A

• Isabelle Adjani
  Isabelle Adjani
  Isabelle Yasmine Adjani is a French film actress and singer. Adjani has appeared in 30 films since 1970. She holds the record for most César Awards for Best Actress with five, for Possession , One Deadly Summer , Camille Claudel , Queen Margot and Skirt Day...
  
  
• Renée Adorée
  Renée Adorée
  Renée Adorée was a French actress who had appeared in Hollywood silent movies during the 1920s.-Early life:...
  
  
• Anouk Aimée
  Anouk Aimée
  Anouk Aimée is a French film actress. Aimée has appeared in 70 films since 1947. She began her film career in 1947 at age 14. In 1958 she portrayed the tragic artist Jeanne Hébuterne in the film Les Amants de Montparnasse...
  
  
• Floanne Ankah
  Floanne Ankah
  Floanne Ankah is an actress and filmmaker also known as a singer under the mononym Floanne. She was born and raised in France, and has lived in New York City since 2000...
  
  
• Arletty
  Arletty
  Arletty was a French actress, singer, and fashion model.-Life and career:Arletty was born Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat in Courbevoie , to a working-class family. Her early career was dominated by the music hall, and she later appeared in plays and cabaret. Arletty was a stage performer for ten years...
  
  
• Antonin Artaud
  Antonin Artaud
  Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
  
  
• Fanny Ardant
  Fanny Ardant
  Fanny Marguerite Judith Ardant is a French actress. She has appeared in more than fifty motion pictures since 1976. Ardant won the César Award for Best Actress in 1997 for her performance in Pédale douce.-Early life:...
  
  
• Jeanne Aubert
  Jeanne Aubert
  Jeanne Aubert was a French singer and actress.Born Marguerite Perrinot in Paris, France to an aristocratic father and a former flower girl, she was pushed by her mother into showbusiness. At age five, she began performing on stage at the Théâtre du Châtelet...
  
  
• Jean-Louis Aubert
  Jean-Louis Aubert
  Jean-Louis Aubert is a French guitarist, singer and songwriter. He has also composed music for the cinema and for television, including the soundtrack for the film I've Loved You So Long, starring Kristin Scott Thomas .In 1976, he co-founded the rock band Téléphone...
  
  
• Jean-Pierre Aumont
  Jean-Pierre Aumont
  -Early life:Aumont was born Jean-Pierre Philippe Salomons in Paris, the son of Suzanne and Alexandre Salomons, owner of La Maison du Blanc . His mother's uncle was well-known stage actor Georges Berr. His father was from a Dutch Jewish family and his mother's family were French Jews...
  
  
• Claude Autant-Lara
  Claude Autant-Lara
  Claude Autant-Lara , was a French film director and later Member of the European Parliament .-Biography:...
  
  
• Daniel Auteuil
  Daniel Auteuil
  Daniel Auteuil is a French film, television and theatre actor.-Early life and education:He was born in Algiers, French Algeria.-Career:...
  
  
• Charles Aznavour
  Charles Aznavour
  Charles Aznavour, OC is an Armenian-French singer, songwriter, actor, public activist and diplomat. Besides being one of France's most popular and enduring singers, he is also one of the best-known singers in the world...
  
  

B–C

• Brigitte Bardot
  Brigitte Bardot
  Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...
  
  
• Emmanuelle Béart
  Emmanuelle Béart
  Emmanuelle Béart is a French film actress, who has appeared in over 50 film and television productions since 1972. Béart won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources . She has been nominated a further seven times for Most Promising Actress and Best Actress.- Early...
  
  
• Jean-Paul Belmondo
  Jean-Paul Belmondo
  Jean-Paul Belmondo is a French actor initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s.-Career:Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris, Belmondo did not perform well in school, but developed a passion for boxing and football."Did you box professionally very long?" "Not very long...
  
  
• François Berléand
  François Berléand
  François Berléand is a French actor.Berléand was born in Paris, France of . He plays Gilles Triquet, the officer manager and equivalent of David Brent in Le Bureau, the French version of The Office, produced by Canal+. He released a book about his childhood in 2006, Le fils de l'homme invisible...
  
  
• Charles Berling
  Charles Berling
  Charles Berling is a French actor, director, scenario writer and producer born on April 30, 1958 in Saint-Mandé in Val de Marne .-Biography:Son of a marine physician, he is also the nephew of the literary critic Raymond Picard...
  
  
• Suzanne Bianchetti
  Suzanne Bianchetti
  Suzanne Bianchetti was a film actress.Suzanne Bianchetti appeared in her first film in the early 1900s and quickly became one of France's most loved and respected actresses...
  
  
• Juliette Binoche
  Juliette Binoche
  Juliette Binoche is a French actress, artist and dancer. She has appeared in more than 40 feature films, been recipient of numerous international accolades, is a published author and has appeared on stage across the world. Coming from an artistic background, she began taking acting lessons during...
  
  
• Bernard Blier
  Bernard Blier
  Bernard Blier was a French character actor. His rotund features and premature baldness allowed him to often play cuckolded husbands in his early career. He proved to be one of France's most versatile and sought-after character actors, performing interchangeably in comedies and dramas...
  
  
• Sandrine Bonnaire
  Sandrine Bonnaire
  Sandrine Bonnaire is a French actress, who has appeared in more than 40 films including Hollywood movies.Bonnaire was born in the town of Gannat, Allier, in the Auvergne region. She was born into a working-class family, the seventh of eleven children. Her acting career began at the age of 16 in...
  
  
• Élodie Bouchez
  Élodie Bouchez
  Élodie Bouchez-Bangalter is a French actress. She is best known in the United States for her role as Renée Rienne on the fifth and final season of the television show Alias...
  
  
• Bourvil
  Bourvil
  André Bourvil, born André Robert Raimbourg was a French actor and singer best known for his roles in comedy, most notably in his collaboration with Louis de Funès in La Grande Vadrouille .-Biography:His father was killed in the First World War before Bourvil was born...
  
  
• Dany Boon
  Dany Boon
  Dany Boon is a French comedian who has acted both on the stage and the screen. He takes his stage name from the television show Daniel Boone.-Life and career:...
  
  
• Charles Boyer
  Charles Boyer
  Charles Boyer was a French actor who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. After receiving an education in drama, Boyer started on the stage, but he found success in movies during the 1930s. His memorable performances were among the era's most highly praised romantic dramas,...
  
  
• Guillaume Canet
  Guillaume Canet
  Guillaume Canet is a French actor and film director.Canet began his career in theatre and television before moving to film. He starred in several films like Joyeux Noël, Love Me If You Dare and The Beach...
  
  
• Capucine
  Capucine
  Capucine was a French actress and fashion model best known for her comedic roles in The Pink Panther and What's New Pussycat? . She appeared in 36 films and 17 television productions between 1948 and 1990...
  
  
• Martine Carol
  Martine Carol
  -Biography:Born Marie-Louise Jeanne Nicolle Mourer in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, , she studied acting under René Simon , making her stage debut in 1940 and her first motion picture in 1943. One of the most beautiful women in film, she was frequently cast as an elegant blonde seductress...
  
  
• Leslie Caron
  Leslie Caron
  Leslie Claire Margaret Caron is a French film actress and dancer, who appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. In 2006, her performance in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit won her an Emmy for guest actress in a drama series...
  
  
• Isabelle Carré
  Isabelle Carré
  Isabelle Carré is a French actress, who has appeared in more than 40 films since 1989. She won a César Award for Best Actress for her role in Se souvenir des belles choses , and has been nominated a further six times, for Beau fixe , Le Hussard sur le toit , La Femme défendue , Les Sentiments ,...
  
  
• Vincent Cassel
  Vincent Cassel
  Vincent Cassel is a Cesar award winning French actor probably best known to English-speaking audiences through his performances in the Ocean's Trilogy of films and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.-Personal life:...
  
  
• Jean-Pierre Cassel
  Jean-Pierre Cassel
  Jean-Pierre Cassel was a French actor.-Life and career:Cassel was born Jean-Pierre Crochon in Paris, the son of Louise-Marguerite , an opera singer, and Georges Crochon, a doctor. Cassel was discovered by Gene Kelly as he tap danced on stage, and later cast in the 1957 film The Happy Road...
  
  
• Laetitia Casta
  Laetitia Casta
  Laetitia Marie Laure Casta is a French model and actress.-Early life:Laetitia Casta was born in Pont-Audemer, Normandy, France. Her mother, Line Blin, is from Normandy. Her father, Dominique Casta, is from Corsica. She has an older brother, Jean-Baptiste, and a younger sister, Marie-Ange...
  
  
• Robert Clary
  Robert Clary
  Robert Clary is a French-born American actor, published author, and lecturer, best known for his role in the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes as Corporal LeBeau.-Early life and career:...
  
  
• Grégoire Colin
  Grégoire Colin
  Grégoire Colin is a French actor, producer, screenwriter, and director.-Career:Grégoire started acting on the French stage at age 12. He first caught the eye of critics in the 1992 Agnieszka Holland's psychological family drama Olivier, Olivier when he was just 17...
  
  
• Marion Cotillard
  Marion Cotillard
  Marion Cotillard is a French actress and singer. She garnered critical acclaim for her roles in films such as La Vie en Rose, My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument, Taxi, Furia and Jeux d'enfants...
  
