Famous people on France's street names

Charles de Gaulle

1151 Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French army officer and statesman who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 to restore democracy in France. In 1958, amid the Algerian War, he came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He rewrote the Constitution of France and founded the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until his resignation in 1969.

Jean Moulin

666 Jean Moulin was a French civil servant and resistant who succeeded in unifying the main networks of the French Resistance, a unique act in Europe. He served as the first President of the National Council of the Resistance during World War II from 27 May 1943 until his death less than two months later.

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 one of the first social democrats and the leader of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. The two parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, Jaurès was assassinated in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, but remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. As a heterodox Marxist, Jaurès rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, patriotism and internationalism.

Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque

536 Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque was a Free-French general during the Second World War. He became Marshal of France posthumously in 1952, and is known in France simply as le maréchal Leclerc or just 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 named after him. His research in chemistry led to remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of the causes and preventions of diseases, which laid down the foundations of hygiene, public health and much of modern medicine. Pasteur's works are credited with saving millions of lives through the developments of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has been honored as the "father of bacteriology" and the "father of microbiology".

Victor Hugo

470 Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo, sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms.

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 across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.

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 member of the Académie Française. He distinguished himself as Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front during the First World War in 1918.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

297 Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was a French mechanical engineer in the French Army, military scientist and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics". He published only one book, the Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, in which he expressed the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines and laid the foundations of the new discipline: thermodynamics. Carnot's work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy. Driven by purely technical concerns, such as improving the performance of the steam engine, Sadi Carnot's theoretical work laid important foundations for modern science as well as technologies such as the automobile and jet engine.

Georges Clemenceau

256 Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman who served as 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 politics of the Third Republic, particularly amid the end of the First World War. He was a key figure of the Independent Radicals, advocating for the separation of church and state, as well as the amnesty of the Communards exiled to New Caledonia.

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 and reconciliation politics during the interwar period (1918–1939).

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 to 1885. He was a promoter of laicism and colonial expansion. Under the Third Republic, Ferry made primary education free and compulsory through several new laws. However, he was forced to resign following the Sino-French War in 1885 due to his unpopularity and public opinion against the war.

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 theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse…!  Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.

François Mitterrand

149 François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was a French politician who served as President of France from 1981 to 1995, the longest holder of that position in the history of France. As a former Socialist Party First Secretary, he was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.

John the Baptist

149 John the Baptist was a Jewish preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser.

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, after being hounded by a calumny campaign orchestrated by extreme right-wing newspapers.

Pierre Curie

146 Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. In 1903, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". With their win, the Curies became the first ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

145 Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight. His works have been translated into many languages.

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 Christ and one of the first leaders of the early Christian Church. He appears repeatedly and prominently in all four New Testament gospels as well as the Acts of the Apostles. Catholic tradition accredits Peter as the first bishop of Rome‍—‌or pope‍—‌and also as the first bishop of Antioch.

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 Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".

Martin of Tours

141 Martin of Tours, also known as Martin the Merciful, was the third bishop of Tours. He has become one of the most familiar and recognizable Christian saints in France, heralded as the patron saint of the Third Republic, and is patron saint of many communities and organizations across Europe. A native of Pannonia, he converted to Christianity at a young age. He served in the Roman cavalry in Gaul, but left military service at some point prior to 361, when he became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers, establishing the monastery at Ligugé. He was consecrated as Bishop of Caesarodunum (Tours) in 371. As bishop, he was active in the suppression of the remnants of Gallo-Roman religion, but he opposed the violent persecution of the Priscillianist sect of ascetics.

Gabriel Péri

138 Gabriel Péri (Peri) was a prominent French communist journalist and politician who was a member of the French Resistance. He was executed in German-occupied France during the Second World War.

Voltaire

135 François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

Joseph Joffre

128 Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, 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 regrouping the retreating allied armies to defeat the Germans at the strategically decisive First Battle of the Marne in September 1914.

Jean Mermoz

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

Josquin des Prez

122 Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez was a composer of High Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the Franco-Flemish School and had a profound influence on the music of 16th-century Europe. Building on the work of his predecessors Guillaume Du Fay and Johannes Ockeghem, he developed a complex style of expressive—and often imitative—movement between independent voices (polyphony) which informs much of his work. He further emphasized the relationship between text and music, and departed from the early Renaissance tendency towards lengthy melismatic lines on a single syllable, preferring to use shorter, repeated motifs between voices. Josquin was a singer, and his compositions are mainly vocal. They include masses, motets and secular chansons.

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 Hundred Years' War. Claiming to be acting under divine guidance, she became a military leader who transcended gender roles and gained recognition as a savior of France.

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 who was instrumental in the foundation of the French Second Republic and the continuation of the tricolore as the flag of France.

Jean Monnet

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

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 influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology.

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 Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was instrumental in building postwar European and trans-Atlantic institutions and was one of the founders of the European Communities, the Council of Europe and NATO. The 1964–1965 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. In 2021, Schuman was declared venerable by Pope Francis in recognition of his acting on Christian principles.

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 is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid and the electrical telegraph. As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France.

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 novelist; in 1916, he published Under Fire, a novel about World War I based on his experience which is described as one of the earliest works of the Lost Generation movement or as the work which started it; the novel had a major impact on the later writers of the movement, namely on Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque. Barbusse is considered as one of the important French writers of 1910–1939 who mingled the war memories with moral and political meditations.

Adolphe Thiers

96 Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French statesman and historian. He was the second elected President of France and first President of the Third Republic.

Salvador Allende

92 Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a democratic socialist committed to democracy, he has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.

Alphonse Juin

92 Alphonse Pierre Juin was a senior French Army general who became Marshal of France. A graduate of the École Spéciale Militaire class of 1912, he served in Morocco in 1914 in command of native troops. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, he was sent to the Western Front in France, where he was gravely wounded in 1915. As a result of this wound, he lost the use of his right arm.

Léon Blum

91 André Léon Blum was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister of France.         

Michael (archangel)

90 Michael, also called Saint Michael the Archangel, Archangel Michael and Saint Michael the Taxiarch is an archangel in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Baha'i faith. The earliest surviving mentions of his name are in third- and second-century-BC Jewish works, often but not always apocalyptic, where he is the chief of the angels and archangels, and he is the guardian prince of Israel and is responsible for the care of Israel. Christianity conserved nearly all the Jewish traditions concerning him, and he is mentioned explicitly in Revelation 12:7–12, where he does battle with Satan, and in the Epistle of Jude, where the author denounces heretics by contrasting them with Michael.

John F. Kennedy

90 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to as JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the United States Congress prior to his presidency.

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 and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist". Mistral was a founding member of the Félibrige and member of the Académie de Marseille.

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 supported by a coalition of Gaullists (RPF), moderate socialists (UDSR), Christian democrats (MRP) and liberal-conservatives (CNIP). His main priority was ending the Indochina War, which had already cost 92,000 lives, with 114,000 wounded and 28,000 captured on the French side. Public opinion polls showed that, in February 1954, only 7% of the French people wanted to continue the fight to regain Indochina out of the hands of the Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Mendès France negotiated a deal that gave the Viet Minh control of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, and allowed him to pull out all French forces. He is considered one of the most prominent statesmen of the French Fourth Republic.

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, and its second president. He is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games. He was particularly active in promoting the introduction of sport in French schools.

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 an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of the historical Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.

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 of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.

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. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.

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 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. He was key figure in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and a trade unionist in the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU) and Confédération générale du travail (CGT).

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 apocrypha, as well as Christian and Islamic 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 writing, Anne's name and that of her husband Joachim come only from New Testament apocrypha, of which the Gospel of James seems to be the earliest that mentions them. The mother of Mary is mentioned but not named in the Quran.

Georges Pompidou

71 Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou was a French politician who served as President of France from 1969 to his death in 1974. He was earlier the longest-ever Prime Minister of France, under President Charles de Gaulle, from 1962 to 1968.

George Sand

71 Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She wrote more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.

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, and the first to be martyred. Saint James is the patron saint of Spain and, according to tradition, his remains are held in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

Louis IX of France

70 Louis IX, commonly revered 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 father, Louis VIII, he was crowned in Reims at the age of 12. His mother, Blanche of Castile, effectively ruled the kingdom as regent until he came of age and continued to serve as his trusted adviser until her death. During his formative years, Blanche successfully confronted rebellious vassals and championed the Capetian cause in the Albigensian Crusade, which had been ongoing for the past two decades.

Jules Guesde

70 Jules Bazile, known as Jules Guesde was a French socialist journalist and politician.               

Paul Bert

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

Georges Guynemer

70 Georges 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 a profound shock to France.

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 works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the "language of Molière".

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 substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"

Louise Michel

68 Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.

Albert Camus

67 Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel.

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 L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.

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 many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students in various cities and countries around Europe. His reputation evolved among the pious, as was common for early Christian saints, and his legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus through Sinterklaas.

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 Garabit Viaduct. He is best known for the world-famous Eiffel Tower, designed by his company and built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and his contribution to building the Statue of Liberty in New York. After his retirement from engineering, Eiffel focused on research into meteorology and aerodynamics, making significant contributions in both fields.

Irène Joliot-Curie

63 Irène Joliot-Curie was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.

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 the money he made to finance his attempts to build a successful aircraft. Blériot was the first to use the combination of hand-operated joystick and foot-operated rudder control as used to the present day to operate the aircraft control surfaces. Blériot was also the first to make a working, powered, piloted monoplane. In 1909 he became world-famous for making the first airplane flight across the English Channel, winning the prize of £1,000 offered by the Daily Mail newspaper. He was the founder of Blériot Aéronautique, a successful aircraft manufacturing company.

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 term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Édouard Branly

61 Édouard Eugène Désiré Branly was a French inventor, physicist and professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He is primarily known for his early involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the Branly coherer around 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 designation of Rollox in Glasgow, Scotland, said to be a corruption of Roch's Loch, which referred to a small loch once near a chapel dedicated to Roch in 1506.

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 short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.

Woodrow Wilson

59 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, Wilson changed the nation's economic policies and led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.

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 physician and musician. His skill at carving his own wooden flutes led him to invent the stethoscope in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker. He pioneered its use in diagnosing various chest conditions. He became a lecturer at the Collège de France in 1822 and professor of medicine in 1823. His final appointments were that of head of the medical clinic at the Hôpital de la Charité and professor at the Collège de France. He went into a coma and subsequently died of tuberculosis on August 13, 1826 at age 45.

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 initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.

Alphonse Daudet

58 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 "nightingale" in French. As early as 1406, the word rossignol has served as the French term for "skeleton key" or for any tool which opens that which is locked.

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 the world. He is considered a master of the modern chanson.

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 of French Indochina," and was seen as one of the most active and effective governors general of Indochina.

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. Although his work is less fashionable than it once was, Pagnol is still generally regarded as one of France's greatest 20th-century writers and is notable for the fact that he excelled in almost every medium—memoir, novel, drama and film.

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 under the Arc de Triomphe, on Column 3. Richard Holmes describes him as "quick-thinking, stern, and ruthless... a general of real talent whose early death was a loss to France."

Marie Curie

55 Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, known simply as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

Paul Vaillant-Couturier

53 Paul Vaillant-Couturier was a French writer and communist. 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 late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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 years.

Jules Michelet

52 Jules Michelet was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work Histoire de France, which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. He is considered one of the founders of modern historiography. Michelet was influenced by Giambattista Vico. He admired Vico's emphasis on the role of people and their customs in shaping history, which was a major departure from the emphasis on political and military leaders. Michelet also drew inspiration from Vico's concept of the "corsi e ricorsi", or the cyclical nature of history, in which societies rise and fall in a recurring pattern.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

52 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works representing virtually every Western classical genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral repertoire. Mozart is widely regarded as being one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music, with his music admired for its "melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

52 Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."

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 an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. While only moderately successful during his lifetime, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.

Pierre Corneille

51 Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-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 organization created after the 6 February 1934 far right riots. Being a public opponent of fascism in the 1930s resulted in his arrest and being held under house arrest by the Vichy government for most of World War II. Langevin was also president of the Human Rights League (LDH) from 1944 to 1946, having recently joined the French Communist Party.

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 realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). He published his first book in 1946.

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 from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, published posthumously in 1849–1850.

Paul Verlaine

51 Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Paul Cézanne

50 Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.

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, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

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 wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the alleged superiority of White people over other human "races". Renan is known as being among the first scholars to advance the disputed Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted the Jewish religion and allegedly migrated to central and eastern Europe following the collapse of their khanate.

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 education. From 1883 until his death, he was a senator for life in the Third Republic Senate.

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 was also one of the pioneers in the sport of cycling in France.

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 prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.

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, 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 primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

André Malraux

46 Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine (1933) won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister (1945–46) and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency (1959–1969).

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 who served as Health Minister in several governments and was President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, the first woman to hold that office. As health minister, she is best remembered for advancing women's rights in France, in particular for the 1975 law that legalized abortion, today known as the Veil Act. From 1998 to 2007, she was a member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest legal authority.

Albert I of Belgium

44 Albert I was King of the Belgians from 23 December 1909 until his death in 1934.                   

Vincent de Paul

44 Vincent de Paul, CM, commonly known as Saint Vincent de Paul, 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 and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a free markets, public education, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested. He died in prison after a period of hiding from the French Revolutionary authorities.

