soprano.                           

Jean-Raymond Guyon

3 Jean-Raymond Guyon, né le 2 avril 1900 à Libourne (Gironde) et mort le 26 mars 1961 à Tonneins (Lot-et-Garonne), est un homme politique et économiste français.

George Washington

3 George Washington was a Founding Father and the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington led Patriot forces to victory in the...

René Crabos

3 René Crabos was a French rugby union player and administrator who represented the France national team 17 times between 1920 and 1924, and went on to be president of the Fédération Française de Rugby...

Yitzhak Rabin

3 Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli statesman and general who was the prime minister of Israel, having served two terms in office, 1974–1977, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995. He was the first...

Thales of Miletus

3 Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece.

Michel Foucault

3 Paul-Michel Foucault was a French historian of ideas and philosopher, who was also an author, literary critic, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the...

Crispin and Crispinian

3 Saints Crispin and Crispinian are the Christian patron saints of cobblers, curriers, tanners, and leather workers. They were beheaded during the reign of Diocletian; the date of their execution is...

Paul Devaux

3 Paul Devaux was a liberal Belgian revolutionary politician and historian.                           

Fernand Darchicourt

3 Fernand Darchicourt, né le 26 septembre 1917 à Saint-Étienne (Loire) et mort le 23 décembre 1968 à Gasville (Eure-et-Loir), est un homme politique français.

Camille Blanc

3 Camille Blanc was a French municipal leader, with many interests in Monaco. From 1904 to 1925, he was founding mayor of Beausoleil, a town adjacent to Monte Carlo, which had previously formed part of...

Antoine Bourdelle

3 Antoine Bourdelle, born Émile Antoine Bordelles, was a French sculptor and teacher. He was a student of Auguste Rodin, a teacher of Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and an important figure in the Art...

Palisot de Beauvois

3 Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot, Baron de Beauvois was a French naturalist and zoologist.   

Marie Marvingt

3 Marie Félicie Élisabeth Marvingt was a French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. Marvingt was a...