  
• Clotilde Courau
• Darry Cowl
  Darry Cowl
  Darry Cowl, born André Darricau, was a French actor and musician. He won a César Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 2004 for his role as a concierge in Pas sur la bouche , which proved to be his last appearance.He was born in Vittel, and came to prominence when he was cast by Sacha...
  
  

D–L

• Béatrice Dalle
  Béatrice Dalle
  -Biography:Dalle was born in Brest, Finistère, France, as Béatrice Cabarrou. In 1985 she married the painter Jean-François Dalle but they divorced in 1988....
  
  
• Lili Damita
  Lili Damita
  Lili Damita was a French actress who appeared in 33 movies between 1922 and 1937.-Early life and education:...
  
  
• Danielle Darrieux
  Danielle Darrieux
  Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux is a French actress and singer, who has appeared in more than 110 films since 1931. She is one of France's great movie stars and her eight-decade career is among the longest in film history....
  
  
• Alain Delon
  Alain Delon
  Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon is a French actor. He rose quickly to stardom, and by the age of 23 was already being compared to French actors such as Gérard Philipe and Jean Marais, as well as American actor James Dean. He was even called the male Brigitte Bardot...
  
  
• Danièle Delorme
  Danièle Delorme
  Danièle Delorme is an French actress and film producer....
  
  
• Julie Delpy
  Julie Delpy
  Julie Delpy is a French-American actress, director, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter. She studied filmmaking at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and has directed, written, and acted in more than 30 films, including Europa Europa , The Voyager , Three Colors: White , Before Sunrise...
  
  
• Catherine Deneuve
  Catherine Deneuve
  Catherine Deneuve is a French actress. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof and mysterious beauties in films such as Repulsion and Belle de jour . Deneuve was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1993 for her performance in Indochine; she also won César Awards for that...
  
  
• Élisabeth Depardieu
  Élisabeth Depardieu
  Élisabeth Depardieu is a French actress, writer, co-producer, ex-wife of actor Gerard Depardieu and mother of actors Guillaume Depardieu and Julie Depardieu.-Personal life:...
  
  
• Gérard Depardieu
  Gérard Depardieu
  Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor and filmmaker. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite and has twice won the César Award for Best Actor...
  
  
• Guillaume Depardieu
  Guillaume Depardieu
  Guillaume Depardieu was a French actor, winner of a César Award, and the elder son of Gerard Depardieu.-Personal life:...
  
  
• Patrick Dewaere
  Patrick Dewaere
  Patrick Dewaere was a French film actor. He was born in Saint-Brieuc, Côtes-d'Armor, son of French actress Mado Maurin. His five siblings, Jean-Pierre Maurin , Yves-Marie Maurin , Dominique Maurin , Jean-Francois Maurin and Marie-Veronique Maurin Patrick Dewaere (26 January 1947 – 16 July 1982)...
  
  
• Arielle Dombasle
  Arielle Dombasle
  Arielle Dombasle is a French-American singer, actress, director and model. Her breakthrough roles were in Éric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Blue Villa...
  
  
• Michel Drucker
  Michel Drucker
  Michel Drucker, CQ is a popular French journalist and TV host.Michel Drucker was born in Vire, Calvados, in Normandy. Jacques Drucker, a doctor, is Michel's younger brother, and Jean Drucker, a TV top executive, is Michel's older brother. He started a journalistic career in 1965 at the ORTF as...
  
  
• Morgane Dubled
  Morgane Dubled
  Morgane Dubled , is a French model.-Early life:Dubled was first scouted at the age of 16 by a model scout for Elite Model Management in her hometown of Nice, France, in 2001...
  
  
• Anny Dupérey
  Anny Duperey
  -External links:*...
  
  
• Romain Duris
  Romain Duris
  -Life:Born on 28 May 1974 in Paris, son of an engineer-architect father, Duris studied arts at university. He was noticed in the street by a casting director whilst waiting in a queue in 1993 and offered a part in the 1994 Cédric Klapisch film Le péril jeune...
  
  
• Nicolas Duvauchelle
  Nicolas Duvauchelle
  Nicolas Duvauchelle is a French actor.-Biography:Duvauchelle starred in numerous movies including Lightweight, À tout de suite and Le Grand Meaulnes...
  
  
• Fernandel
  Fernandel
  Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin , better known as Fernandel, was a French actor and singer. Born in Marseille, France, he was a comedy star who first gained popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues...
  
  
• Brigitte Fossey
  Brigitte Fossey
  Brigitte Fossey, born in Tourcoing, Nord, is a French actress.-Early years:The daughter of a schoolteacher, Fossey was five years old when she was cast by director René Clément to star in his film, Forbidden Games. Fossey played the role of an innocent child orphaned by World War II...
  
  
• Louis de Funès
  Louis de Funès
  Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza was a very popular French actor who is one of the giants of French comedy alongside André Bourvil and Fernandel...
  
  
• Félicité du Jeu
  Félicité Du Jeu
  Félicité Du Jeu is a French actress. She is best known for her role as DC Stella Goodman in the BBC cold case show Waking The Dead. A multilingual actress, Du Jeu acts in French and English...
  
  
• Jean Gabin
  Jean Gabin
  -Biography:Born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in Paris, he grew up in the village of Mériel in the Seine-et-Oise département, about 22 mi north of Paris. The son of cabaret entertainers, he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly...
  
  
• Annie Girardot
  Annie Girardot
  Annie Girardot was a French actress.She began performing in 1955, making her film debut in Treize à table. Girardot won the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti in 1956, and in 1977 won the César Award for Best Actress portraying the title character in Docteur Françoise Gailland...
  
  
• Judith Godrèche
• Eva Green
  Eva Green
  Eva Gaëlle Green is a French actress and model.Green performed in theatre before making her film debut in The Dreamers , which generated controversy over her numerous nude scenes. She achieved greater fame for her parts in Kingdom of Heaven , and in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, for...
  
  
• Sacha Guitry
  Sacha Guitry
  Alexandre-Pierre Georges Guitry was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the Boulevard theatre.- Biography :...
  
  
• Isabelle Huppert
  Isabelle Huppert
  Isabelle Anne Madeleine Huppert is a French actress who has appeared in over 90 film and television productions since 1971. She has had 14 films in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Best Actress Award twice, for Violette Nozière and La pianiste . She is also the most...
  
  
• Irène Jacob
  Irène Jacob
  Irène Marie Jacob is a French-born Swiss actress considered one of the preeminent French actresses of her generation. Jacob gained international recognition and acclaim through her work with Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski, who cast her in the lead role of The Double Life of Véronique...
  
  
• Claude Jade
  Claude Jade
  Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade , was a French actress, known for starring as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses , Bed and Board and Love on the Run . Jade acted in theatre, film and television...
  
  
• Marlène Jobert
  Marlène Jobert
  Marlène Jobert is a French actress, singer and author.Jobert was born in Algiers, Algeria , the daughter of Andrée and a father who flew for the French Air Force. She is a Pied-Noir of Jewish heritage. She came to Metropolitan France when aged 8...
  
  
• Valérie Kaprisky
  Valérie Kaprisky
  Valérie Kaprisky is a French actress.She was born Valerie Chérès in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. Kaprisky is her mother's maiden name....
  
  
• Mélanie Laurent
  Mélanie Laurent
  Mélanie Laurent is a French actress, director, singer and writer. She is best known to international audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, for which she won Best Actress from the Online Film Critics Society and the Austin Film Critics...
  
  
• Jean-Pierre Léaud
  Jean-Pierre Léaud
  -Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
  
  
• Virginie Ledoyen
  Virginie Ledoyen
  Virginie Fernandez , known by her stage name Virginie Ledoyen, is a French actress.-Life and career:She was born in Aubervilliers, Paris, the daughter of Olga, a restaurateur, and Bernard Fernandez, a merchant who sold cleaning products. Her paternal grandfather was Spanish...
  
  
• Noemie Lenoir
  Noémie Lenoir
  Noémie Lenoir is a French model and actress of African and European descent.-Career:Lenoir was first spotted by Ford Models when she was 16 years old. In 1995, Lenoir signed with L'Oréal, and has since appeared in their advertisements alongside Laetitia Casta and long-term model and actress Andie...
  
  
• Max Linder
  Max Linder
  Max Linder was an influential French pioneer of silent film.-Birth and early career:Born Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle in Saint-Loubès, Gironde, France to a Catholic wine-growing family, he grew up with a passion for the theatre and as a young man joined a theatre troupe touring the country...
  
  
• Sheryfa Luna
  Sheryfa Luna
  Sheryfa Luna is a French R&B singer born to an Algerian father and a French mother.She won the fourth series of the French edition of popular Popstars in October 2007....
  
  

M–W

• Marcel Marceau
  Marcel Marceau
  Marcel Marceau was an internationally acclaimed French actor and mime most famous for his persona as Bip the Clown.-Early years:...
  
  
• Sophie Marceau
  Sophie Marceau
  Sophie Marceau is a French actress director, screenwriter, and author. She has appeared in 38 films. As a teenager, Marceau achieved popularity with her debut films La boum and La boum 2 , receiving a César Award for Most Promising Actress...
  