Georges Danton

43 Georges Jacques Danton was a leading figure in the French Revolution. A modest and unknown lawyer on the eve of the Revolution, Danton became a famous orator of the Cordeliers Club and was raised to governmental responsibilities as the French Minister of Justice following the fall of the monarchy on the tenth of August 1792, and was allegedly responsible for inciting the September Massacres. He was tasked by the National Convention to intervene in the military conquest of Belgium led by French General Dumouriez. And in the Spring of 1793, he supported the foundation of a Revolutionary Tribunal and became the first president of the Committee of Public Safety.

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, commonly known by his initials FDR, was an American statesman and politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. He was a member of the Democratic Party and is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms. His initial two terms were centered on combating the Great Depression, while his third and fourth saw him shift his focus to America's involvement in World War II.

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 musician of his era, one whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation".

Lucie Aubrac

43 Lucie Samuel, born Bernard and 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 a woman at that time. In 1939 she married Raymond Samuel, who took the name Aubrac in the Resistance. She was active on a number of operations, including prison breakouts. Like her husband, she was a communist militant, which she remained after the war. She sat in the Provisional Consultative Assembly in Paris from 1944 to 1945.

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 same year.

Napoleon

42 Napoleon Bonaparte, later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French emperor and military commander who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars. He was the leader of the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then of the French Empire as Emperor of the French from 1804 until 1814, and briefly again in 1815. His political and cultural legacy endures as a celebrated and controversial leader. He initiated many enduring reforms, but has been criticized for his authoritarian rule. He is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history and his wars and campaigns are still studied at military schools worldwide. However, historians still debate the degree to which he was responsible for the Napoleonic Wars, in which between three and six million people died.

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 Blanc's ideas of the workers' cooperatives were never realized, his political and social ideas greatly contributed to the development of socialism in France. He wanted the government to encourage cooperatives and replace capitalist enterprises. These cooperatives were to be associations of people who produced together and divided the profit accordingly.

Count of St. Germain

42 The Count of St. Germain or in French Comte de Saint Germain was a European adventurer who achieved prominence in European high society of the mid-18th century due to his interest and achievements in science, alchemy, philosophy, and the arts. St. Germain used a variety of names and titles, including the Marquis de Montferrat, Comte Bellamarre, Chevalier Schoening, Count Weldon, Comte Soltikoff, Manuel Doria, Graf Tzarogy, and Prinz Ragoczy. While his real name is unknown, and his birth and background obscure, towards the end of his life he claimed that he was a son of Prince Francis II Rákóczi of Transylvania.

Rosa Luxemburg

42 Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, orthodox Marxist, and anti-War activist during the First World War. She became a key figure of the revolutionary socialist movements of Poland and Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the Spartacist uprising.

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 prêtre franciscain portugais, maître de doctrine spirituelle, prédicateur de renom et thaumaturge, qui fut canonisé en 1232, moins d’un an après sa mort, et déclaré docteur de l'Église en 1946.

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 become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

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 Joseph was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who, according to the canonical Gospels, 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, soldier, and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.

Henri Becquerel

41 Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

Jean-Baptiste Kléber

41 Jean-Baptiste Kléber was a French military leader of the French Revolutionary Wars. After serving for one year in the French Royal Army, he entered Habsburg service seven years later. However, his humble birth hindered his opportunities. Eventually, he volunteered for the French Revolutionary Army in 1792 and quickly rose through the ranks.

Michel de Montaigne

40 Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, commonly known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written.

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 country's politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a doctrine often characterized as a variant of mercantilism, earned him the nickname le Grand Colbert.

Saint George

39 Saint George, also George of Lydda, was an early Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to tradition, he was a soldier in the Roman army. Of Cappadocian Greek origin, he became a member of the Praetorian Guard for Roman emperor Diocletian, but was sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. He became one of the most venerated saints, heroes and megalomartyrs in Christianity, and he has been especially venerated as a military saint since the Crusades. He is respected by Christians, Druze, as well as some Muslims as a martyr of monotheistic faith.

Claude Monet

39 Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.

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, which became a must-have fashion statement for many celebrities and stars in the 50s and 60s. His namesake label is Roger Vivier (brand).

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.

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

37 Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, sometimes spelled de l'Isle or de Lile, was a French army officer of the French Revolutionary Wars. He is known for writing the words and music of the Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin in 1792, which would later be known as La Marseillaise and become the French national anthem.

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 believing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.

Johannes Gutenberg

37 Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was a German inventor and craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg invented the printing press, which later spread across the world. His work led to an information revolution and the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and humanist movements.

Yves Saint Laurent (designer)

37 Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, referred to 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 foremost fashion designers of the twentieth century. In 1985, Caroline Milbank wrote, "The most consistently celebrated and influential designer of the past twenty-five years, Yves Saint Laurent can be credited with both spurring the couture's rise from its 1960s ashes and with finally rendering ready-to-wear reputable."

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 1945 and 1947. He was also the general secretary of the Fédération des travailleurs de la métallurgie CGT.

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 the first president of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) as chair of the Armand Commission from 1958 to 1959 before he was elected to the Académie Française in 1963.

Galileo Galilei

36 Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei, commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei or simply Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.

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 production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".

Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves

36 Henri Louis Honoré, Count 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 or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets".

Eugeniu Botez

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

Jacques Cartier

35 Jacques Cartier was a French-Breton maritime explorer for France. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas" after the Iroquoian names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona and at Hochelaga.

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 Navy 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 English domination in this specialty. Several of his wins broke long standing records. He owed his successes to his exceptional mastery of sailing and of each one of his boats, to both physical and mental stamina and, in some cases, to technological improvements built into his boats. Through his victories, Tabarly inspired an entire generation of ocean racers and contributed to the development of nautical activities in France.

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, was martyred for his faith by decapitation. Some accounts placed this during Domitian's persecution and incorrectly identified St Denis of Paris with the Areopagite who was converted by Paul the Apostle and who served as the first bishop of Athens. Assuming Denis's historicity, it is now considered more likely that he suffered under the persecution of the emperor Decius shortly after AD 250.

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 John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, diplomat, and Catholic priest, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.

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 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh's work was beginning to gain critical attention before he died at age 37, by what was suspected at the time to be a suicide. During his lifetime, only one of Van Gogh's paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold.

Hubert Lyautey

33 Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey was a French Army general and colonial administrator. After serving in Indochina and Madagascar, he became the first French Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925. Early in 1917 he served briefly as Minister of War. From 1921 he was a Marshal of France. He was dubbed the French empire builder, and in 1931 made the cover of Time. Lyautey was also the first one to use the term "hearts and minds" as part of his strategy to counter the Black Flags rebellion during the Tonkin campaign in 1885.

Ferdinand Buisson

33 Ferdinand Édouard Buisson was a French educational bureaucrat, pacifist, and Radical-Socialist politician. He presided over the League of Education from 1902 to 1906 and over the Human Rights League (LDH) from 1914 to 1926. In 1927, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him jointly with Ludwig Quidde. Philosopher and educator, he was Director of Primary Education. He was the author of a thesis on Sebastian Castellio, in whom he saw a "liberal Protestant" in his image. Ferdinand Buisson was the president of the National Association of Freethinkers. In 1905, he chaired the parliamentary committee to implement the separation of church and state. Famous for his fight for secular education through the League of Education, he coined the term laïcité ("secularism").

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 "rusticware", typically highly decorated large oval platters featuring small animals in relief among vegetation, the animals apparently often being moulded from casts taken of dead specimens. It is often difficult to distinguish examples from Palissy's own workshop and those of a number of "followers" who rapidly adopted his style. Imitations and adaptations of his style continued to be made in France until roughly 1800, and then revived considerably in the 19th century.

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 collaborateurs de Pasteur (1822-1895) et fonda avec lui l'Institut Pasteur. Il découvrit le sérum antidiphtérique, première thérapie efficace contre cette maladie.

Montesquieu

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

Saint Barbara

32 Saint Barbara, known in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the Great Martyr Barbara, was an early Christian 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 who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.

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. During World War I he became France's official "Bard of the Armies".

Édith Piaf

32 Édith Piaf was a French singer best known for performing songs in the cabaret and modern chanson genres. She is widely regarded as France's greatest popular singer and one of the most celebrated performers of the 20th century.

Félix Faure

31 Félix François Faure was the 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 Seine-Inférieure in 1881. He rose to prominence in national politics up until unexpectedly assuming the presidency, during which time France's relations with Russia improved.

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 development of other programmable machines, such as an early version of digital compiler used by IBM to develop the modern day computer.

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 also a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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. During the French Revolution he served as the Minister of the Marine, and was involved in the reform of the French educational system, helping to found the École Polytechnique.

Paul Arène

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

Jeanbon Saint-André

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

Jean-Baptiste Charcot

30 Jean-Baptiste-Étienne-Auguste Charcot, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was a French scientist, medical doctor and polar scientist. His father was the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893).

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 murdered in 1944.

Nicolaus Copernicus

30 Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.

Clare of Assisi

29 Chiara Offreduccio, known as Clare of Assisi, was 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 Gauches. Under the Fourth Republic, he served as President of the National Assembly until 1954. A historian by occupation, Herriot was elected to the Académie Française's eighth seat in 1946. He served as Mayor of Lyon for more than 45 years, from 1905 until his death, except for a brief period from 1940 to 1945, when he was exiled to Germany for opposing the Vichy regime.

Albert Einstein

29 Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.

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 is, according to tradition, a Christian saint and virgin, who was martyred in the early fourth century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According to her hagiography, she was both a princess and a noted scholar who became a Christian around the age of 14, converted hundreds of people to Christianity and was martyred around the age of 18. More than 1,100 years after Catherine's martyrdom, Joan of Arc identified her as one of the saints who appeared to and counselled her.

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, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.

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 infiltrated La Cagoule, which was planning the overthrow of the French Third Republic, led by the Popular Front government. Dormoy directed the arrest and imprisonment of 70 cagoulards in November 1937. The police recovered 2 tons of armaments from their sites.

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 Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

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 a central figure of Christianity, venerated under various titles such as virgin or queen, many of them mentioned in the Litany of Loreto. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Church of the East, Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches believe that Mary, as mother of Jesus, is the Mother of God. Other Protestant views on Mary vary, with some holding her to have lesser status.

Charles Gounod

28 Charles-François Gounod, usually known as Charles 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 repertory. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his Ave Maria and "Funeral March of a Marionette".

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 events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.

Benjamin Franklin

27 Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath, a leading writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Among the most influential intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and the first postmaster general.

Julian the Hospitaller

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

27 Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.

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 Eligii, written by his friend Audoin of Rouen.

Honoré de Balzac

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

Jean Baptiste Perrin

27 Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids, verified Albert Einstein's explanation of this phenomenon and thereby confirmed the atomic nature of matter. For this achievement he was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926.

Camille Claudel

26 Camille Rosalie Claudel was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The subject of several biographies and films, Claudel is well known for her sculptures including The Waltz and The Mature Age.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

26 Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin was a French lawyer, politician and one of the leaders of the French Revolution of 1848.

Nelson Mandela

26 Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid activist, politician, and statesman who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by fostering racial reconciliation. Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as the president of the African National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997.

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 and Saint Paul, was a Christian apostle who spread the teachings of Jesus in the first-century world. For his contributions towards the New Testament, he is generally regarded as one of the most important figures of the Apostolic Age, and he also founded several Christian communities in Asia Minor and Europe from the mid-40s to the mid-50s AD.

Gustave Flaubert

26 Gustave Flaubert also known as Flambert, 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, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of 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 the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques (1894), was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.

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 for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné. She is revered in France as one of the great icons of French 17th-century literature.

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 to the Storming of the Bastille. Desmoulins was also noted for his radical criticism of the Reign of Terror as the editor of the journal Le Vieux Cordelier. He was a schoolmate and close friend of Maximilien Robespierre and a close friend and political ally of Georges Danton, who were the leading figures in the French Revolution.

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 member of the La Tour d'Auvergne family, his military exploits over his five-decade career earned him a reputation as one of the greatest military commanders in history.

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 various synagogues by his teachings. Accused of blasphemy at his trial, he made a speech denouncing the Jewish authorities who were sitting in judgment on him and was then stoned to death. Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul the Apostle, a Pharisee and Roman citizen who would later become an apostle, participated in Stephen's martyrdom.

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 exile in Belgium with his father from 1853.

Thomas Edison

25 Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.

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 and Member of Parliament for Nièvre's 1st constituency.

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 unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell.

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 Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.

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 before joining the French army and becoming one of the earliest fighter pilots during World War I. Garros was shot down on 5 October 1918. In 1928, the Roland Garros tennis stadium was named in his memory; the French Open tennis tournament takes the name of Roland Garros, which is held in this stadium.

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 founded its women's organisation Union des Jeunes Filles de France in 1936. Casanova was arrested on 15 February 1942 as she brought coal to Georges Politzer and his wife; she had been involved in organising actions against the German occupiers. First incarcerated at La Santé Prison in Paris, she was transferred to the Fort de Romainville for causing unrest with the help of fellow prisoners. Casanova was deported to Auschwitz on 24 January 1943, where she began working as a dentist at the camp infirmary. She died of typhus shortly thereafter. She was posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour.