  
• Jean Marais
  Jean Marais
  -Biography:A native of Cherbourg, France, Marais starred in several movies directed by Jean Cocteau, for a time his lover, most famously Beauty and the Beast and Orphée ....
  
  
• Olivier Martinez
  Olivier Martinez
  Olivier Martinez is a French film actor. He became known after roles in several French films such as Un, deux, trois, soleil , which garnered him the César Award for "Most Promising Actor", The Horseman on the Roof , and The Chambermaid on the Titanic...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Maunier
  Jean-Baptiste Maunier
  Jean-Baptiste Maunier , nicknamed JB or Jean-Bapt, is a French actor and singer famous for his role in the 2004 French film, Les Choristes.- Early life :...
  
  
• Miou-Miou
  Miou-Miou
  Miou-Miou is a French actress. In her career she has worked with a number of international directors, including Michel Gondry, Bertrand Blier, Yves Boisset, Claude Berri, Jacques Deray, Michel Deville, Diane Kurys, Radu Mihăileanu, Patrice Leconte, Joseph Losey and Louis Malle.-Career:She was born...
  
  
• Mistinguett
  Mistinguett
  Mistinguett was a French actress and singer, whose birth name was Jeanne Bourgeois. She was at one time the best-paid female entertainer in the world...
  
  
• Yves Montand
  Yves Montand
  -Early life:Montand was born Ivo Livi in Monsummano Terme, Italy, the son of poor peasants Giuseppina and Giovanni Livi, a broommaker. Montand's mother was a devout Catholic, while his father held strong Communist beliefs. Because of the Fascist regime in Italy, Montand's family left for France in...
  
  
• Jeanne Moreau
  Jeanne Moreau
  Jeanne Moreau is a French actress, singer, screenwriter and director.She made her theatrical debut in 1947, and established herself as one of the leading actresses of the Comédie-Française...
  
  
• Michèle Morgan
  Michèle Morgan
  Michèle Morgan is a French film actress, who was a leading lady for three decades.- Career :Morgan was born Simone Renée Roussel in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, a western suburb of Paris....
  
  
• Musidora
  Musidora
  Musidora was the stage name of Jeanne Roques, a popular French silent film actress. She became famous for her vamp roles in such film serials as Les Vampires and Judex, in which she developed a persona comparable to that of Theda Bara...
  
  
• Gérard Philipe
  Gérard Philipe
  Gérard Philipe was a prominent French actor, who had appeared in 34 films between 1944 and 1959.-Career:...
  
  
• Michel Piccoli
• Clémence Poésy
  Clémence Poésy
  Clémence Poésy is a French actress and fashion model. Since starting on the stage as a child, Poésy had dramatic education, and has been active on both film and television since 1999, including some English-language productions...
  
  
• Alexia Portal
  Alexia Portal
  Alexia Portal is a French actress best known for her role as Béatrice Romand's son's girlfriend in the 1998 film Autumn Tale.-Filmography:*"Navarro"**Jour de colère TV Episode .... Sonya**Manipulation TV Episode .... Sophie...
  
  
• Yvonne Printemps
  Yvonne Printemps
  Yvonne Printemps was a French singer and actress.-Biography:Born Yvonne Wigniolle, she made her debut at the age of 12 in a revue at La Cigale in Paris. She was dancing at the Folies Bergère at age 13...
  
  
• Pérette Pradier
• Jérôme Pradon
  Jérôme Pradon
  Jérôme Pradon is an actor and singer who has performed in the West End, Paris and various other places around the world. He was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 3 June 1964.- Theatre :...
  
  
• Rachel (actress)
  Rachel (actress)
  Elisabeth "Eliza, or Élisa" Rachel Félix , better known only as Mademoiselle Rachel , was a French actress....
  
   pseudonym for Elisa-Rachel Félix
• Gabrielle Réjane
  Gabrielle Réjane
  Gabrielle Réjane was the stage name of Gabrielle-Charlotte Reju, , a French actress.Born in Paris, the daughter of an actor, she became a pupil of Régnier at the Conservatoire, and took the second prize for comedy in 1874. Her debut was made the next year, during which she played attractively a...
  
  
• Jean Reno
  Jean Reno
  Jean Reno is a French actor. Working in French, English, Spanish and Italian, he has appeared not only in numerous successful Hollywood productions such as The Pink Panther, Godzilla, The Da Vinci Code, Mission: Impossible, Ronin and Couples Retreat, but also in European productions such as the...
  
  
• Pierre Richard
  Pierre Richard
  Pierre Richard is a popular French actor best known for the roles of a clumsy daydreamer in comedy films...
  
  
• Jean Rochefort
  Jean Rochefort
  Jean Rochefort is a French actor, with a career that has spanned over five decades.Rochefort was born in Paris, France. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen He was 19 years old when he entered the Centre d'Art Dramatique de la rue Blanche. Later he joined the Conservatoire National...
  
  
• Béatrice Romand
  Béatrice Romand
  Béatrice Romand is a French actress best known for her work with director Éric Rohmer in such films as Claire's Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon, A Good Marriage, Le Rayon vert and Autumn Tale....
  
  
• Philippine de Rothschild
  Philippine de Rothschild
  Baroness Philippine Mathilde Camille de Rothschild is the owner of the French winery Château Mouton Rothschild. She also has acted under the stage name Philippine Pascale....
  
  
• Nathalie Roussel
  Nathalie Roussel
  Nathalie Roussel is a French actress of stage, television and film who is best known for her role in the 1991 films My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle.-Filmography:*Moments de vérité .... Marie...
  
  
• Michel Roux
  Michel Roux (actor)
  Michel Roux was a French actor.He was also the French Voice for many American and Italian actors, such as Jack Lemmon, Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and Tony Curtis....
  
  
• Emmanuelle Seigner
  Emmanuelle Seigner
  Emmanuelle Seigner is a French actress, former fashion model, and singer, best known as the wife of Academy Award winning director Roman Polanski, and for her roles in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , and Frantic...
  
  
• Delphine Seyrig
  Delphine Seyrig
  Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig was a stage and film actress and a film director.-Early life:...
  
  
• Simone Signoret
  Simone Signoret
  Simone Signoret was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top...
  
  
• Audrey Tautou
  Audrey Tautou
  Audrey Justine Tautou is a French model and film actress, best known for playing the title character in the award-winning 2001 film Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, Sophie Neveu in the 2006 thriller The Da Vinci Code, Irène in Priceless and Coco Chanel in Coco avant Chanel...
  
  
• Jean-Louis Trintignant
  Jean-Louis Trintignant
  Jean-Louis Trintignant is a French actor who has enjoyed an international acclaim. He won the Best Actor Award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.-Career:...
  
  
• Marie Trintignant
  Marie Trintignant
  -Early life:She was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, the daughter of actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and his second wife Nadine Marquand. She first appeared on screen aged 4 in her mother's film, My Love, My Love. When Marie's baby sister Pauline died when Marie was 8, she became withdrawn and virtually...
  
  
• Gaspard Ulliel
  Gaspard Ulliel
  Gaspard Ulliel is a French film actor and model. He began appearing in made-for-television films during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and then began to be known as a film actor in France, as well as starring in the title role in the thriller Hannibal Rising.-Life and career:Ulliel was born in...
  
  
• Michael Vartan
  Michael Vartan
  Michael S. Vartan is a French-American film and television actor. He is probably best known for the role of Michael Vaughn on the American television action drama Alias...
  
  
• Hervé Villechaize
  Hervé Villechaize
  Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize was a French actor who achieved worldwide recognition for his role as Mr. Roarke's assistant, Tattoo, in the television series Fantasy Island...
  
  
• Lambert Wilson
  Lambert Wilson
  Lambert Wilson is a French actor. He is internationally known for his portrayal of The Merovingian in The Matrix He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the son of Georges Wilson, who was an actor, theatrical manager and director of the Theatre National de Paris.Wilson screen tested for The...
  
  

Architects

• Jacques-François Blondel
  Jacques-François Blondel
  Jacques-François Blondel was a French architect. He was the grandson of François Blondel , whose course of architecture had appeared in four volumes in 1683 -Biography:...
  
  
• Germain Boffrand
  Germain Boffrand
  Germain Boffrand was one of the most gifted French architects of his generation. A pupil of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Germain Boffrand was one of the main creators of the precursor to Rococo called the style Régence, and in his interiors, of the Rococo itself...
  
  
• Étienne-Louis Boullée
  Étienne-Louis Boullée
  Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today.- Life :...
  
  
• Salomon de Brosse
  Salomon de Brosse
  Salomon de Brosse was the most influential early 17th-century French architect, a major influence on François Mansart. Salomon was from a prominent Huguenot family, the grandson through his mother of the designer Jacques I Androuet du Cerceau and the son of the architect Jean de Brosse...
  
  
• Libéral Bruant
  Libéral Bruant
  Libéral Bruant , was a French architect best known as the designer of the Hôtel des Invalides, Paris, now dominated by the dome erected by Jules Hardouin Mansart, his collaborator in earlier stages of the construction...
  
  
• Androuet du Cerceau family
  Androuet du Cerceau
  Androuet du Cerceau was a family of French architects and designers active in the 16th and early 17th century.*Jacques I Androuet du Cerceau *Jean Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau...
  
  
• Le Corbusier
  Le Corbusier
  Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
  
   pseudonym for Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Swiss-born)
• Philibert Delorme
• Gustave Eiffel
  Gustave Eiffel
  Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer from the École Centrale Paris, an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures...
  
  
• Pierre Francois Leonard Fontaine
  Pierre François Léonard Fontaine
  Pierre François Léonard Fontaine was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer.Starting from 1794 Fontaine worked in such close partnership with Charles Percier, originally his friend from student days, that it is difficult to distinguish their work...
  
  
• Ange-Jacques Gabriel
  Ange-Jacques Gabriel
  Ange-Jacques Gabriel was the most prominent French architect of his generation.Born to a Parisian family of architects and initially trained by the royal architect Robert de Cotte and his father , whom he assisted in the creation of the Place Royale at Bordeaux , the younger Gabriel...
  
  
• Charles Garnier
  Charles Garnier (architect)
  Charles Garnier was a French architect, perhaps best known as the architect of the Palais Garnier and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.-Early life:...
  
  
• Tony Garnier
  Tony Garnier (architect)
  Tony Garnier was a noted architect and city planner. He was most active in his hometown of Lyon.Garnier is considered the forerunner of 20th century French architects...
  
  
• Hector Guimard
  Hector Guimard
  Hector Guimard was an architect, who is now the best-known representative of the French Art Nouveau style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....
  
  
• Villard de Honnecourt
  Villard de Honnecourt
  Villard de Honnecourt was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio of 33 sheets of parchment containing about 250 drawings dating from the 1220s/1240s, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris...
  
  
• Pierre Jeanneret
  Pierre Jeanneret
  Pierre Jeanneret was a Swiss architect who collaborated with his more famous brother Charles Edouard Jeanneret for about twenty years....
  
   (Swiss-born)
• Henri Labrouste
  Henri Labrouste
  Pierre François Henri Labrouste was a French architect from the famous École des Beaux Arts school of architecture. After a six year stay in Rome, Labrouste opened an architectural training workshop, which quickly became the center of the Rationalist view...
  
  
• Claude Nicolas Ledoux
  Claude Nicolas Ledoux
  Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was one of the earliest exponents of French Neoclassical architecture. He used his knowledge of architectural theory to design not only in domestic architecture but town planning; as a consequence of his visionary plan for the Ideal City of Chaux, he became known as a utopian...
  
  
• Pierre Lescot
  Pierre Lescot
  Pierre Lescot was a French architect active during the French Renaissance, "the man who was first responsible for the implantation of pure and correct classical architecture in France." He was born in Paris....
  
  
• André Lurçat
  André Lurçat
  André Lurçat was a French modernist architect, landscape architect, furniture designer and city planner, a founding member of CIAM, and active in the rebuilding in French cities after World War II...
  
  
• Robert Mallet-Stevens
  Robert Mallet-Stevens
  Robert Mallet-Stevens was a French architect and designer. Along with Le Corbusier he is widely regarded as the most influential figure in French architecture in the period between the two World Wars....
  
  
• Francois Mansart
  François Mansart
  François Mansart was a French architect credited with introducing classicism into Baroque architecture of France...
  
  
• Jules Hardouin Mansart
  Jules Hardouin Mansart
  Jules Hardouin-Mansart was a French architect whose work is generally considered to be the apex of French Baroque architecture, representing the power and grandeur of Louis XIV...
  
  
• Louis Métezeau
  Louis Métezeau
  Louis Métezeau was a French architect.He was born in Dreux, Eure-et-Loir, the son of Thibault Métezeau, the brother of Clément II Métezeau and the nephew of Jean Métezeau. He was Premier Architecte du Roi of Henry IV of France. He undertook the construction of the Grande Galerie du Louvre and...
  
  
• Jean Nouvel
  Jean Nouvel
  Jean Nouvel is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture...
  
  
• Charles Percier
  Charles Percier
  Charles Percier was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer, who worked in a close partnership with Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, originally his friend from student days...
  
  
• Claude Perrault
  Claude Perrault
  Claude Perrault is best known as the architect of the eastern range of the Louvre Palace in Paris , but he also achieved success as a physician and anatomist, and as an author, who wrote treatises on physics and natural history.Perrault was born and died in Paris...
  
  
• Dominique Perrault
  Dominique Perrault
  Dominique Perrault is a French architect. He became world known for the design of the French National Library, distinguished with the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 1996....
  
  
• Auguste Perret
  Auguste Perret
  Auguste Perret was a French architect and a world leader and specialist in reinforced concrete construction. In 2005 his post-WWII reconstruction of Le Havre was declared by UNESCO one of the World Heritage Sites....
  
  
• Christian de Portzamparc
  Christian de Portzamparc
  Christian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urbanist. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1970 and has since been noted for his bold designs and artistic touch; his projects reflect a sensibility to their environment and the town is a founding principal of his...
  
  
• Jean Prouvé
  Jean Prouvé
  -Images:**- External links :***...
  
  
• Alain Provost
  Alain Provost
  Allain Provost is a French Landscape Architect. His works include designs for the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes, Paris, Parc André Citroën in Paris, the Jardin Diderot at La Défense, La Courneuve Park in Seine-Saint-Denis, Ile-de-France, the Eurotunnel in Calais , the Technocentre Renault,...
  
  
• Henri Sauvage
  Henri Sauvage
  Henri Sauvage was a French architectural designer.Sauvage was born in Rouen, France. After studying at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal, he opened a wallpaper shop in Paris for which he got orders from Hector Guimard and Louis Majorelle, he then...
  
  
• Jacques Germain Soufflot
• Louis Le Vau
  Louis Le Vau
  Louis Le Vau was a French Classical architect who worked for Louis XIV of France. He was born and died in Paris.He was responsible, with André Le Nôtre and Charles Le Brun, for the redesign of the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. His later works included the Palace of Versailles and his collaboration...
  
  
• Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Athletes

• André the Giant
  André the Giant
  André René Roussimoff , best known as André the Giant, was a French professional wrestler and actor. His best remembered acting role was that of Fezzik, the giant in the film The Princess Bride...
  
  , professional wrestler
• Sarah Abitbol
  Sarah Abitbol
  Sarah Abitbol is a French pair skater. Abitbol started skating when she was six, when she had a choice of swimming or ice skating for physical education. She won the bronze medal in pairs at the 2000 World Figure Skating Championships with partner Stéphane Bernadis. She missed six months for the...
  
  , pairs figure skater (with S. Bernadis); World Figure Skating Championship bronze
• Tariq Abdul-Wahad
  Tariq Abdul-Wahad
  Tariq Abdul-Wahad is a French former professional basketball player.Saint-Jean was born near Paris from parents who were natives of French Guiana. He changed his name to Tariq Abdul-Wahad after converting to Islam in 1997. He is the first player to be born and raised in France and play in the NBA...
  
  , basketball player (born Olivier Saint-Jean)
• Luc Alphand
  Luc Alphand
  Luc Alphand is a French former alpine skier and race car driver.- Skiing :Born in Briançon , Alphand made his World Cup skiing debut in 1984...
  
  , Alpine skier
• Jacques Anquetil
  Jacques Anquetil
  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...
  
  , cyclist
• Fabien Barthez
  Fabien Barthez
  Fabien Alain Barthez is a former French footballer goalkeeper who won honours with Manchester United and the French national team, with whom he won the 1998 FIFA World Cup and Euro 2000 and reached the final of the 2006 World Cup. He shares the record for the most World Cup finals clean sheets...
  
  , football player
• Marion Bartoli
  Marion Bartoli
  Marion Bartoli is a French professional tennis player and the current French no. 1. She has won seven Women's Tennis Association singles titles and three doubles titles. She was also a runner-up at the 2007 Wimbledon Championships....
  
  , tennis player
• Fabrice Benichou
  Fabrice Benichou
  -Amateur career:In 1984 Benichou made it to the finals for the French National Bantamweight championship, but lost.-Pro Boxing career:Benichou won the IBF World Super Bantamweight championship in 1989. He lost it the following year to Welcome Ncita....
  
  , world champion super bantamweight
  Super Bantamweight
  Super bantamweight is a weight division in professional boxing. The maximum weight for this division is 122 pounds, or roughly 55.34 kilograms....
  
   boxer
• Stéphane Bernadis
  Stephane Bernadis
  Stéphane Bernadis is a French pair skater. He won the bronze medal in pairs at the 2000 World Figure Skating Championships with partner Sarah Abitbol.-Results:...
  
  , pairs figure skater (with S. Abitbol)
• Alain Bernard
  Alain Bernard
  Alain Bernard is a French swimmer from Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône.Bernard won three medals in the 2008 Summer Olympics. After competing on the silver medal-winning French 4×100 m relay team, Bernard won the gold medal in the men's 100 m freestyle event.He held the same 100 m...
  
  , Olympic swimmer
• Serge Betsen
  Serge Betsen
  Serge Betsen Tchoua is a French rugby union player who plays as a flanker for London Wasps at club level and formerly for internationally...
  