Isaac Newton

24 Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz.

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 she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

Claude Bernard

23 Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. Historian 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 concept of homeostasis.

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 Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

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 was the novel La Guerre des boutons (1912). It has been reprinted more than 30 times, and is included on the French high-school curriculum.

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 artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.".

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 the patron saint of several professions, locales, and kingdoms.

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 Barcelona. His execution, following a revolt in Barcelona, propelled Ferrer into martyrdom and grew an international movement of radicals and libertarians, who established schools in his model and promoted his schooling approach.

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 for happy or cheerful. In addition to his important work as bishop, Hilary was married and the father of Abra of Poitiers, a nun and saint who became known for her charity.

Eugène Delacroix

23 Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

Alexander Fleming

23 Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin from the mould Penicillium rubens has been described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease". For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

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. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.

Jules Vallès

22 Jules Vallès was a French journalist, author, and left-wing political activist.                     

Giuseppe Garibaldi

22 Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi was an Italian general, patriot, revolutionary and republican. He contributed to Italian unification (Risorgimento) and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He is considered to be one of Italy's "fathers of the fatherland", along with Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and Giuseppe Mazzini. Garibaldi is also known as the "Hero of the Two Worlds" because of his military enterprises in South America and Europe.

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 14 November 1904 to 12 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 these experiences in his poems.

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 with arrows, though this did not kill him. He was, according to tradition, rescued and healed by Irene of Rome, which became a popular subject in 17th-century painting. In all versions of the story, shortly after his recovery he went to Diocletian to warn him about his sins, and as a result was clubbed to death. He is venerated in the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

François-Alexandre Verdier

22 François-Alexandre Verdier was 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 Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, created in 1902.

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 virtually unchanged to this day.

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 Occupation of France during the Second World War.

Louis Jouvet

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

Jean-Martin Charcot

21 Jean-Martin Charcot was a famous French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. He worked on groundbreaking work about hypnosis and hysteria, in particular with his hysteria patient Louise Augustine Gleizes. Charcot is known as "the founder of modern neurology", and his name has been associated with at least 15 medical eponyms, including various conditions sometimes referred to as Charcot diseases.

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 time of their release due to their unconventional outlook.

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 and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.

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 Roubaix and member of the Resistance during World War II.

Étienne Dolet

21 Étienne Dolet was a French scholar, translator and printer. Dolet was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. His early attacks upon the Inquisition, the city council and other authorities in Toulouse, together with his later publications in Lyon treating of theological subjects, roused the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely. After being imprisoned several times, he was eventually convicted of heresy, strangled and burned with his books due to the combined efforts of the parlement of Paris, the Inquisition, and the theological faculty of the Sorbonne.

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 French poet, close to Symbolism, and a figure of the "cursed poet".

Ferdinand de Lesseps

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

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 nearby Saint-Omer in northern France was named. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

Hubertus

21 Hubertus or Hubert was a Christian saint who became the first bishop of Liège in 708 A.D. He is the patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers. Known as the "Apostle of the Ardennes", he was called upon, until the early 20th century, to cure rabies through the use of the traditional Saint Hubert's Key.

Marcel Dassault

21 Marcel Dassault was a French engineer and industrialist who spent his career in aircraft manufacturing.

Guy Môquet

21 Guy Prosper Eustache Môquet was a young French Communist militant. During the German occupation of France in World War II, he was taken hostage by the Nazis and executed by firing squad in Châteaubriant in retaliation for attacks on Germans by the French Resistance; Môquet went down in history as one of its symbols. The farewell letter he wrote to his family at age 17 is now a mandatory reading in all French high schools.

Vincent Auriol

20 Vincent Jules Auriol was a French politician who served as President of France from 1947 to 1954.   

Elsa Triolet

20 Ella Yuryevna Kagan, known as Elsa Triolet, was a Russian-French writer and translator.             

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, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s  until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon  and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and in condenser lenses for overhead projectors.

Georges Charpak

20 Georges Charpak (French: [ʃaʁpak]; born Jerzy Charpak, was a Polish-born French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.

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 Tintillac. His reputation spread during the twenty-five years in which he served as abbot. In 529, St. Albinus was elected, against his wishes, Bishop of Angers.

Aimé Césaire

20 Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word négritude in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.

René Descartes

19 René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.

Mark the Evangelist

19 Mark the Evangelist also known as John Mark or Saint Mark, is the person who is traditionally ascribed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark. Modern Bible scholars have concluded that the Gospel of Mark was written by an anonymous author rather than an identifiable historical figure. According to Church tradition, Mark founded the episcopal see of Alexandria, which was one of the five most important sees of early Christianity. His feast day is celebrated on April 25, and his symbol is the winged lion.

Abbé Pierre

19 Abbé Pierre, was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP).

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 "Transat" in 1972. In 1972, he started the construction of a 72m 4 masted monohull for the 1976 "Transat".

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 club leader, and a major figure of the French Revolution. As the youngest member elected to the National Convention, Saint-Just belonged to the Mountain faction. A steadfast supporter and close friend of Robespierre, he was swept away in his downfall during 9th Thermidor.

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 as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin.

Saint Christopher

19 Saint Christopher is venerated by several Christian denominations as a martyr killed in the reign of the 3rd-century Roman emperor Decius, or alternatively under the emperor Maximinus Daia. There appears to be confusion due to the similarity in names "Decius" and "Daia". Churches and monasteries were named after him by the 7th century.

Anatole Le Braz

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

19 Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, known as Toulouse Lautrec, was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the sometimes decadent affairs of those times.

Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester

18 Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, later sometimes referred to as Simon V de Montfort to distinguish him from his namesake relatives, was an English nobleman of French origin and a member of the English peerage, who led the baronial opposition to the rule of King Henry III of England, culminating in the Second Barons' War. Following his initial victories over royal forces, he became de facto ruler of the country, and played a major role in the constitutional development of England.

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 human to journey into outer space. Travelling on Vostok 1, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961, with his flight taking 108 minutes. By achieving this major milestone for the Soviet Union amidst the Space Race, he became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including the nation's highest distinction: Hero of the Soviet Union.

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 Realism art movement. Toward the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in painting pure landscapes. He is known best for his oil paintings but is also noted for his pastels, Conté crayon drawings, and etchings.

Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau

18 Pierre Marie René Ernest Waldeck-Rousseau was a French Republican politician who served for three years as the Prime Minister of France.

Samuel de Champlain

18 Samuel de Champlain was a French explorer, navigator, cartographer, draftsman, soldier, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler. He made between 21 and 29 trips across the Atlantic Ocean, and founded Quebec City, and New France, on 3 July 1608. An important figure in Canadian history, Champlain created the first accurate coastal map during his explorations and founded various colonial settlements.

Alfred Kastler

18 Alfred Kastler was a French physicist, and Nobel Prize laureate. 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 way "of conserving all kinds of food substances in containers".

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 strike of 1884, when he became known as "the untameable miner" and "the tsar of Lens". He was the inspiration for the character Etienne Lantier in Émile Zola's novel Germinal.

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 surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).

Vladimir Lenin

17 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Olivier de Serres

17 Olivier de Serres was a French author and soil scientist whose Théâtre d'Agriculture (1600) was the accepted textbook of 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 Best Actress, in addition to nominations for two Golden Globe Awards.

Antonio Vivaldi

17 Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi ranks amongst the greatest Baroque composers and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form into a widely accepted and followed idiom.

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 1912, behind Hannes Kolehmainen. His race against Kolehmainen has long been regarded as one of the most memorable moments in running. Kolehmainen and Bouin quickly pulled away from the others, with Bouin leading and Kolehmainen repeatedly trying to pass him. Kolehmainen succeeded only 20 metres from the finish, winning by 0.1 seconds. Both contenders broke the world record.

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 invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, globe aérostatique, which launched the first confirmed piloted ascent by humans in 1783, carrying Jacques-Étienne.

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 political career after the war and was posthumously elevated to the dignity of Marshal of France in 1984.

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 military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription, were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.

Paul Lafargue

16 Paul Lafargue was a Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist socialist, political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Creole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by a suicide pact.

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 dominated the French Army officer corps under the Third Republic before the war, and were the main reason why he was appointed to command at Salonika.

Julius Caesar

16 Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and subsequently became dictator from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. He played a critical role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.

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. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.

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 France twice. During the Italian Wars, Anne also became Queen of Naples, from 1501 to 1504, and Duchess of Milan, in 1499–1500 and from 1500 to 1512.

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 Prize. He also made several important contributions to science, holding 355 patents in his lifetime.

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 Française, in 1980. She was nominated for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Genevieve

16 Genevieve was a consecrated virgin, and is the patron saint of Paris in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Her feast day is on 3 January.

Louis de Broglie

16 Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie was a French aristocrat and physicist who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.

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 I.

Yves Montand

16 Ivo Livi 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 the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology, with him inventing the very term and treating the discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.

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 Second World War, he joined the Resistance and organized clandestine trade union committees.

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 mostly legendary. A town that bears his name grew up around the monastery he purportedly founded, which became a pilgrimage centre and a stop on the Way of Saint James. He is traditionally one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

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. He was inspired to lead a Christian life of poverty as a beggar and itinerant preacher. One of the most venerated figures in Christianity, Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228. He is commonly portrayed wearing a brown habit with a rope tied around his waist, featuring three knots that symbolize the three Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Auguste Brizeux

15 Julien Auguste Pélage Brizeux was a French poet. He was said to belong to a family of Irish origin, long settled in Brittany. He was educated for the law, but in 1827 he produced at the Théâtre Français a one-act verse comedy, Racine, in collaboration with Philippe Busoni.

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 who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".

Olivier V de Clisson

15 Olivier V de Clisson, nicknamed "The Butcher", was a Breton soldier, the son of Olivier IV de Clisson. His father had been put to death by the French in 1343 on the suspicion of having willingly given up the city of Vannes to the English.

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. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.

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 the waning Baroque style, shifting it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical, Rococo. Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes, scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with a theatrical air. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.

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 in feminist causes and charities, politics, sport hunting, automobiles and the arts, and was an accomplished author and sculptor, the latter using the name Manuela.

Johann Sebastian Bach

15 Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific authorship of music across a variety of instruments and forms, including; orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; solo instrumental works such as the cello suites and sonatas and partitas for solo violin; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and choral works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.

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 Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

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 1940s. His best known credits include Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949), Beauty and the Devil (1950), Fan Fan the Tulip (1953), Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Les liaisons dangereuses (1959).

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 he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. Due to his scientific success, influence and his discoveries, he has been deemed "the philosopher par excellence of modern science."

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 figures du syndicalisme minier dans le bassin minier du Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

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 earliest pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.

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 for teachers of youth. He is referred to both as La Salle and as De La Salle.

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 the way for the widespread European exploration and European colonization of the Americas. His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.

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 Ravensbrück concentration camp.

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, as it was the first machine tool that led to the invention of other machine tools. He was responsible for the creation of impressive and innovative automata. He also was the first person to design an automatic loom.

Pope John XXIII

13 Pope John XXIII was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 until his death in 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 against tuberculosis.

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 Beaux-Arts, and his work influenced many other artists, notably Robert Genin, and he aided medallists by designs and suggestions for their works. Puvis de Chavannes was a prominent painter in the early Third Republic. Émile Zola described his work as "an art made of reason, passion, and will".

Saint Cecilia

13 Saint Cecilia, also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the patroness of music and musicians, it being written that, as the musicians played at her wedding, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord". Musical compositions are dedicated to her, and her feast, on 22 November, is the occasion of concerts and musical festivals. She is also known as Cecilia of Rome.

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 last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

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 il s'est attribué « l'invention » des techniques.

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 philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."

André Gide

13 André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author whose writings 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 the symbolist movement, to criticising imperialism between the two World Wars. The author of more than fifty books, he was described in his obituary in The New York Times as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."

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 one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. Beethoven's career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression.

Paul Painlevé

13 Paul Painlevé was a French mathematician and statesman. He served twice as Prime Minister of the Third Republic: 12 September – 13 November 1917 and 17 April – 22 November 1925. His entry into politics came in 1906 after a professorship at the Sorbonne that began in 1892.

Helena, mother of Constantine I

13 Flavia Julia Helena, also known as Helena of Constantinople and in Christianity as Saint Helena, was an Augusta of the Roman Empire and mother of Emperor Constantine the Great. She was born in the lower classes traditionally in the Greek city of Drepanon, Bithynia, in Asia Minor, which was renamed Helenopolis in her honor, although several locations have been proposed for her birthplace and origin.

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 I of Anjou, King of Naples, Sicily, titular King of Jerusalem, Aragon, and Majorca; Duke of Anjou, Bar, and Lorraine; and Count of Provence and Piedmont.

Georges Méliès

13 Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French magician, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of cinema.

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 Christianity in Rome, decriminalizing Christian practice and ceasing Christian persecution in a period referred to as the Constantinian shift. This initiated the cessation of the established ancient Roman religion. Constantine is also the originator of the religiopolitical ideology known as Constantinism, which epitomizes the unity of church and state, as opposed to separation of church and state. He founded the city of Constantinople and made it the capital of the Empire, which remained so for over a millenium.