  , Cameroon
  Cameroon
  Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...
  
   born French citizen, rugby player
• Serge Blanco
  Serge Blanco
  Serge Blanco is a former rugby union footballer who played fullback for Biarritz Olympique and the French national side, gaining 93 caps, 81 of them at fullback. His alternative position was wing....
  
  , Venezuela
  Venezuela
  Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
  
   born French citizen, rugby player
• Jean Bloch, Olympic silver football player
• Louison Bobet
  Louison Bobet
  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...
  
  , cyclist
• Surya Bonaly
  Surya Bonaly
  Surya Bonaly is a French professional figure skater. She is a three-time World Championship silver medalist, a five-time European Champion, the 1991 World Junior Champion and a nine-time French National Champion.-Career:...
  
  , figure skater
• Andrée Brunet
  Andrée Brunet
  Andrée Brunet was a French figure skater and two-time Olympic champion in pair skating.-Biography:...
  
   & Pierre Brunet, 1928 & 1932 Olympic skating Gold Medalists
• Alain Calmat
  Alain Calmat
  Alain Calmat is a French former competitive figure skater, surgeon, and politician. He is the 1964 Olympic silver medalist, the 1965 World Champion, the 1962–1964 European Champion, and the 1958 & 1962–1965 French national champion.-Career:Calmat started skating at the age of nine...
  
  , figure skater, Olympic silver, World Championship gold, silver, 2-time bronze
• Philippe Candeloro
  Philippe Candeloro
  Philippe Candeloro is a French figure skater who medalled at the 1994 and 1998 Winter Olympics.-Early years:Philippe Candeloro was born in Courbevoie, in France, the youngest of four children...
  
  , figure skater
• Eric Cantona
  Eric Cantona
  Eric Daniel Pierre Cantona is a French actor and former French international footballer. He played for Auxerre, Martigues, Marseille, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nîmes and Leeds United before ending his professional footballing career at Manchester United, where he won four Premier League titles in...
  
  , football player
• Georges Carpentier
  Georges Carpentier
  Georges Carpentier was a French boxer. He fought mainly as a light heavyweight and heavyweight in a career lasting from 1908-26. Nicknamed the "Orchid Man", he stood and his fighting weight ranged from...
  
  , world champion boxer
• Marcel Cerdan
  Marcel Cerdan
  Marcellin "Marcel" Cerdan was a French pied noir world boxing 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...
  
  , world champion boxer
• François Cevert
  François Cevert
  Albert François Cevert Goldenberg was a French racing driver who took part in the Formula One World Championship.-Family background:...
  
   (born "François Goldenberg"), Formula One
  Formula One
  Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
  
   driver
• Eugène Christophe
  Eugene Christophe
  Eugène Christophe was a French road bicycle racer and pioneer of cyclo-cross. He was a professional from 1904 until 1926. In 1919 he became the first rider to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour de France .Eugène Christophe rode 11 Tours de France and finished eight...
  
  , cyclist
• Albert Clément
  Albert Clément
  Albert Clément was a French motor racing driver. In 1904 he won the II Ardennes Cup race and finished third in the III Ardennes Cup race at Bastogne. He also finished second in the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island. In 1906 he finished third in the inaugural French Grand Prix and 4th in the...
  
   (c.1878-1907) motor racing driver
• Robert Cohen
  Robert Cohen (boxer)
  Robert Cohen was a French boxer. Cohen was world bantamweight champion from 1954 to 1956.-Boxing career:...
  
  , world champion bantamweight boxer
• Stéphanie Cohen-Aloro
  Stéphanie Cohen-Aloro
  Stéphanie Cohen-Aloro is a former French female professional tennis player.Her highest singles ranking was #61, achieved on October 5, 2003...
  
  , tennis player
• Eugène Criqui
  Eugène Criqui
  Eugène Criqui was a French boxer who held the world featherweight title in 1923.Criqui was born in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. He was a professional pipe-fitter before he turned professional in 1910. He won the French flyweight title in 1912. His boxing career was interrupted when he...
  
  , world champion boxer
• Jean Cruguet
  Jean Cruguet
  Jean Cruguet is an French-American thoroughbred horse racing jockey who won the United States Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing....
  
  , jockey of Seattle Slew
  Seattle Slew
  Seattle Slew was an American Thoroughbred race horse who won the United States Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in 1977, the tenth of eleven horses to accomplish the feat. He remains the only horse to win the Triple Crown while undefeated. In the Blood-Horse magazine List of the Top 100 U.S...
  
  
• Richard Dacoury
  Richard Dacoury
  Richard Dacoury is a former French basketball player, and the French sportsman to have won the most trophies.-Career in clubs:*CRO Lyon *CSP Limoges *Paris BR -Club honours:...
  
  , basketball player
• Pierre Darmon
  Pierre Darmon
  Pierre Darmon was a French tennis player.In 1963, he reached his highest world ranking, # 8. He was also ranked in the top 10 worldwide in 1958 and 1964.-Tennis career:...
  
  , tennis player, highest world ranking # 8
• Emile Delahaye
  Emile Delahaye
  Emile Delahaye was a French automotive pioneer who founded Delahaye Automobiles.Emile Delahaye was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, in the Loire Valley. He studied engineering at a trade school in the city of Angers, the same school later attended by Louis Delâge, another automobile pioneer...
  
  , race car pioneer
• Abou Diaby
  Abou Diaby
  Vassiriki Abou Diaby , commonly known as Abou Diaby, is a French footballer who plays for English club Arsenal in the Premier League and the France national team...
  
  , football player
• Boris Diaw
  Boris Diaw
  Boris Babacar Diaw-Riffiod, better known as Boris Diaw , is a French professional basketball player for JSA Bordeaux in France. He has also played in the National Basketball Association for the Atlanta Hawks, Phoenix Suns, and Charlotte Bobcats...
  
  , basketball player
• Marcel Desailly
  Marcel Desailly
  Marcel Desailly is a retired Ghanaian born French footballer and star of the France national football team squad, with whom he won the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000...
  
  , Ghana
  Ghana
  Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
  
   born French citizen, football player
• David Douillet
  David Douillet
  David Douillet is a French judoka and politician.Douillet was born in the city of Rouen. Standing at 1.90 meters and weighing 125 kilograms , he won the judo heavyweight gold medals in the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games in Atlanta and Sydney. He also gained four world titles and a European crown...
  
  , judo
• Yves Dreyfus
  Yves Dreyfus
  Yves Dreyfus is a Jewish French epee fencer.A 3-time member of the French Olympic épée team, Dreyfus won two medals during his Olympic career.-World Championships:...
  
  , épée fencer, Olympic bronze medal, French champion
• Isabelle Duchesnay
  Isabelle Duchesnay
  Isabelle Duchesnay is an ice dancer who competed for both Canada and France. She and her brother Paul Duchesnay were successful ice dance partners in figure skating, winning a world championship in 1991 and an Olympic silver medal in 1992.Raised in Canada, the Duchesnays started skating at an...
  
   & Paul Duchesnay
  Paul Duchesnay
  Paul Duchesnay was an ice dancer who competed for both Canada and France. He and his sister Isabelle Duchesnay were a successful pair in the sport, winning a world championship in 1991 and an Olympic silver medal in 1992.Raised in Canada, the Duchesnays started skating at an early age...
  
  , ice dancers
• Andre Ethier
  Andre Ethier
  Andre Everett Ethier , is a Major League Baseball outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers.In 2009, Ethier hit six walk off hits , which was the most by any player in the Major Leagues since 1974. His four walk-off home runs tied the Major League record for most in a season...
  
  , Major League Baseball
  Major League Baseball
  Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
  
   outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers
  Los Angeles Dodgers
  The Los Angeles Dodgers are a professional baseball team based in Los Angeles, California. The Dodgers are members of Major League Baseball's National League West Division. Established in 1883, the team originated in Brooklyn, New York, where it was known by a number of nicknames before becoming...
  
  
• Patrice Evra
  Patrice Evra
  Patrice Latyr Evra is a French international footballer who currently plays for English club Manchester United in the Premier League and the France national team. Originally an attacker, he primarily plays as a left back and is described as "the classic example of a modern full-back" who is...
  
  , football player: Monaco + Manchester United
• André Fabre
  André Fabre
  André Fabre is a French thoroughbred horse racing trainer.The son of a diplomat, Fabre graduated from university with a law degree but then decided to pursue a career in thoroughbred horse racing. He began by working in the stables as a groom then as a schooling rider...
  
  , horse trainer
• Laurent Fignon
  Laurent Fignon
  Laurent Patrick Fignon was a French professional road bicycle racer. He won the Tour de France in 1983 and in 1984. He missed winning it a third time, in 1989, by 8 seconds, the closest margin ever to decide the tour. He also won the Giro d'Italia in 1989, after having been the runner-up in 1984,...
  
  , cyclist
• Just Fontaine
  Just Fontaine
  Just "Justo" Fontaine is a former French football player.-Football career:He holds the record for most goals scored in a single FIFA World Cup finals tournament, with 13 in 1958...
  
  , football player
• Jacques Fouroux
  Jacques Fouroux
  Jacques Fouroux was a French rugby union player and coach. He captained France when they won the Grand Slam in 1977, and was the manager when the side repeated the feat in 1981 and 1987.-Player:...
  
  , rugby union player and coach
• Myriam Fox-Jerusalmi
  Myriam Fox-Jerusalmi
  Myriam Fox-Jerusalmi is a French slalom canoer who competed from the 1980s to the late 1990s.-Career:She is Jewish...
  
  , slalom canoer, Olympic bronze (K-1 slalom), 5 golds at ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships
  ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships
  The ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships are an international event in canoeing organized by the International Canoe Federation. The World Championships have taken place every year in non-Summer Olympic years since 2002. From 1949 to 1999, they had taken place in odd-numbered years...
  
   (2-time K-1, 3-time K-1 team)
• Pierre Galle
  Pierre Galle
  Pierre Galle is a French basketball player and coach. He was a member of the France national basketball team from 1968 to 1975. As a coach he coached ASVEL Basket from 1989 to 1991, Hyères-Toulon Var Basket from 1992 to 1994, and others. His brother Jean is also a coach....
  
  , basketball player and coach
• Lucien Gaudin
  Lucien Gaudin
  Lucien Gaudin was a French fencer and olympic champion both in foil and in épée competition....
  
  , fencer
• Yoann Gourcuff
  Yoann Gourcuff
  Yoann Miguel Gourcuff is a French international footballer who currently plays for French club Olympique Lyonnais in Ligue 1. He operates mainly as an attacking midfielder, but can also be utilized as a withdrawn striker and is described as a "playmaker of real quality" who "is an accomplished...
  
  , football player
• Stéphane Haccoun
  Stéphane Haccoun
  Stéphane Haccoun was a southpaw French boxer.He fought as a featherweight, a super featherweight, and a junior lightweight.He compiled a record of 35 wins , 4 losses, and 1 draw.-Link:...
  
  , boxer
• Rudy Haddad
  Rudy Haddad
  Rudy Haddad is a French footballer of Jewish Tunisian descent, currently with AJ Auxerre.Rudy, a previously highly touted young player, came up through the youth system at Paris St. Germain. On January 21, 2009, he was loaned out to Valenciennes FC.He was unable to hold down a regular first team...
  
  , football player
• Alphonse Halimi
  Alphonse Halimi
  Alphonse Halimi was a French boxer. He was nicknamed "la Petite Terreur."Time wrote of him: "Alphonse went to work with a street fighter's will. A grown-up guttersnipe from the back alleys of Algeria...
  
   ("La Petite Terreur"), world champion bantamweight boxer
• Marlène Harnois
  Marlène Harnois
  Marlène Harnois is a French taekwondo practitioner.She was born in Montreal, Canada.She won a bronze medal at the 2011 World Taekwondo Championships in Women's featherweight .- References :...
  
   (born 1986), taekwondo practitioner
• Thierry Henry
  Thierry Henry
  Thierry Daniel Henry is a French professional footballer who plays for the New York Red Bulls in Major League Soccer.Henry was born in Les Ulis, Essonne where he played for an array of local sides as a youngster and showed great promise as a goal-scorer. He was spotted by AS Monaco in 1990 and...
  
  , football player
• Bernard Hinault
  Bernard Hinault
  Bernard Hinault is a former French cyclist known for five victories in the Tour de France. He is one of only five cyclists to have won all three Grand Tours, and the only cyclist to have won each more than once. He won the Tour de France in 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 and 1985...
  
  , cyclist
• Cristobal Huet
  Cristobal Huet
  Cristobal Huet is a French professional ice hockey goaltender playing for Fribourg-Gottéron of the Swiss National League A, on loan from the Chicago Blackhawks of the National Hockey League. He developed his goaltending skills in Grenoble with Les Brûleurs de Loups. He has also played with the...
  
  , hockey player
• Constant Huret
  Constant Huret
  Constant Huret, nicknamed "le Boulanger" was a French long distance track racing cyclist. He was a professional from 1894 to 1902.-Major achievements:...
  
  , cyclist
• Olivier Jacque
  Olivier Jacque
  Olivier Jacque is a former Grand Prix motorcycle road racer.He was second in the 250cc European Championship in 1994, before moving on to the 250cc World Championship. He achieved a top ten finish in the points standings every year he competed...
  
  , motorcycle rider
• Rene Jacquot
  Rene Jacquot
  Rene Jacquot is a former professional boxer and world title holder.-Professional career:Jacquot turned professional in 1983 and captured the WBC Light Middleweight Title in 1989 with an upset win over Donald Curry. He lost the belt in his first defence to John Mugabi, via TKO in the first round...
  
  , boxer, underdog who became world champion
• Laurent Jalabert
  Laurent Jalabert
  Laurent Jalabert is a French former professional road racing cyclist, from 1989 to 2002. Affectionately known as "Jaja" , he won many one-day and stage races and was ranked number 1 in the 1990s...
  
  , cyclist
• Max Jean
  Max Jean
  Max Jean is a former racing driver from France. He participated in one Formula One Grand Prix driving a March for Frank Williams, in his home race on 4 July 1971. He scored no championship points....
  
  , Formula One
  Formula One
  Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
  
   driver
• Brian Joubert
  Brian Joubert
  Brian Joubert is a French figure skater. He is the 2007 World Champion, a three-time European champion, a seven-time French National champion, and the 2006-7 Grand Prix Final champion...
  
  , figure skater
• Jean-Claude Killy
  Jean-Claude Killy
  Jean-Claude Killy was an alpine ski racer, who dominated the sport in the late 1960s. He was a triple Olympic champion, winning the three alpine events at the 1968 Winter Olympics, becoming the most successful athlete there...
  
  , skier
• Raymond Kopa
  Raymond Kopa
  Raymond Kopa , is a former French football offensive midfielder, integral to the French national team of the 1950s....
  
  , football player
• Pascal Lavanchy
  Pascal Lavanchy
  Pascal Lavanchy was a French ice dancer. He competed with partner Sophie Moniotte. He won silver at the 1995 Europeans and bronze at Worlds in the same year.-Results:-References:...
  
  , ice dancer (with S. Moniotte)
• Suzanne Lenglen
  Suzanne Lenglen
  Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was a French tennis player who won 31 Championship titles between 1914 and 1926...
  
  , tennis player
• Alexandre Lippmann
  Alexandre Lippmann
  Alexandre Lippmann was a French Olympic epee fencer.-Olympics:He competed in 3 Olympiads for France, winning 5 medals, including 2 golds....
  
  , épée fencer, 2-time Olympic champion, 2-time silver, bronze
• Bixente Lizarazu
  Bixente Lizarazu
  Bixente Lizarazu is a former football left defender who played most notably for Girondins de Bordeaux and Bayern Munich, as well as the French national team.-Football career:...
  
  , football player
• Sébastien Loeb
  Sébastien Loeb
  Sébastien Loeb is a French rally driver currently driving for the Citroën World Rally Team in the World Rally Championship...
  
  , rally driver and 5-time champion
• Jeannie Longo
  Jeannie Longo
  Jeannie Longo is a French racing cyclist, multiple French champion and 13 times world champion. Longo is still active in cycling as of 2011 and is widely considered one of the greatest female cyclists of all time...
  
  , cyclist
• André Mahé
  André Mahé
  André Mahé was a French road bicycle racer. He was born in Paris, France. He was a professional rider from 1945 until 1954. He jointly won the 1949 classic cycle race Paris–Roubaix with Serse Coppi in controversial fashion...
  
  , cyclist
• Claude Makélélé
  Claude Makélélé
  Claude Makélelé Sinda is a retired football player who used to play as a defensive midfielder for Paris Saint-Germain in Ligue 1. Prior to joining Paris Saint-Germain, Makélélé played for Nantes, Olympique de Marseille, Celta Vigo, Real Madrid and Chelsea...
  
  , football player: PSG
  Paris Saint-Germain FC
  Paris Saint-Germain Football Club , also known simply as Paris Saint-Germain and familiarly as Paris SG or PSG , is a professional association football club based in Paris, France. The club was founded on 12 August 1970, thanks to the merger of Paris FC and Stade Saint-Germain...
  
  
• Laure Manaudou
  Laure Manaudou
  Laure Manaudou |Rhône]]) is a French Olympic, world and European champion swimmer. She is the daughter of a French father and a Dutch mother.- 2004 Olympics :...
  
  , swimmer
• Amélie Mauresmo
  Amélie Mauresmo
  Amélie Simone Mauresmo ; is a French former professional tennis player, and a former World No. 1. Mauresmo won two Grand Slam singles titles at the Australian Open and at Wimbledon....
  
  , tennis player
• Jose Meiffret
  Jose Meiffret
  José Meiffret was a cyclist who set a world motor-paced speed record of 204.73 km/h behind a Mercedes-Benz 300SL on the German Autobahn on July 16, 1962 at Freiburg Germany. This record was set on a bicycle setup with a 130-tooth chainring, weighing 20 kg and equipped with wooden...
  
  , cyclist
• Éric Millot
  Eric Millot
  Éric Millot is a French figure skater. He is the 1993 European bronze medalist and 1990-1993 French national champion. He represented France at the 1992 Winter Olympics, where he placed 15th, and at the 1994 Winter Olympics, where he placed 7th.-Competitive highlights:-References:* *...
  