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 Trèbes after having exchanged himself for a hostage. French President Emmanuel Macron said that Beltrame deserved "the respect and admiration of the whole nation." A state funeral was held at Les Invalides, Paris; for his bravery and adherence to duty he was posthumously promoted to the rank of colonel and made a Commander of the Legion of Honour.

Jean-Baptiste Lully

13 Jean-Baptiste Lully was a French composer, dancer and instrumentalist of Italian birth, who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière, with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets, including L'Amour médecin, George Dandin ou le Mari confondu, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

Louis Antoine de Bougainville

12 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville was a French admiral and explorer. A contemporary of the British explorer James Cook, he took part in the Seven Years' War in North America and the American Revolutionary War against Britain. Bougainville later gained fame for his expeditions, including a circumnavigation of the globe in a scientific expedition in 1763, the first recorded settlement on the Falkland Islands, and voyages into the Pacific Ocean. Bougainville Island of Papua New Guinea as well as the Bougainvillea flower are named after him.

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)) with adding the seventh string, tuned to the note AA (A1 in scientific pitch notation), on the bass viol.

Melaine

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

Guillaume Apollinaire

12 Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish 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 second Napoleonic Empire in 1870. He earned a living producing caricatures and cartoons in newspapers and periodicals such as La Caricature and Le Charivari, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still remembered today. He was a republican democrat, who satirized and lampooned the monarchy, politicians, the judiciary, lawyers, the bourgeoisie, as well as his countrymen and human nature in general.

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 II of Navarre. Her brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France. Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".

Louis Auguste Blanqui

12 Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism.

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 in the mid-twentieth century. His best-known book is Le Sang noir, which has been described as a "prefiguration of Sartre's La Nausée."

Jacques Duclos

12 Jacques Duclos was a French Communist politician and member of Communist International (Comintern) who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly after defeating Paul Reynaud, until 1969, when he won a substantial portion of the vote in the presidential elections.

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 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 allowances to families with children.

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. He had a left-wing sympathy that found its way into a few songs.

Henri Giraud

12 Henri Honoré Giraud was a French military officer who was a leader of the Free French Forces during the Second World War until he was forced to retire in 1944.

Ferdinand Magellan

12 Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage thereafter bearing his name and achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific. After his death, this expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519–22 in the service of Spain.

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 (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Erik Satie

12 Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.

Jean-Philippe Rameau

12 Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer and music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer of his time for the harpsichord, alongside François Couperin.

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 the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.

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-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and is the culmination of his intellectual efforts. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.

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 Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.

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 the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace.

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. By 1060, following a long struggle to establish his throne, his hold on Normandy was secure. In 1066, following the death of Edward the Confessor, William invaded England, leading an army of Normans to victory over the Anglo-Saxon forces of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, and suppressed subsequent English revolts in what has become known as the Norman Conquest. The rest of his life was marked by struggles to consolidate his hold over England and his continental lands, and by difficulties with his eldest son, Robert Curthose.

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 of Greek and Franco-Levantine origin, 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 the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for supposed "crimes against the state". Chénier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and other works of art.

Stendhal

11 Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century 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 of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. A self-proclaimed egotist, he coined the same characteristic in his characters' "Beylism".

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 until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.

Sadi Carnot (statesman)

11 Marie François Sadi Carnot was a French statesman, who served as the 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, est un homme politique français. Élu maire de Lille en 1896, il devient l'un des premiers maires socialistes de France, après Christophe Thivrier à Commentry (Allier) en 1882 et Henri Carette à Roubaix (Nord) en 1892.

Georges Besse

11 Georges Besse was a French businessman who helped lead several large state-controlled companies. He was assassinated outside his Paris home by the armed group Action directe while he was the CEO of car manufacturer Renault.

Paul-Émile Victor

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

Eugène Edine Pottier

11 Eugène Edme Pottier was a French revolutionary, poet, freemason and transport worker.               

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 the Second World War.

Maurice Genevoix

11 Maurice Genevoix was a French author and WW1 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, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art songs "Erlkönig", "Gretchen am Spinnrade", "Ave Maria"; the Trout Quintet, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, the String Quartet No. 14 Death and the Maiden, a String Quintet, the two sets of Impromptus for solo piano, the three last piano sonatas, the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang.

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 explorer and photographer, and the first French female oceanographer.     

Charlemagne

11 Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of the Carolingian Empire from 800, holding all these titles until his death in 814. Charlemagne succeeded in uniting the majority of Western Central Europe, and was the first recognized emperor to rule in the west after the fall of the Western Roman Empire approximately three centuries earlier. Charlemagne's rule saw a program of political and social changes that had a lasting impact on Europe in the Middle Ages.

Léo Ferré

11 Léo Ferré was a French-born 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 released many hit singles, particularly between 1960 and the mid-1970s. Some of his songs have become classics of the French chanson repertoire, including "Avec le temps", "C'est extra", "Jolie Môme" and "Paris-Canaille".

Jean Aicard

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

Adrien Albert Marie de Mun

11 Adrien Albert Marie, Comte de Mun, was a French political figure, nobleman, journalist, social reformer, and reactionary of the nineteenth century. Born into a noble family de Mun joined the French army at a young age serving during the French conquest of Algeria, the Franco-Prussian War and the suppression of the Paris Commune. A devout Catholic, de Mun became interested in Catholic Social Teaching while he was a prisoner of war in Germany.

Alessandro Volta

11 Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the president of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement and led others to conduct similar experiments, which eventually led to the development of the field of electrochemistry.

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 perhaps best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", and for his films, including The Love Parade, The Big Pond, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight. His trademark attire was a boater hat and tuxedo.

Archimedes

11 Archimedes of Syracuse was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered the greatest mathematician of ancient history, and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying the concept of the infinitely small and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems. These include the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral.

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 skill in curing infirmities. He emigrated from his native Ireland to France, where he constructed for himself a hermitage together with a vegetable and herb garden, oratory, and hospice for travellers. He is the patron saint of gardeners.

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 public building decorations. Dufy is most remembered for his artwork depicting outdoor social gatherings. In addition to painting, he was skilled in various other fields, including drawing, printmaking, book illustration, scenic design, furniture design, and planning public spaces.

Louise Weiss

11 Louise Weiss was a French author, journalist, feminist, and European politician.                   

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 cycling and motor racing. Henri acquired French nationality in 1937.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

10 Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.

George de Villebois-Mareuil

10 George Henri Anne-Marie Victor count de Villebois-Mareuil or by his shortened name George de Villebois-Mareuil was a former colonel in the French infantry who fought and died on the side of the Boers during the Second Anglo-Boer War. He was the first of only two foreign volunteers to be given the rank of Major-General in the armed forces of the Boer Republics. The other being his second in command Yevgeny Maximov (1849–1904) after the death of Villebois-Mareuil.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

10 Dwight David Eisenhower, nicknamed Ike, was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army. Eisenhower planned and supervised two of the most consequential military campaigns of World War II: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

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, later the Général d'Armée, a Marshal of the Empire and freemason. Marshal Kellermann served in varying roles throughout the entirety of two epochal conflicts, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Kellermann is one of the names inscribed under the Arc de Triomphe, on Column 3.

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 resurrection of Jesus Christ when he was told of it ; he later confessed his faith on seeing the places where the wounds had healed on the holy body of Jesus after the Crucifixion of Jesus. While it is often assumed he touched the wounds in art and poetry, the scriptures do not say that he touched the wounds.

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 girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 — it is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

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 of others, each supporting a wooden mast with two crossarms on pivots that could be placed in various positions. The operator in a tower moved the arms to a sequence of positions, spelling out text messages in semaphore code. The operator in the next tower read the message through a telescope, then passed it on to the next tower. This was the first practical telecommunications system of the industrial age, and was used until the 1850s when electric telegraph systems replaced it.

Cyricus and Julitta

10 Cyricus and his mother Julitta are venerated as early Christian martyrs. According to tradition, 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 wires via telegraphic networks.

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 president of the charity organisation ATD Quart Monde. Her uncle was General Charles de Gaulle, who served as President of France from 1959 to 1969.

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 movement, in the Ligue des droits de l'homme and in Anti-Nazism.

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). Il a publié de 1936 à 1951. Ses œuvres complètes ont été publiées pour la première fois par les Éditions Seghers en 1961, et constamment rééditées depuis.

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.

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 played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.

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, he later amassed a large fortune from a variety of commercial activities, such as ship-owning, privateering, slave trading and owning land.

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, often depicted laughing, with his mouth wide open, and therefore he was invoked against toothache.

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 airline company, which later became the Compagnie générale aéropostale - Aéropostale, then Air France, where he was a pilot and later operations director.

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 to command a fighter wing before being shot down and killed on 27 August 1943. His diaries were published in 1949 and later translated into English.

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 became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and protection for the post–World War II social vision. His short book Time for Outrage! sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.

Jean Gabin

10 Jean-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 illusion (1937), Le Quai des brumes (1938), La bête humaine (1938), Le jour se lève (1939), and Le plaisir (1952). During his career, he twice won the Silver Bear for Best Actor from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor from the Venice Film Festival, respectively. Gabin was made a member of the Légion d'honneur in recognition of the important role he played in French cinema.

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 popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

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 (1986).

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.                                                       

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, and argued that the progress of women's rights was directly related with the progress of the working class. She wrote several works, the best known of which are Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Promenades in London (1840), and The Workers' Union (1843). Tristan was the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin.

Josephine Baker

10 Freda Josephine Baker, naturalized as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.

François Mansart

9 François Mansart was a French architect credited with introducing classicism into Baroque architecture of France. The Encyclopædia Britannica cites him as the most accomplished of 17th-century French architects whose works "are renowned for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance".

Raymond Queneau

9 Raymond 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 on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.

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. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.

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 Marquis of Marconi was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi's being credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

Sarah Bernhardt

9 Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictures.

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 and edited the literary reviews Livre d'Art with Alfred Jarry and Vers et Prose (1905–14) with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which published the work of Paul Valéry and other important Symbolist writers. Fort is notable for his enormous volume of poetry, having published more than thirty volumes of ballads and, according to Amy Lowell, for creating the polyphonic prose form in his 'Ballades francaises'.

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 of Vaucluse.

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 sculptor, painter, and printmaker.                 

Françoise Giroud

9 Françoise Giroud, born Lea France Gourdji, was a French journalist, screenwriter, writer, and politician.

Alfred Sisley

9 Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air. He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.

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 years, from 1953 to 1955. His career included the national road championship, Milan–San Remo (1951), Giro di Lombardia (1951), Critérium International, Paris–Nice (1952), Grand Prix des Nations (1952), world road championship (1954), Tour of Flanders (1955), Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré (1955), Tour de Luxembourg (1955), Paris–Roubaix (1956) and Bordeaux–Paris (1959).

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 is the father of the writer Claude Michelet.           

Pierre-Georges Latécoère

9 Pierre-Georges Latécoère was a pioneer of aeronautics. Born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, he studied in the École Centrale Paris and, during the First World War, started a business in aeronautics. He directed plants that made planes and opened the first airlines that operated from France to Africa and South America.

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 of Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

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 includes the well-known "Flower Duet".

Konrad Adenauer

9 Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a new founded Christian-democratic party, which became the dominant force in the country under his leadership.

Marcel Proust

9 Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

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 Paris, which was published in a newspaper from 1842 to 1843.

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 whose work emphasized number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics.

Paul Louis Courier

8 Paul Louis Courier, 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 of Deputies from 1881 until 1889. He was a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 for his work in the European peace movement.

Horace Vernet

8 Émile Jean-Horace Vernet more commonly known as simply 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 and is shown in the stained glass windows and south gate of Rouen Cathedral and the stained glass windows of the église Saint-Godard (1555). The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that his legend has little historical value with little authentic information. He was both Lord Chancellor of France and Référendaire of France..

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 XII, who died without a legitimate son.

Vercingetorix

8 Vercingetorix was a Gallic king and chieftain of the Arverni tribe who united the Gauls in a failed revolt against Roman forces during the last phase of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. After surrendering to Caesar and spending almost six years in prison, he was executed in Rome.

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 important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, before translating the work of several notable Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, arranging for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.

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 ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.

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 ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā, first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.

Jeanne Jugan

8 Jeanne Jugan, religious name Mary of the Cross, was a French religious sister who became known for the dedication of her life to the neediest of the elderly poor. Her service resulted in the establishment of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who care for the elderly who have no other resources throughout the world. She has been declared a saint by the Catholic Church.

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. As commander of the large Allied army based at Salonika, he conducted the successful Macedonian campaign, which caused the collapse of the Southern Front and contributed to the armistice.

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 journalism, Pelloutier became involved in socialist politics. He briefly joined the French Workers' Party, but following a disagreement with its leader over his proposal for a general strike, he left the party and joined the anarchist movement. He became the leader of the Bourses du Travail, in which he advocated for anarcho-syndicalism. Having suffered from tuberculosis luposa for most of his career, he eventually succombed to the disease, and died in 1901 at the age of 33.