  , figure skater
• Alain Mimoun
  Alain Mimoun
  Alain Mimoun is a retired French runner and Olympic marathon champion.-Early life:Born in El Telagh, then in French Algeria, Mimoun lost several years of competition to World War II...
  
  , athlete
• Sophie Moniotte
  Sophie Moniotte
  Sophie Moniotte was a French ice dancer. She competed with partner Pascal Lavanchy. They won silver at the 1995 Europeans and bronze at Worlds in the same year. In 1999, she published a memoir of her life as a skater.-Results:...
  
  , ice dancer (with P. Lavanchy)
• Carole Montillet
  Carole Montillet
  Carole Montillet-Carles is a French alpine skier.-Career:Born in Corrençon-en-Vercors, Isère, she became a member of the Villard de Lans ski club in Grenoble...
  
  , skier
• Armand Mouyal
  Armand Mouyal
  Armand Mouyal was a French epee fencer.-Fencing career:Born in Oran, Algeria , Mouyal began fencing in the early 1950s, and was as skilled with the foil as with the épée .-National Championships:Mouyal, a French police officer, captured French national Individual Épée titles in 1952,...
  
  , épée fencer, Olympic bronze, world champion
• Alfred "Artem" Nakache
  Alfred Nakache
  Alfred Nakache was a French swimmer and water polo player. Nakache was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1993...
  
  , swimmer, world record (200-m breaststroke), one-third of French 2-time world record (3x100 relay team)
• Claude Netter
  Claude Netter
  Claude Netter was a French foil fencer.Netter was one of France's top fencers in the 1950s, and competed in three Olympiads for the French foil team, winning two medals...
  
  , foil fencer, Olympic champion, silver
• Hellé Nice
  Hellé Nice
  Hellé Nice was a model, dancer, and a Grand Prix motor racing driver.- Early life and fast lifestyle :...
  
  , pioneer female race car driver
• Joakim Noah
  Joakim Noah
  Joakim Simon Noah is a professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association . Born in New York City to a Swedish mother and French father, he holds American, Swedish and French citizenship...
  
  , NBA basketball player (Chicago Bulls)
• Yannick Noah
  Yannick Noah
  Yannick Noah is a former professional tennis player from France. He is best remembered for being the last French man to win the French Open in 1983, and as a highly-successful captain of France's Davis Cup and Fed Cup teams...
  
  , tennis player
• Micheline Ostermeyer
  Micheline Ostermeyer
  Micheline Ostermeyer was a French athlete and concert pianist.A great-niece of the French author Victor Hugo, and a niece of the composer Lucien Paroche, Ostermeyer, who was Jewish, was born in Rang-du-Fliers, Pas-de-Calais...
  
  , Olympic champion in discus and shot put, bronze in high jump
• Tony Parker
  Tony Parker
  William Anthony "Tony" Parker is a French professional basketball player who currently plays for the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA....
  
  , Belgian born French citizen, basketball player
• Gwendal Peizerat
  Gwendal Peizerat
  Gwendal Peizerat is a French ice dancer. With Marina Anissina, he is the 2002 Olympic champion, the 1998 Olympic bronze medalist, the 2000 World Champion, and a six-time French National Champion.-Biography:...
  
  , ice dancer
• Marie-José Pérec
  Marie-José Pérec
  Marie-José Pérec is a French athlete, specialised in the 200 and 400 m, and a triple Olympic champion....
  
  , athlete
• Mary Pierce
  Mary Pierce
  Mary Pierce is a French-American tennis professional playing on the Women's Tennis Association tour. She is a citizen of France, Canada, and the United States but plays for France in team competitions and the Olympics.Pierce has won four Grand Slam titles, two in singles and two in doubles...
  
  , Canadian-born French citizen, tennis player
• Stéphane Peterhansel
  Stéphane Peterhansel
  Stéphane Peterhansel is a rally racing driver from France. He won the Paris Dakar Rally riding Yamaha motorcycles in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, and 1998 and then again driving Mitsubishi Pajero SUVs in 2004, 2005 and 2007, making him one of the most successful drivers in the history of that race...
  
  , car and motor racer, 9 time Dakar Rally winner
• Julien Pillet
  Julien Pillet
  Julien Pillet is a French sabre fencer. He is a three-time Olympic medalist as he won the gold in the team event at the 2004 Summer Olympics and also at the 2008 Summer Olympics...
  
  , fencer
• Michel Platini
  Michel Platini
  Michel François Platini is a former French football player, manager and current president of UEFA. Platini was a member of the French national team that won the 1984 European Championship, a tournament in which he was the top goalscorer and voted the best player. He participated in the 1978, 1982...
  
  , football player
• Alain Prost
  Alain Prost
  Alain Marie Pascal Prost, OBE, Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur is a French racing driver. A four-time Formula One Drivers' Champion, Prost has won more titles than any driver except for Juan Manuel Fangio , and Michael Schumacher . From 1987 until 2001 Prost held the record for most Grand Prix...
  
  , Formula One
  Formula One
  Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
  
   driver and 4-time champion
• Antoine Rigaudeau
  Antoine Rigaudeau
  Antoine Roger Rigaudeau nicknamed Le Roi , is a retired French professional basketball player....
  
  , basketball player
• François Rozenthal
  François Rozenthal
  François Rozenthal is a French ice hockey player.-Personal:Rozenthal is Jewish, and is the identical twin brother of Maurice Rozenthal, who is also a French ice hockey player.-Ice hockey career:...
  
  , ice hockey player
• Maurice Rozenthal
  Maurice Rozenthal
  Maurice Rozenthal is a French ice hockey player.-Personal:Rozenthal is Jewish, and is the identical twin brother of François Rozenthal, who is also a French ice hockey player.-Ice hockey career:...
  
  , ice hockey player
• Georges Stern, jockey
• Jean Stern
  Jean Stern
  Jean Stern, born in France, was a French épée fencer.-Olympic fencing career:Stern was a member of the French fencing team at the 1908 London Olympics, and competed in both the team and individual épée events. During the Games, the French team defeated Denmark , Great Britain , and Belgium to...
  
  , épée fencer, Olympic champion
• Léon Théry
  Léon Théry
  Léon Théry, , was a French racing driver who won the premier European race, the Gordon Bennett Cup, twice in 1904 and 1905.-Career:...
  
  
• Marcel Thil
  Marcel Thil
  -Career:Born in Saint-Dizier, Haute-Marne in the Champagne-Ardenne Region of France, Thil started boxing at a very young age and turned professional at the age of sixteen...
  
  , world champion boxer
• Christophe Tiozzo
  Christophe Tiozzo
  Christophe Tiozzo was a French boxer, who won a Light Middleweight Bronze medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics...
  
  , world champion boxer
• Fabrice Tiozzo
  Fabrice Tiozzo
  Fabrice Tiozzo is a retired professional boxer in the light heavyweight division. His record is 48-2 .Tiozzo was a two time light heavyweight champion as well as a one time cruiserweight champion....
  
  , world champion boxer, Christophe's brother
• David Trezeguet
  David Trézéguet
  David Sergio Trezeguet is a World Cup winning French international footballer who currently is a free agent after being released by Baniyas SC on 21 Nov 2011....
  
  , football player
• Patrick Vieira
  Patrick Vieira
  Patrick Vieira is a retired French footballer of Senegalese descent who is the Football Development Executive at Manchester City....
  
  , Senegal
  Senegal
  Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
  
   born French citizen, football player
• Richard Virenque
  Richard Virenque
  Richard VirenqueRichard Virenque's name is pronounced Ree-shah Vee-rahnk. Virenque considers himself a man of the South but pronounces his name in standard French. Confusion is caused by the southern habit of pronouncing "en" as "ang" or "eng", making it Vee-rank. But Virenque says Vee-rahnk or...
  
  , Morocco
  Morocco
  Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
  
   born French citizen, cyclist
• Roger Walkowiak
  Roger Walkowiak
  Roger Walkowiak is a French former road bicycle racer who unexpectedly won the 1956 Tour de France. He was a professional rider from 1950 until 1960.-The 1956 Tour de France:...
  
  , cyclist
• Jean-Pierre Wimille
  Jean-Pierre Wimille
  Jean-Pierre Wimille was a Grand Prix motor racing driver and a member of the French Resistance during World War II.-Biography:...
  
  , race car driver
• Zinedine Zidane
  Zinedine Zidane
  Zinedine Yazid Zidane is a retired French footballer. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. Zidane was a leading figure of a generation of French players that won the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship...
  
  , football (soccer) Player

Authors

A

• Marcel Achard
  Marcel Achard
  Marcel Achard was a French playwright and screenwriter whose popular sentimental comedies maintained his position as a highly-recognizable name in his country's theatrical and literary circles for five decades...
  
  
• Alain-Fournier
  Alain-Fournier
  Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier , a French author and soldier. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes , which has been twice filmed and is considered a classic of French literature.-Biography:Alain-Fournier was born in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, in the Cher...
  
  
• Olivier Ameisen
  Olivier Ameisen
  Olivier Ameisen is a French-American cardiologist. He was appointed visiting professor of medicine at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in 2008 based on his work on the mechanisms and treatment of addiction...
  
  
• Jean Anouilh
  Jean Anouilh
  Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' Classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's...
  