Baptiste Marcet

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

Alain Fournier

8 Alain Fournier (1943–2000) was a computer graphics researcher and professor at the University of British Columbia.

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.                             

Jean Vilar

8 Jean Vilar was a French actor and theatre director.                                                 

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 his assassination in 1986.

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 who was considered by many boxing experts and fans to be France's greatest boxer, and beyond to be one of the best to have learned his craft in Africa. His life was marked by his sporting achievements, social lifestyle and ultimately, tragedy, being killed in an airplane crash.

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-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

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 four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional. She ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series on the Tennis Channel in 2012.

Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville

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

Bartholomew Columbus

8 Bartholomew Columbus was an Italian explorer from the Republic of Genoa and the younger brother of Christopher Columbus.

Maurice Utrillo

7 Maurice Utrillo, born Maurice Valadon; 26 December 1883 – 5 November 1955), 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 have been born there.

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 the 46th greatest of all time, although he directed only six feature-length films.

Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert

7 Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert was a French banker and naturalist. He was an honorary member of the Académie des Sciences and many species were named from his natural history collections.

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 of the city population.

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 predecessors—constituted the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

7 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists. Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as "the synthesis of community and property". Some consider his mutualism to be part of individualist anarchism while others regard it to be part of social anarchism.

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 dissolved the small Christian communities. Fabian sent out seven bishops from Rome to Gaul to preach the Gospel: Gatien to Tours, Trophimus to Arles, Paul to Narbonne, Saturnin to Toulouse, Denis to Paris, Austromoine to Clermont, and Martial to Limoges. His feast day is 29 November.

Saint Alban

7 Saint Alban is venerated as the first-recorded British Christian martyr, for which reason he is considered to be the British protomartyr. Along with fellow Saints Julius and Aaron, Alban is one of three named martyrs recorded at an early date from Roman Britain. He is traditionally believed to have been beheaded in Verulamium sometime during the 3rd or 4th century, and his cult has been celebrated there since ancient times.

Gioachino Rossini

7 Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.

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 slavery abolitionist and supporter of universal suffrage. He was a founding member of the Bureau des longitudes, the Institut de France, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers.

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 démocratique.

Eugénie de Montijo

7 Doña María Eugenia Ignacia Agustina de Palafox y Kirkpatrick, 19th Countess of Teba, 16th Marquise of Ardales, known as Eugénie de Montijo, was Empress of the French from her marriage to Napoleon III on 30 January 1853 until the Emperor was overthrown on 4 September 1870. From 28 July to 4 September 1870, she was the de facto head of state of France.

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 idea of raising his regional language to the dignity of a literary language.

Saint Brioc

7 Brioc was a 5th-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 a British scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, as a self-made man, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. He similarly discovered the principles of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.

Hippolytus of Rome

7 Hippolytus of Rome was a Bishop of Rome and one of the most important second-third century Christian theologians, whose provenance, identity and corpus remain elusive to scholars and historians. Suggested communities include Rome, Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia and other regions of the Middle East. The best historians of literature in the ancient church, including Eusebius of Caesarea and Jerome, openly confess they cannot name where Hippolytus the biblical commentator and theologian served in leadership. They had read his works but did not possess evidence of his community. Photios I of Constantinople describes him in his Bibliotheca as a disciple of Irenaeus, who was said to be a disciple of Polycarp, and from the context of this passage it is supposed that he suggested that Hippolytus so styled himself. This assertion is doubtful. One older theory asserts he came into conflict with the popes of his time and seems to have headed a schismatic group as a rival to the bishop of Rome, thus becoming an antipope. In this view, he opposed the Roman Popes who softened the penitential system to accommodate the large number of new pagan converts. However, he was reconciled to the Church before he died as a martyr.

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 order are traditionally credited with spreading and popularizing the rosary. He is alternatively called Dominic of Osma, Dominic of Caleruega, and Domingo Félix de Guzmán.

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

7 Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France.

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 National Assembly for Jura under the Fourth Republic in 1946, he was a member of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) in Algiers (1943–1944). A Radical, Faure was married to writer Lucie Meyer. In 1978, he was elected to the Académie Française.

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 formation of carbon–carbon bonds.

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 the first president of France from 1848 to 1852, and the last monarch of France as Emperor of the French from 1852 until he was deposed in absentia on 4 September 1870.

Jean Renoir

7 Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.

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 the Self in 1888. In politics, he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889 as a Boulangist and would play a prominent political role for the rest of his life.

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 common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.

André Breton

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

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 years (1875–1894). In 1892 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society for this work, despite having been banished from France because of his political activism.

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 in his 1697 book Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The best known of his tales include "Le Petit Chaperon Rouge", "Cendrillon" ("Cinderella"), "Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté", "La Belle au bois dormant", and "Barbe Bleue" ("Bluebeard").

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, have become mainstream in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.

Saints 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 is a legendary king of Britain, a hero of English mythology, 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 father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss. One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because of prejudice against her sex, she was unable to make a career out of mathematics, but she worked independently throughout her life. Before her death, Gauss had recommended that she be awarded an honorary degree, but that never occurred. On 27 June 1831, she died from breast cancer. At the centenary of her life, a street and a girls’ school were named after her. The Academy of Sciences established the Sophie Germain Prize in her honour.

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 to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron, Antonio Barezzi. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti, whose works significantly influenced him.

Madeleine Brès

7 Madeleine Alexandrine Brès, born Gebelin, was a French pediatrician and the first French woman to earn a medical degree in 1875, with a 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 (1430–1485) 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 resentment among local barons, who finally secured the overthrow of Landais' régime. The rise and fall of Landais undermined Francis' position and prepared the way for the annexation of Brittany by France.

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 pastels, summary and economic, garnered the splendid eulogy of Baudelaire; and Corot called him the "King of the skies".

Lancelot

7 Lancelot du Lac, also written as Launcelot and other variants, is a character in some versions of Arthurian legend where he is typically depicted as King Arthur's close companion and one of the greatest Knights of the Round Table. In the French-inspired Arthurian chivalric romance tradition, Lancelot is an orphaned son of King Ban of the lost kingdom of Benoic, raised in a fairy realm by the Lady of the Lake. A hero of many battles, quests and tournaments, and famed as a nearly unrivalled swordsman and jouster, Lancelot becomes the lord of the castle Joyous Gard and personal champion of Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere, despite suffering from frequent and sometimes prolonged fits of madness. But when his adulterous affair with Guinevere is discovered, it causes a civil war that, once exploited by Mordred, brings an end to Arthur's kingdom.

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 novel was her first, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), which was written when she was a teenager.

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, fut l’un des dirigeants du réseau de renseignements Alliance. Il en fut le responsable militaire de mai 1942 à juillet 1943, puis son chef de juillet à septembre. Son principal pseudonyme était « Aigle ».

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 Pacific Ocean, where he wrote several books about the islanders' way of life. As a tennis player he was ranked the fifth on the French rankings in 1923.

Zéphyrin Camélinat

7 Zéphyrin Camélinat was a French politician, writer, 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 father, but gave up because of his weak heart. He was elected into the Académie Goncourt in 1942.

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 was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.

Charles Trenet

7 Louis Charles Augustin Georges Trenet was a renowned French singer-songwriter who composed both the music and the lyrics to nearly 1,000 songs over a career that lasted more than 60 years. These songs include "Boum!" (1938), "La Mer" (1946) and "Nationale 7" (1955). Trenet is noted for his work with musicians Michel Emer and Léo Chauliac, with whom he recorded "Y'a d'la joie" (1938) for the first and "La Romance de Paris" (1941) and "Douce France" (1947) for the latter. He was awarded an Honorary Molière Award in 2000.

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 described to Europeans the then-mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China under the Yuan dynasty, giving their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan, and other locations throughout Asia.

Charles Delestraint

7 Charles Delestraint was a French Army lieutenant general and member of the French Resistance during World War II. He also befriended Charles de Gaulle. Delestraint was killed by the Gestapo in 1945.

Ettore Bugatti

7 Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti was an Italian-French automobile designer and manufacturer. He is remembered as the founder and proprietor of the automobile manufacturing company Automobiles E. Bugatti, which he founded in 1909 in the then German town of Molsheim in the Alsace region of what is now France. Bugatti died in Paris, and is buried in Dorlisheim, France.

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 particulièrement connu pour avoir créé le personnage de Cafougnette.

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 Saint François de Sales, né le 21 août 1567 au château de Sales près de Thorens-Glières en Savoie et mort le 28 décembre 1622 à Lyon, est un prélat savoyard. Nommé évêque de Genève en 1602, il ne put jamais prendre possession de son siège devenu la « Rome des calvinistes », et resta en résidence à Annecy. Cofondateur de l'ordre de la Visitation Sainte-Marie, il est canonisé en 1665 et proclamé docteur de l'Église en 1877. Il est liturgiquement commémoré le 24 janvier dans la forme ordinaire du rite romain et le 29 janvier dans la forme tridentine, secondairement le 28 décembre pour sa naissance au ciel.

Jean Lurçat

6 Jean Lurçat was a French artist noted for his role in the revival of contemporary tapestry.         

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 works, a number of choral works and other music, often alluding to his Breton heritage. Ropartz also published poetry.

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. She was witness to Jesus resurrecting her brother, Lazarus.

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 served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts to strengthen cooperation in western Europe through the EEC and to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe. He was the first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930.

Benoît Frachon

6 Benoît Frachon was a French metalworker and trade union leader who 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 of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) from 1945 to 1967.

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 his ballet Les Deux Pigeons (1886) and opéra comique Véronique (1898) have had lasting success; Les p'tites Michu (1897) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1919) were also popular internationally.

Michel-Joseph Maunoury

6 Michel-Joseph Maunoury was a commander of 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, the pen name of the French writer, poet, and translator Gérard Labrunie, was a French essayist, poet, translator, and travel writer. He was a major figure during the era of French romanticism, and best known for his novellas and poems, especially the collection Les Filles du feu, which included the novella Sylvie and the poem "El Desdichado". Through his translations, Nerval played a major role in introducing French readers to the works of German Romantic authors, including Klopstock, Schiller, Bürger and Goethe. His later work merged poetry and journalism in a fictional context and influenced Marcel Proust. His last novella, Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie, influenced André Breton and Surrealism.

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 was cut short by death from cancer seven years later. She was posthumously awarded the Médaille de l'Aéronautique.

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 Algeria. She was inspired by the life and writings of Charles de Foucauld.

Vincent Scotto

6 Vincent Scotto was a French composer.                                                               

Charles Garnier (architect)

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

Louis Daguerre

6 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.

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 and mystery.

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 fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Clair's best known films include Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).

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 leading man of French cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, known for his portrayal of tough characters on both sides of the law in crime dramas.

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 (1942) and Children of Paradise (1945); the latter has been cited as one of the great films of all time.

Frédéric Joliot-Curie

6 Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a French physicist and husband of Irène Joliot-Curie, with whom he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were the second ever married couple, after his wife's parents, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. Joliot-Curie and his wife also founded the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, part of the Paris-Saclay University.

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 photojournalism.

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 France he sought to protect the rights of socialists and trade union workers.

Charles Michels

6 Charles Michels was a trade unionist and communist militant. He was deputy of the 15th arrondissement in Paris. During the Second World War, Michels was one of the 48 hostages shot in Chateaubriant, Nantes and Paris in retaliation for the assassination of Karl Hotz, Feldkommandant of Nazi occupied Nantes.

Alexis de Tocqueville

6 Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, usually known as just Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.

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 circumnavigation time towards the end of the race, Moitessier was the likely winner for the fastest voyage, but he elected to continue on to Tahiti and not return to the start line in England, rejecting the idea of the commercialization of long distance sailing. He was a French national born and raised in Vietnam, then part of French Indochina.

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 simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

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 a former member (député) of the National Assembly. Frêche had been a member of the French Socialist Party until he was expelled on January 27, 2007.

Charles de Foucauld

6 Charles Eugène de Foucauld de Pontbriand, PFJ was a French soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnographer, Catholic priest and hermit who lived among the Tuareg people in the Sahara in Algeria. He was assassinated in 1916. His inspiration and writings led to the founding of the Little Brothers of Jesus, among other religious congregations.

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 décédé 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 (1939–45).

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 century Southeast Asia.

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 Troyes.

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, Edgar Allan Poe Awards, French Legion of Honor, Golden Globe Award, French National Academy of Cinema and Honorary Cesar awards.

Lady of the Lake

6 The Lady of the Lake is a name or a title used by several either fairy or fairy-like but human enchantresses in the Matter of Britain, the body of medieval literature and mythology associated with the legend of King Arthur. She plays several important roles in many stories, including providing Arthur with the sword Excalibur, eliminating Merlin, raising Lancelot after the death of his father, and helping to take the dying Arthur to Avalon. Different sorceresses known as the Lady of the Lake appear concurrently as separate characters in some versions of the legend since at least the Post-Vulgate Cycle and consequently the seminal Le Morte d'Arthur, with the latter describing them as a hierarchical group, while some texts also give this title to either Morgan or her sister.

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 aviator", setting a woman's record for loops done in an hour. The French government eventually recognized her with the Legion of Honor and other awards. Since her death, she has been commemorated with a postage stamp of Argentina.

Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville

6 Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville, Marquis Duquesne was a French Governor General of New France. He was born in Toulon, France.

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 Vendée de 1936 à 1944.

Alfred Sauvy

6 Alfred Sauvy was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy coined the term Third World in reference to countries that were unaligned with either the Western bloc or the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.

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 to women undergoing similar daily struggles.

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 was a French novelist, poet and journalist. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieu.

Théodore de Banville

6 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 Francais and as a literary critic for L'Opinion Nationale.

Hospitaller Malta

5 Hospitaller Malta, officially the Monastic State of the Order of Malta, and known within Maltese history as the Knights' Period, was a polity which existed between 1530 and 1798 when the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo were ruled by the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It was formally a vassal state of the Kingdom of Sicily, and it came into being when Emperor Charles V granted the islands as well as the city of Tripoli in modern Libya to the Order, following the latter's loss of Rhodes in 1522. Hospitaller Tripoli was lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1551, but an Ottoman attempt to take Malta in 1565 failed.

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. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century. He was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of his era.

Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau

5 Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau was a French army general, army group commander and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces during the First World War. Elected deputy in 1919 and president of the Army Commission in the legislature, he then took the head of a confessional political movement, the Fédération Nationale Catholique. During the Second World War, he opposed Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime and supported the French Resistance. For a long time controversial because of a Catholicism that was considered outrageous by his opponents, historians have moderated that portrait by emphasising his great loyalty to republican institutions and disputed in particular that he could have been reactionary or anti-Semitic.

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 furnace. He lived in Thury-Harcourt, Normandy.

Federico García Lorca

5 Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, known as Federico García Lorca, was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting mostly of poets who introduced the tenets of European movements into Spanish literature.

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 Stéphane Mallarmé, pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.

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. Moissan was one of the original members of the International Atomic Weights Committee.

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 Toudouze.

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, 1st Count of Vidigueira, was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea.

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 nephew was the author André Gide.

Darius Milhaud

5 Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. A renowned teacher, he taught many future jazz and classical composers, including Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis among others.

Louis Lépine

5 Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine was a French lawyer, politician and administrator who was Governor General of Algeria and twice Préfet de Police with the Paris Police Prefecture from 1893 to 1897 and again from 1899 to 1913. On each occasion he assumed office during a period of instability in the governance of the French state seen by his supporters as a man who could bring order. He earned the nickname of "The Little Man with the Big Stick" for his methodology in handling large Parisian crowds. During his periods as Préfet de police he instigated a series of reforms that modernised the French Police Force. An efficient and clear-sighted administrator he introduced scientific analysis into policing with reforms in forensic science and the training of detectives.Lépine was also responsible for convening and re-invigorating the Exposition Universelle whereby an annual competition known as the Concours Lépine was introduced for inventors and innovators to have their work presented and acclaimed. An annual competition that has now had 120-plus editions.

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 décédé 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 général de division français, compagnon de la Libération.

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 1950s and in 1981–1984, when he was appointed by President François Mitterrand as Minister of National Education.

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 in 1956–1957. His main achievement was to establish the framework used to grant independence to France’s African territories. In 1967, he fought the last duel in French history. As the Socialist candidate for president in 1969, he received only 5 percent of the vote. He was much more successful in promoting François Mitterrand as leader of the Socialist Party in 1971. He held a series of ministerial portfolios after the Socialist victory in 1981, especially as minister of state for the interior and decentralization.

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, usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.

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 criticized abuses of colonialism such as forced labour. Albert Londres gave his name to a journalism prize, the Prix Albert-Londres, for Francophone journalists.

Albert Samain

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

Henri Pourrat

5 The French writer and folklore collector Henri Pourrat was born in 1887 in Ambert, a town in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France. He died near Ambert in 1959.

Arthur Honegger

5 Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. A member of Les Six, his best known work is probably Antigone, composed between 1924 and 1927 to the French libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles. It premiered on 28 December 1927 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel. However, his most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which was inspired by the sound of a steam locomotive.

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 at the Paris Conservatoire. His students included Albéric Magnard, Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Yvonne Rokseth, and Erik Satie, as well as Cole Porter.

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 modernist movement.

Albert Joly

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

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, and pastoral scenes. He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.

Jean Marais

5 Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais, known professionally as Jean Marais, was a French actor, film director, theatre director, painter, sculptor, visual artist, writer and photographer. He performed in over 100 films and was the lover, muse and friend of acclaimed director Jean Cocteau. In 1996, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his contributions to French cinema.

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 Guerre mondiale.

Pierre Mauroy

5 Pierre Mauroy was a French Socialist 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. At the time of his death Mauroy was the emeritus mayor of the city of Lille. He died from complications of lung cancer on 7 June 2013 at the age of 84. He is the namesake of Lille's new stadium, Stade Pierre-Mauroy.

Albert Lebrun

5 Albert François Lebrun was a French politician, 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 Republican Alliance (ARD).

Ambrose

5 Ambrose of Milan, venerated 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 Roman Christianity against Arianism and paganism. He left a substantial collection of writings, of which the best known include the ethical commentary De officiis ministrorum (377–391), and the exegetical Exameron (386–390). His preachings, his actions and his literary works, in addition to his innovative musical hymnography, made him one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the 4th century.

Léopold Sédar Senghor

5 Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal (1960–1980).

Édouard Lalo

5 Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer. His most celebrated piece is the Symphonie Espagnole, a five-movement concerto for violin and orchestra that remains a popular work in the standard repertoire.

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 as defeatism. He believed this had led to France's defeat and eventual occupation by Germany in 1940 during World War II. His two best-known novels Sous le soleil de Satan (1926) and the Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936) both revolve around a parish priest who combats evil and despair in the world. Most of his novels have been translated into English and frequently published in both Great Britain and the United States.

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 résistant le plus populaire dans le souvenir des habitants de Dunkerque.

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 both expressing his patrimony and distinguishing himself from the master painter.

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 Joseph Eugène Gouraud was a French general, best known for his leadership of the French Fourth Army at the end of the First World War. Following this, he became the first High Commissioner of the Levant (1919–1922) then Military governor of Paris (1923–1937).

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 planning; as a consequence of his visionary plan for the Ideal City of Chaux, he became known as a utopian. His greatest works were funded by the French monarchy and came to be perceived as symbols of the Ancien Régime rather than Utopia. The French Revolution hampered his career; much of his work was destroyed in the nineteenth century. In 1804, he published a collection of his designs under the title L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la législation. In this book he took the opportunity of revising his earlier designs, making them more rigorously neoclassical and up to date. This revision has distorted an accurate assessment of his role in the evolution of Neoclassical architecture. His most ambitious work was the uncompleted Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, an idealistic and visionary town showing many examples of architecture parlante. Conversely his works and commissions also included the more mundane and everyday architecture such as approximately sixty elaborate tollgates around Paris in the Wall of the General Tax Farm.

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, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

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 and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.

Francis Jammes

5 Francis Jammes was a French and European 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 country life. His later poetry remained lyrical, but also included a strong religious element brought on by his (re)conversion to Catholicism in 1905.

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 was a French author, born in Paris. Duhamel trained as a doctor, and during World War I was attached to the French Army. In 1920, he published Confession de minuit, the first of a series featuring the anti-hero Salavin. In 1935, he was elected as a member of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty-seven times. He was also the father of the musicologist and composer Antoine Duhamel.

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, Louverture first fought and allied with Spanish forces against Saint-Domingue Royalists, then joined with Republican France, becoming Governor-General-for-life of Saint-Domingue, and lastly fought against Bonaparte's republican troops. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture displayed military and political acumen that helped transform the fledgling slave rebellion into a revolutionary movement. Along with Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Louverture is now known as one of the "Fathers of Haiti".

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 the posthumously published Huit Jours à la campagne.

Léon Foucault

5 Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope.

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 government adviser and French cabinet minister. He also served in the Belgian resistance during World War II.

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 by the reinstated Bourbons. Cadoudal means in Breton language "warrior returning from the fight".

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 gardens of the Palace of Versailles; his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française.

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 caused uproar in France, dividing public opinion. His artistic output ranged from his early work in jazz, chanson, and yé-yé to later efforts in rock, zouk, funk, reggae, and electronica. Gainsbourg's varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorise, although his legacy has been firmly established and he is often regarded as one of the world's most influential popular musicians.

Django Reinhardt

5 Jean Reinhardt, known by his Romani nickname Django, was a Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most significant exponents.

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 best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir, and orchestra.

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. However, he became a national hero in France and was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 2009.

Marcel Mérieux

5 Marcel Mérieux, né le 16 janvier 1870 à Lyon 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 and military officer. On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), flying alone for 33.5 hours. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was designed and built by the Ryan Airline Company specifically to compete for the Orteig Prize for the first flight between the two cities. Although not the first transatlantic flight, it was the first solo transatlantic flight and the longest at the time by nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km). It became known as one of the most consequential flights in history and ushered in a new era of air transportation between parts of the globe.

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.                                                               

Florence Arthaud

5 Florence Arthaud, was a French sailor.                                                             

James Watt

5 James Watt was a Scottish inventor, mechanical 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 by the Industrial Revolution in both his native country Great Britain, and the rest of the world.

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 most prolific and influential composers of his era, and his piano works continue to be widely performed and recorded.

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 one of the forerunners of 20th-century French architects.

Armand Carrel

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

Pierre Lescot

4 Pierre Lescot was a French architect active during the French Renaissance. His most notable works include the Fontaine des Innocents and the Lescot wing of the Louvre in Paris. He played an important role in the introduction of elements of classical architecture into French architecture.

Michel Simon

4 Michel Simon was a Swiss actor of German origin. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), L'Atalante (1934), Port of Shadows (1938), The Head (1959), and The Train (1964).

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 principaux négociants en coton au début du XIXe siècle.

Frédéric Bastiat

4 Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist, writer and a 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 fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.

Neil Armstrong

4 Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who in 1969 became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor.

Daniel Balavoine

4 Daniel Xavier-Marie Balavoine was a French singer and songwriter. He was hugely popular in the French-speaking world in the early 1980s; he inspired many singers of his generation such as Jean-Jacques Goldman, Michel Berger, who was his closest friend, as well as the Japanese pop-rock group Crystal King. Balavoine was a part of the original cast of the rock opera Starmania in 1978, which was written by Berger.

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, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

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 was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry's most important figures. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.

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 the fifth century. Local legends dating from the 14th century make him the first bishop of Agen, though, as Alban Butler writes, the only evidence to support his existence is the dedication of a church to him in the 6th century.

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 Napoleon.

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), and Napoléon (1927).

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, with several other main roles. The familiar depiction of Merlin, based on an amalgamation of historic and legendary figures, was introduced by the 12th-century British pseudo-historical author Geoffrey of Monmouth and then built on by the French poet Robert de Boron and their prose successors in the 13th century.

Aristide Boucicaut

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

Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma

4 Marie Louise was an Austrian archduchess who reigned as 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 1 April 1810 until his abdication on 6 April 1814.

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 and the Levant. His memory retains iconic status in Bourges, where he built a palatial house that is preserved to this day.

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 of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.

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 studies on the character structure.

Claire Fontaine

4 Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her assistants. Since 2018 Claire Fontaine lives and works in Palermo and has a studio in the historical centre of the Kalsa near Piazza Magione.

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 development of the moving image. Pathé adopted the national emblem of France, the cockerel, as the trademark for his company. After the company, now called Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with Pathé-Journal.

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 recognized as one of the most influential and controversial figures of the French Revolution. Robespierre fervently campaigned for the voting rights of all men and their unimpeded admission to the National Guard. Additionally he advocated for the right to petition, the right to bear arms in self-defence, and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

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. Schumann was a member of the Christian democratic Popular Republican Movement.

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 World War II in France. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

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 15-volume Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.

Gabriel Lippmann

4 Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.

Fernand David

4 Fernand David was the French Minister of Agriculture from 21 January 1913 to 22 March 1913.         

Victor Duruy

4 Jean Victor Duruy was a French historian and statesman.                                             

Augustine of Hippo

4 Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.

Théophile Roussel

4 Jean-Baptiste Victor Théophile Roussel, né le 28 juillet 1816 à Saint-Chély-d'Apcher en Lozère, mort le 27 septembre 1903, au château d'Orfeuillette à Albaret-Sainte-Marie en Lozère, est un médecin, homme politique et philanthrope français. Il est l'un des premiers hommes politiques français ayant œuvré pour la protection de l’enfance.

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 syndicalisme et du socialisme en Saône-et-Loire.

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 early member of the noblesse de robe in the service of the French state.

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 in a small boat across the Atlantic Ocean without provision. He theorized that a human being could very well survive the trip across the ocean without provisions and decided to test his theory himself in order to save thousands of lives of people lost at sea.

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 four times in the post-war period..

Louis de Funès

4 Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza was a French actor and comedian. He is France's favourite actor, according to a series of polls conducted since the late 1960s, having played over 150 roles in film and over 100 on stage. His acting style is remembered for its high-energy performance and his wide range of facial expressions and tics. A considerable part of his best-known acting was directed by Jean Girault.

Jean Bertin

4 Jean Henri Bertin was a French scientist, engineer and inventor. He was born in Druyes-les-Belles-Fontaines and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He 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, also written Barra, was a young French republican drummer boy at the time of the Revolution, and is known for his death and martyrdom at only 14 years old at the hands of pro-Monarchist forces at Vendée.

Saint Martial

4 Martial, called "the Apostle of the Gauls" or "the Apostle of Aquitaine", was the first bishop of Limoges. His feast day is 30 June.

Agatha of Sicily

4 Agatha of Sicily is a Christian saint. Her feast is on 5 February. Agatha was born in Catania, part of the Roman Province of Sicily, and was martyred c. 251. She is one of several virgin martyrs who are commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass.

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 from 1959 to 1962. In terms of political personality, Debré was intense and immovable and had a tendency to rhetorical extremism.

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 democratically elected president of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote. A shipyard electrician by trade, Wałęsa became the leader of the Solidarity movement, and led a successful pro-democratic effort, which in 1989 ended Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.

Jean-Marie Tjibaou

4 Jean-Marie Tjibaou was a French politician in New Caledonia and leader of the Kanak independence movement. The son of a tribal chief, Tjibaou was ordained a Catholic priest but abandoned his religious vocation for a life in political activism.

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 promotion of the Occitan language and culture.

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, altitude, and speed.

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 his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two late 19th-century art movements. Less known is Bernard's literary work, comprising plays, poetry, and art criticism as well as art historical statements that contain first-hand information on the crucial period of modern art to which Bernard had contributed.

Charles-Michel de l'Épée

4 Charles-Michel de l'Épée was a philanthropic educator of 18th-century France who has become known as the "Father of the Deaf".

Suzanne Valadon

4 Suzanne Valadon was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.

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 Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent, was convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent overseas to the penal colony on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent the following five years imprisoned in very harsh conditions.

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, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.

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 Gallagher.

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 arrested four times, and once hanged in effigy. She was finally executed August 2, 1755. After her death, she was remembered as an infamous Breton.

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. Mazenod 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 Astérix comic book series with illustrator Albert Uderzo. He was raised primarily in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he attended French schools, as well as lived in the United States for a short period of time. There he met Belgian cartoonist Morris. After his return to France, they collaborated for more than 20 years on the comic series Lucky Luke.

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 the French throne.

Octave Mirbeau

4 Octave 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 appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Maximilien Sébastien Foy

4 Maximilien Sébastien Foy was a French military leader, statesman and writer.                       

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 singer, songwriter, pianist, composer, arranger and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. In 2023 Rolling Stone ranked Simone at No. 21 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

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 (1970–85). He was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a student of Henri Hauser.

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 folklore. He was posthumously awarded the Prix Lambert.

Camille Pissarro

4 Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

Alcide De Gasperi

4 Alcide Amedeo Francesco De Gasperi was an Italian politician who founded the Christian Democracy party and served as prime minister of Italy in eight successive coalition governments from 1945 to 1953.

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 explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James, Leon Bloy, and Marcel Proust.

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 became a full-time pianist for fifteen years and then turned to teaching afterwards.

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 a leader in the Resistance during World War II. At his death The New York Times called him "one of France's most decorated Resistance heroes".

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 refrigerating plant, as used on ocean vessels, to preserve meats and other perishable food. In 1911, Tellier was awarded the Joest prize by the French Institute and, in 1912, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He wrote Histoire d'une invention moderne, le frigorifique (1910). Tellier died impoverished in Paris. Dimethyl ether was the first refrigerant, in 1876, Charles Tellier bought the ex-Elder-Dempster a 690 tons cargo ship Eboe and fitted a Methyl-ether refrigerating plant of his design. The ship was renamed Le Frigorifique and successfully imported a cargo of refrigerated meat from Argentina. However the machinery could be improved and in 1877 another refrigerated ship called Paraguay with a refrigerating plant improved by Ferdinand Carré was put into service on the South American run.

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 took part in the Formula One World Championship. He competed in 48 World Championship Grands Prix, achieving one win, 13 podium finishes and 89 career points.

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 Seconde Guerre mondiale, il crée et commande le 1er bataillon de fusiliers marins commandos, dont ses membres, connus a posteriori sous le nom de commandos Kieffer, ont combattu lors du débarquement de Normandie.

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 Romy Schneider was a German-French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. She later reprised the role in a more mature version in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1973). She began her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. Her performance in That Most Important Thing: Love is regarded as one of the greatest in the history of cinema.

François Jacob

4 François Jacob was a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through regulation of transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.

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 Comité d'Action Socialiste in 1941 and was a member of the Brutus Network, a Resistant Socialist group. Mayer also supported the Libération-sud resistance movement headed by Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie.

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, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

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 Paris from 1977 to 1995.

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 1908 were united in their use of intense colour. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905.

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 writings influenced the later works of Gérard de Nerval.

André Pantigny

4 André Pantigny est connu en tant que militant socialiste et résistant français de la Seconde Guerre mondiale ; il est né à Oignies dans le Pas-de-Calais, le 3 juin 1900, et mort le 4 décembre 1944 au camp de concentration de Gross-Rosen, en Haute-Silésie.

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, Fonck still holds the title of "all-time Allied Ace of Aces". He received confirmation for 75 victories out of 142 claims. Taking into account his probable claims, Fonck's final tally could conceivably be nearer 100 or above. He was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1918 and later a Commander of the Legion of Honor after the war, and raised again to the dignity of Grand Officer.

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 Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.

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 Louis de Funès in the films Le Corniaud (1965) and La Grande Vadrouille (1966). For his performance in Le Corniaud, he won a Special Diploma at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival.

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 régional clandestin en Normandie-Bretagne, il est arrêté pour acte de résistance et est interné au camp d'Aincourt et à celui de Châteaubriant. Évadé, il est repris en 1943 au Mans par la police française et torturé à mort par la police allemande. Il meurt le 12 septembre 1943 à l'âge de 34 ans. Cité à l'ordre de la Nation, il est fait chevalier de la Légion d'honneur à titre posthume en mai 1947.

Pierre Leroux

3 Pierre Henri Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist. He was born at Bercy, now a part of Paris, the son of an artisan.

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 neoclassicism, Récamier cultivated a public persona as a great beauty, and her fame quickly spread across Europe. She befriended many intellectuals, sat for the finest artists of the age, and spurned an offer of marriage from Prince Augustus of Prussia.

Alberto Giacometti

3 Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.

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 of poetry, both short lyrical forms as well as longer narrative poems. For centuries, Froissart's Chronicles have been recognised as the chief expression of the chivalric revival of the 14th-century kingdoms of England, France and Scotland. His history is also an important source for the first half of the Hundred Years' War.

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 19th-century operas such as La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca (1900) is based, and Fédora (1882) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora (1898) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915) by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.

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 à Aigues-Vives dans le Gard le 10 décembre 1856 et mort dans la même ville le 10 novembre 1893, 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 Société de Géographie de Paris, he reached far into the interior along the right bank of the Congo River. He has often been depicted as a man of friendly manner, great charm and peaceful approach towards the Africans he met and worked with on his journeys, but recent research has revealed that he in fact alternated this kind of approach with more calculated deceit and at times relentless armed violence towards local populations. Under French colonial rule, the capital of the Republic of the Congo was named Brazzaville after him and the name was retained by the post-colonial rulers, one of the few African nations to do so.

Peter Abelard

3 Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, poet, composer and musician.

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 inventor of food preservation using tin cans.

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 made by Henry Farman on 13 January 1908 near Paris, France. During World War I the company founded by Voisin became a major producer of military aircraft, notably the Voisin III. Subsequently, he switched to the design and production of luxury automobiles under the name Avions Voisin.

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 French Republic.

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 de nombreux ouvrages, articles de presse et d'un journal intime tenu tout au long de sa vie.

Queen Mathilde of Belgium

3 Mathilde is Queen of the Belgians as the wife of King Philippe. She is the first native-born Belgian queen. She has founded and assisted charities to decrease poverty in the country.

Nicolas Poussin

3 Nicolas Poussin was a French painter who 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 for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscape in his paintings. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.

Fermin

3 Fermin was a legendary holy man and martyr, traditionally venerated as the co-patron saint of Navarre, Spain. His death may be associated with either the Decian persecution (250) or Diocletianic Persecution (303).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.

Olivier Messiaen

3 Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.

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 est un homme politique français, né le 17 mars 1907 à Cormeilles (Eure) et mort le 14 mars 1968 à Équeurdreville-Hainneville (Manche).

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 quasi-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 awards in the form of gold and silver flowers that the city of Toulouse would award annually to the best poets.

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 Jean de La Ceppède, the English poet Keith Bosley called d'Aubigné "the epic poet of the Protestant cause," during the French Wars of Religion. Bosley added, however, that after d'Aubigné's death, he "was forgotten until the Romantics rediscovered him."

Quiteria

3 Quiteria was a second-century virgin martyr and saint about whom nothing is certain except her name and her cult. She appears in the Roman Martyrology, but not in any other ancient calendars.

Dante Alighieri

3 Dante Alighieri, most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

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 writings were initially published under the pseudonym Anna Edianez, Edianez being an anagram of Zénaïde and Anna being derived from one of her own given names, Anne. She also wrote under the names Anna Edianez de Saint-B. and Anna Edianez de L.

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. He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1934 until his death in 1976.

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 recognized royal mistress of a French king. She was the subject of several contemporary paintings and works of art, including Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels.

Anna Politkovskaya

3 Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was an American-Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005).

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 Greece, Syria, and Asia-Minor.

Jean Wiener

3 Jean Wiener was a French pianist and composer.                                                     

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 reconnaissance missions during the battle of the Marne.

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 themes, as well as the transition from neo-classicism to romanticism.

Alberto Santos-Dumont

3 Alberto Santos-Dumont, self-stylized as 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 aircraft. The heir of a wealthy family of coffee producers, he dedicated himself to aeronautical study and experimentation in Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. He designed, built, and flew the first powered airships and won the Deutsch prize in 1901, when he flew around the Eiffel Tower in his airship No. 6, becoming one of the most famous people in the world in the early 20th century.

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 exerce jusqu'à son décès.

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. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of L'art pompier, and was Napoleon III's preferred painter.

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 until his abdication in 1795. Since Polish adjectives have different forms for the genders, Poniatowska is the equivalent name for a female member of this family.

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, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, particularly in boulevardier roles. He was also a prolific playwright, writing 115 plays throughout his career. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and 1932.

Gaston Doumergue

3 Pierre Paul Henri Gaston Doumergue was a French politician of the Third Republic. He served as President of France from 1924 to 1931, succeeding Alexandre Millerand, who had resigned.

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 est un aviateur et homme politique français, 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).

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 suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in tissue culture, transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.

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 officier et explorateur français.

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 textiles merchant who moved to Paris. He never completed a formal education, leaving primary school at age 15. After several years apprenticed to Paris engineer Paul-Gustav Froment, Ducretet opened his own workshop in 1864 at 21 Rue des Ursulines where with a few employees he manufactured classical physics research, teaching and demonstration apparatus, such as galvanometers, Wimshurst machines, and Crookes tubes. Over time his reputation grew and he became instrument supplier to several large Paris educational and scientific institutions. He was awarded a gold medal for his quality instruments at the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition and from then on his firm was a regular presence at important international expositions, winning another gold at the 1881 International Electricity Exposition in Paris. He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1885.

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 Normandy. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and then to the Senate, and held various ministerial posts between 1913 and 1934. He generally held moderately conservative views, believed in fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, and felt strongly that agriculture was the foundation of France's prosperity.

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 and 1933, and although he did not reach the finishing line in any subsequent appearance at the Le Mans, he did lead each event until 1938. Sommer was also competitive at the highest level in Grand Prix motor racing, but did not win a race. He won the French Grand Prix in 1936, but the event that year was run as a sports car race.

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, honest, turbulent, and impulsive man".

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, also known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His verified reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest of any sovereign. Although Louis XIV's France was emblematic of the Age of Absolutism in Europe, the King surrounded himself with a variety of significant political, military, and cultural figures, such as Bossuet, Colbert, Louvois, Le Brun, Le Nôtre, Lully, Mazarin, Molière, Racine, Turenne, Condé, and Vauban.

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 of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his late teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and read Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.

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 also known for her social commitment and work.

François-Joseph-Victor Broussais

3 François-Joseph-Victor Broussais was a French physician.                                           

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 career lasting from 1908 to 1926. A French professional champion on several occasions, he became the European heavyweight champion before the First World War. A sergeant aviator during the Great War, he was wounded before returning to civilian life. He then discovered rugby union, playing as a winger.

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, novels, as well as children's literature.

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, est un journaliste, homme de lettres et homme politique radical-socialiste français, né le 16 février 1883 à Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët (Manche) et mort en déportation le 24 avril 1944 à Buchenwald (Allemagne).

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 de longévité avec 6 738 jours.

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 promoteurs de l’aviation en France.

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. Critic Leonard S. Davidow, considers it one of Verne's best books. Davidow wrote, "Jules Verne has written no better book than this, in fact it is deservedly ranked as one of the most thrilling tales ever written." Unlike some of Verne's other novels, it is not science fiction, but its plot device is a scientific phenomenon. The book was later adapted to a play, by Verne himself and Adolphe d'Ennery. Incidental music to the play was written by Alexandre Artus in 1880 and by Franz von Suppé in 1893. The book has been adapted several times for films, television and cartoon series.

Georges Mandel

3 Georges Mandel was a French Jewish journalist, and politician.                                     

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 and early Fifth Republics, including a Minister of Finance from 20 January 1955 to 23 February 1955 and a Minister of Public Works, Transport, and Tourism from 9 June 1958 to 16 May 1962 under Charles de Gaulle.

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, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.

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 played a leading role in the French Communist Party and in the national trade union movement both before and after World War II (1939–45).

Hyacinthe Rigaud

3 Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra, known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud, was a Spanish-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 known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

François Camel

3 François Camel est un homme politique socialiste français, instituteur de profession, syndicaliste, résistant, né le 3 mai 1893 à Esplas-de-Sérou (Ariège) et mort le 1er mai 1941 à Lasserre (Ariège).

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 Académie française.

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 songs (sirventes). He was involved in revolts against Richard I and then Phillip II. He married twice and had five children. In his final years, he became a monk.

Joseph Fourier

3 Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

Jean Auguste Margueritte

3 Jean Auguste Margueritte, French General, father of Victor Margueritte and Paul Margueritte.       

François Joseph Paul de Grasse

3 François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, Marquis of Grasse-Tilly SMOM was a career French officer who achieved the rank of admiral. He is best known for his command of the French fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781 in the last year of the American Revolutionary War. It led directly to the British surrender at Yorktown and helped gain the rebels' victory.

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 first composer to be called a "Romantic". He is known particularly for his operas, written in keeping with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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 à Domfront le 13 juillet 1830 et mort à Paris 16e le 23 janvier 1904, 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, most famous for his fictional detective Jules Maigret. One of the most popular authors of the 20th century, he published around 400 novels, 21 volumes of memoirs and many short stories, selling over 500 million copies.

Albin Roussin

3 Albin Reine Roussin was a French admiral and statesman.                                             

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 early interest in photography as an art form.

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 revolutionizing education in French schools. She was a feminist who worked to fix poverty, social injustice, and to further the education of girls. She also wrote articles for the weekly French newspaper "The French Economist".

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 Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and postwar President of France.

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 couple moved to Domrémy, where they owned a farm consisting of about 50 acres (200,000 m2) of land. After their daughter's famous exploits in 1429, the family was granted noble status by Charles VII in December of that year. Isabelle moved to Orléans in 1440 after her husband's death and received a pension from the city. She petitioned Pope Nicholas V to reopen the court case that had convicted Joan of heresy, and then, in her seventies, addressed the opening session of the appellate trial at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The appeals court overturned Joan's conviction on 7 July 1456. Isabelle died two years later, probably at Sandillon near Orléans.

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 later neo-classicism. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art. Following the First World War, he founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré, decorated the interiors of churches, and worked for a revival of religious art.

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.

Raymonde de Laroche

3 Raymonde de Laroche was a French pilot, thought to be the first woman to pilot a plane. She became the world's first licensed female pilot on 8 March 1910.

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 de bonne volonté . Sinclair Lewis called him one of the six best novelists in the world.

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 Wales, he died in Dol-de-Bretagne, a small town in north Brittany.

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 Gironde département between 1946 and 1997.

Paulin Talabot

3 Paulin Talabot was a French railway and canal engineer. Educated at the École Polytechnique, Talabot started his career building canals. Inspired by George and Robert Stephenson's steam railways in England, he built a line to transport coal from the coal mines at La Grand-Combe to the Mediterranean at Nîmes, which opened in 1839. He visited England and became friends with Robert Stephenson, with whom he surveyed a route for a Suez Canal in 1847.

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 Hanoi in April 1882 inaugurated a period of undeclared hostilities between France and Dai Nam that culminated one year later in the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886).

Charles Robin

3 Charles Robin was an entrepreneur 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 spelled Jean-Marie Le Bris, and he is also known as Yann Vari Ar Briz in Breton language.

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 poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes.

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 tabacum, which in turn is named after Jean Nicot de Villemain, who sent tobacco and seeds to Paris in 1560, presented it to the King Francis II, and who promoted their medicinal use. Smoking was believed to protect against illness, particularly the plague.

François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas

3 François-Antoine, 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 enter the singles competition as well. He defeated Jaroslav Drobný in the final in five sets.

Pierre de Fermat

3 Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. He was also a lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France.

Marcel Callo

3 Marcel Callo was a French Roman Catholic from Rennes who served in Catholic organizations – in particular the Young Christian Workers (Jocists) – devoted to charitable works to the poor and to communities in general. Callo served as an apprentice at a print store from the age of thirteen before joining Catholic associations in France. He was conscripted to serve during World War II and the Gestapo arrested him in 1944 for his Christian activities. He died in the camps after being forced to do long hours of labour.

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 culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

Laurent Fignon

3 Laurent Patrick Fignon was a French professional road bicycle racer who won the Tour de France in 1983 and 1984 and the Giro d'Italia in 1989. He is former FICP World No. 1 in 1989. He nearly captured the Tour de France for a third time in 1989 before being edged by Greg LeMond by 8 seconds, the closest margin ever to decide the Tour. Fignon won many classic races, including taking Milan–San Remo back-to-back in 1988 and 1989. He died from cancer in 2010.

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 is the most bemedalled French athletics sportsperson in history. In 1999, readers of the French athletics magazine Athlétisme Magazine voted him as the “French Athlete of the 20th Century”.

Germaine de Staël

3 Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a prominent philosopher, woman of letters, and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonhostess. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.

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 French-Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, writer, actor and Québécois political activist. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 20, 1968. Leclerc was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame for his songs "Moi, mes souliers", "Le P'tit Bonheur" and "Le Tour de l'île" in 2006.

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 of War.

Ella Fitzgerald

3 Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

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 religious chiaroscuro scenes lit by candlelight.

Amédée Guillotin de Corson

3 L'abbé Amédée-Aimé Guillotin de Corson, né à Nozay (Loire-Atlantique) le 26 mai 1837 et mort à Bain-de-Bretagne (Ille-et-Vilaine) le 7 août 1905, est un prêtre et historien français, spécialiste de l'histoire de la Bretagne.

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 Vivre" from 1981 she states "The extension of the art of dwelling is the art of living — living in harmony with man's deepest drives and with his adopted or fabricated environment." Charlotte liked to take her time in a space before starting the design process. In Perriand's Autobiography, "Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation", she states: "I like being alone when I visit a country or historic site. I like being bathed in its atmosphere, feeling in direct contact with the place without the intrusion of a third party." Her approach to design includes taking in the site and appreciating it for what it is. Perriand felt she connected with any site she was working with or just visiting she enjoyed the living things and would reminisce on a site that was presumed dead.

Étienne Lenoir

3 Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, also known as Jean J. Lenoir, was a Belgian-French engineer who developed the internal combustion engine in 1858. Prior designs for such engines were patented as early as 1807, but none were commercially successful. Lenoir's engine was commercialized in sufficient quantities to be considered a success, a first for the internal combustion engine.

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 long career in Cambodia and Cochinchina, Pavie became the first French vice-consul in Luang Prabang in 1886, eventually becoming the first Governor-General and plenipotentiary minister of the newly formed French colony of Laos.

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 and preacher, who gained acclaim as a missionary and a logician. He is honored as a saint of the Catholic Church and other churches of Catholic traditions.

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 self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book titled The Birds of America (1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon is also known for identifying 25 new species. He is the eponym of the National Audubon Society, and his name adorns a large number of towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States. Dozens of scientific names first published by Audubon are still in use by the scientific community.

Jacques Offenbach

3 Jacques Offenbach 20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880) 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. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Franz von Suppé, Johann Strauss Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

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 Belgian–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. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet, which was published in 1929. Her teachings influenced the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the popularisers of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and the esotericist Benjamin Creme.

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 perhaps because her brother, Pierre Durand, was a well-known preacher, or perhaps because of her marriage.

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 ancien 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 Jonquière.

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 religious born in Le Rosey, village of Marlhes, near St. Etienne (Loire), France. He was the founder of the Marist Brothers, a religious congregation of brothers in the Catholic Church devoted to Mary and dedicated to education. His feast day is 6 June, his death anniversary.

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 pochads.

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 mission. Chrétien was the first Frenchman and the first western European in space.

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 to 1925, representing Puy-de-Dôme.

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.

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 his predecessors were monarchists who tried without success to restore the French monarchy, Grévy is considered the first real republican president of France. During Grevy's presidency from 1879 to 1887, according to David Bell, there was a disunity among his cabinets. Only one survived more than a year. Grevy paid attention chiefly to defense, internal order, and foreign relations. Critics argue that Grevy's confusing approach to appointments set a bad precedent for handling crises. Grevy's son-in-law was implicated in a corruption scandal in 1887, and Grevy had to resign after exhausting the pool of willing politicians to form a fresh government.

Hubert Dubedout

3 Hubert Dubedout, né le 9 décembre 1922 à Paris 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 other engineers.

Paul-Henri Spaak

3 Paul-Henri Charles Spaak was an influential Belgian Socialist politician, diplomat and statesman. Along with Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer he was a leader in the formation of the institutions that evolved into the European Union.

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 maison natale, est aujourd'hui un musée consacré à sa vie et à son œuvre.

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 born in 1876. A nurse mishap resulted in an accident where the infant Anatole lost the proper use of his leg and he remained crippled for the rest of his life. He never married but had several relationships. A brilliant mind, he studied in Agen before attending the Collège Stanislas, a famous Roman Catholic school in Paris, where he became friend with writer to be Henry de Jouvenel and Roman Catholic activist Marc Sangnier.

Louise Labé

3 Louise Charlin Perrin Labé,, also identified as La Belle Cordière, was a French poet of the Renaissance born in Lyon, the daughter of wealthy ropemaker Pierre Charly and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet.

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 propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to be executed during peacetime. Other convicted co-conspirators were sentenced to prison, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working in Los Alamos, was convicted in the United Kingdom.

William of St-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 French Cross Country Champion in 1928. Arrested by the Nazis when returning from an attempt to rescue her brother from a prison camp in 1940, she died in 1941 in Paris as a result of her imprisonment.

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 écrivaine et poétesse française.

Pierre Bachelet

3 Pierre Bachelet was a French singer-songwriter and film score composer. He was also known as Andrew Bacson.

Michel Berger

3 Michel Jean Hamburger, known professionally as Michel Berger, was a French singer and songwriter. He was a leading figure of France's pop music scene for two decades as a singer; as a songwriter, he was active for such artists as his wife France Gall, Françoise Hardy or Johnny Hallyday. He died of a heart attack at age 44.

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 le Nord-Pas-de-Calais, à la tête d'un groupe de Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) qui ont commis plus d'une vingtaine de sabotages contre les Allemands après avoir participé pour la plupart à la grève des mineurs du Nord-Pas-de-Calais (1941).

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 jusqu'en 1939 et exclusivement de véhicules industriels à partir de cette date.

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 Generation of '98. His work, initially modernist, evolved towards an intimate form of symbolism with romantic traits. He gradually developed a style characterised by both an engagement with humanity on one side and an almost Taoist contemplation of existence on the other, a synthesis that according to Machado echoed the most ancient popular wisdom. In Gerardo Diego's words, Machado "spoke in verse and lived in poetry."

Pierre Sauvaigo

3 Pierre Sauvaigo est un homme politique français, né le 3 mai 1921 à Paris et décédé le 28 février 1983 à Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Rudolf Diesel

3 Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer who is famous for having invented 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 an American Founding Father, military officer, and politician who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Second Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army in 1775, Washington led Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War and then served as president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which drafted and ratified the Constitution of the United States and established the U.S. federal government. Washington has thus become commonly known as the "Father of his Country".

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 between 1952 and 1962, as well as president of the Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA) from 1954 to 1962. Crabos represented France at rugby in the 1920 Summer Olympics, the team won the silver medal.

Yitzhak Rabin

3 Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth prime minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–1977, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.

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 philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

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 given as 25 October 285 or 286.

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 La Turbie and had been known as Monte-Carlo-Supérieur.

Antoine Bourdelle

3 Antoine Bourdelle, born Émile Antoine Bordelles, was an influential and prolific 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 Deco movement and the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture.

Palisot de Beauvois

3 Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot, Baron de Beauvois was a French naturalist and zoologist.   

Marie Marvingt

3 Marie Marvingt was a French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements including those of swimming, cycling, mountain climbing, winter sports, ballooning, flying, riding, gymnastics, athletics, rifle shooting, and fencing. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. She was a record-breaking balloonist, an aviator, and during World War I she became the first female combat pilot. She was also a qualified surgical nurse, was the first trained and certified flight nurse in the world, and worked for the establishment of air ambulance services throughout the world. In 1903 M. Château de Thierry de Beaumanoir named her the fiancée of danger, which newspapers used to describe her for the rest of her life. It is also included on the commemorative plaque on the façade of the house where she lived at 8 Place de la Carrière, Nancy.

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