  , 20th century dramatist
• Guillaume Apollinaire
  Guillaume Apollinaire
  Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
  
  
• Louis Aragon
  Louis Aragon
  Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
  
  
• Antonin Artaud
  Antonin Artaud
  Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
  
  
• Marcel Aymé
  Marcel Aymé
  Marcel Aymé was a French novelist, children's writer, humour writer and also a screenwriter and theatre playwright.- Biography :...
  
  

B

• Honoré de Balzac
  Honoré de Balzac
  Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
  
  , realist
  Literary realism
  Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
  
   author
• Henri Barbusse
  Henri Barbusse
  Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.-Life:...
  
  
• Charles Baudelaire
  Charles Baudelaire
  Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
  
  , 19th century poet
• Pierre Beaumarchais
  Pierre Beaumarchais
  Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary ....
  
  , comedy playwright
• Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
  
  , 20th century author
• Cyrano de Bergerac
  Cyrano de Bergerac
  Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French dramatist and duelist. He is now best remembered for the works of fiction which have been woven, often very loosely, around his life story, most notably the 1897 play by Edmond Rostand...
  
  
• Georges Bernanos
  Georges Bernanos
  Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Of Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings, he was a violent adversary to bourgeois thought and to what he identified as defeatism leading to France's defeat in 1940.-Biography:Bernanos was born at Paris, into a family of...
  
  
• Tristan Bernard
  Tristan Bernard
  Tristan Bernard was a French playwright, novelist, journalist and lawyer.-Life:Born Paul Bernard into a Jewish family in Besançon, Doubs, Franche-Comté, France, he was the son of an architect...
  
  
• Maurice Blanchot
  Maurice Blanchot
  Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
  
  
• Antoine Blondin
  Antoine Blondin
  Antoine Blondin was a French writer.He belonged to the literary group called the Hussards. He was also a sports columnist in L'Équipe. Blondin also wrote under the name Tenorio.-Biography:...
  
  
• Nicolas Boileau
  Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
  Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and critic.-Biography:Boileau was born in the rue de Jérusalem, in Paris, France. He was brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière...
  
  
• Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was a French bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist....
  
  
• Pierre Boulle
  Pierre Boulle
  Pierre Boulle was a French novelist largely known for two famous works, The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes .-Biography:...
  
  
• Fernand Braudel
  Fernand Braudel
  Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
  
  
• André Breton
  André Breton
  André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
  
  
• Restif de la Bretonne
• Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
• Michel Butor
  Michel Butor
  -Life and work:Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, the United States, and Geneva...
  
  

C–E

• Albert Camus
  Albert Camus
  Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
  
  , existentialist author
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
  
  , 20th century author
• Blaise Cendrars
  Blaise Cendrars
  Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
  
  
• Aimé Césaire
  Aimé Césaire
  Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
  
  , 20th century author
• Nicolas Chamfort
  Nicolas Chamfort
  Nicolas Chamfort was a French writer, best known for his witty epigrams and aphorisms. He was secretary of Louis XVI's sister, and of the Jacobin club.-Life:...
  
  
• René Char
  René Char
  René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
  
  , 20th century poet
• François-René de Chateaubriand
  François-René de Chateaubriand
  François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.-Early life and exile:...
  
  
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses ....
  
  
• Emil Cioran
  Emil Cioran
  -Early life:Emil M. Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran , was originally from Veneţia de Jos, a commune near Făgăraş.After studying humanities at the...
  
  
• Paul Claudel
  Paul Claudel
  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.-Life:...
  
  
• Jean Cocteau
  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
  
  , 20th century poet and playwright
• Colette
  Colette
  Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
  
  , 20th century author
• Benjamin Constant
  Benjamin Constant
  Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was a Swiss-born French nobleman, thinker, writer and politician.-Biography:...
  
  
• Tristan Corbière
  Tristan Corbière
  Tristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....
  
  
• Pierre Corneille
  Pierre Corneille
  Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...
  
  , classicist
  Classicism
  Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
  
   playwright
• Marquis de Custine
  Marquis de Custine
  Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine was a French aristocrat and writer who is best known for his travel writing, in particular his account of his visit to Russia in 1839 Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia...
  
  , travel writer
• Robert Desnos
  Robert Desnos
  Robert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...
  
  , 20th century poet
• Charles Dezobry
  Charles Dezobry
  Louis Charles Dezobry was a French historian and historical novelist, born at St-Denis.-Works:* Rome au siècle d'Auguste, ou Voyage d'un Gaulois à Rome à l'époque du règne d'Auguste et pendant une partie du règne de Tibère...
  
  , historian and historical novelist
• Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
  
  
• Alexandre Dumas, père
  Alexandre Dumas, père
  Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
  
  , author
• Alexandre Dumas, fils
  Alexandre Dumas, fils
  Alexandre Dumas, fils was a French author and dramatist. He was the son of Alexandre Dumas, père, also a writer and playwright.-Biography:...
  
  , playwright/author
• Marguerite Duras
  Marguerite Duras
  Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
  
  , 20th century novelist
• Vanessa Duriès
  Vanessa Duriès
  Vanessa Duriès, also known as Katia Lamara was a French novelist.She was the author of the French BDSM novel Le lien based on her own experience as a slave...
  
  
• Paul Éluard
  Paul Éluard
  Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
  
  

F–J

• Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
  
  , 20th century author, psychiatrist
• Léon-Paul Fargue
  Léon-Paul Fargue
  Léon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist.He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements...
  
  
• Georges Feydeau
  Georges Feydeau
  Georges Feydeau was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his many lively farces.-Biography:Georges Feydeau was born in Paris, the son of novelist Ernest-Aimé Feydeau and Léocadie Bogaslawa Zalewska. At the age of twenty, Feydeau wrote his first comic...
  
  
• Marc Ferro
  Marc Ferro
  Marc Ferro is a French historian. He has worked on early twentieth-century European history, specialising in the history of Russia and the USSR, as well as the history of cinema....
  
  
• Amanda Filipacchi
  Amanda Filipacchi
  Amanda Filipacchi is an American writer best known for her humorous, inventive, and controversial novels.Her fiction has been translated into 13 languages and has received critical acclaim in the U.S. and around the world.-Writing career:...
  
  , novelist (French and U.S. citizenship, writes in English)
• Alain Finkielkraut
  Alain Finkielkraut
  Alain Finkielkraut is a French essayist, and son of a Jewish-Polish manufacturer of fine leather goods who had been deported to Auschwitz and survived. He currently teaches at the École polytechnique as professor of the "history of ideas and modernity" in the department of humanities and social...
  
  , essayist
• Gustave Flaubert
  Gustave Flaubert
  Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
  
  , realist
  Literary realism
  Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
  
   author
• Anatole France
  Anatole France
  Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...
  
  
• Marie de France
  Marie de France
  Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an undisclosed court, but was almost certainly at least known about at the royal court of King Henry II of England...
  
  , poet
• Romain Gary
  Romain Gary
  Romain Gary was a French diplomat, novelist, film director, World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt twice .- Early life :Gary was born in Vilnius under the name Roman Kacew...
  
  
• Jean Genet
  Jean Genet
  Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
  
  
• André Gide
  André Gide
  André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
  
  , Nobel Prize
  Nobel Prize
  The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
  
   Winner
• Jean Giono
  Jean Giono
  Jean Giono was a French author who wrote works of fiction set in the Provence region of France.-First period:...
  
  
• Jean Giraudoux
  Jean Giraudoux
  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. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy...
  
  
• Françoise Giroud
  Françoise Giroud
  Françoise Giroud, born France Gourdji was a French journalist, screenwriter, writer and politician.-Biography:...
  
  
• Julien Gracq
  Julien Gracq
  Julien Gracq , born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French département of Maine-et-Loire, was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their Surrealism.Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, where he earned his...
  
  
• Julien Green
  Julien Green
  Julien Green , was an American writer, who authored several novels, including Léviathan and Each in His Own Darkness...
  
  
• Pierre Guyotat
  Pierre Guyotat
  Pierre Guyotat is a French writer. He was born on January 9, 1940 at Bourg-Argental, Loire.- Biography :In 1960, Guyotat wrote his first novel, Sur un cheval. He was called to Algeria in the same year. In 1962 he was found guilty of desertion and publishing forbidden material. After three months...
  
  
• Jean-Edern Hallier
  Jean-Edern Hallier
  Jean-Edern Hallier was a French author.- Overview :Hallier was the son of World War I French General André Hallier. Jean-Edern was born in 1936 and lost an eye during the siege of Budapest, where his father was on diplomatic posting...
  
  
• Auguste Himly
  Auguste Himly
  Auguste Louis Himly was a French historian and geographer.After studying in his native town and taking the university course in Berlin , Himly went to Paris and passed first in the examination for fellowship of the lycées , first in the examinations on leaving the École des...
  
  , historian
• Victor Hugo
  Victor Hugo
  Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
  
  , novelist, poet, and playwright
• Joris-Karl Huysmans
  Joris-Karl Huysmans
  Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...
  
  
• Eugène Ionesco
  Eugène Ionesco
  Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
  
  
• Alain Jouffroy
  Alain Jouffroy
  Alain Jouffroy, born on September 11, 1928 near Parc Montsouris, Paris, is a French writer, poet and artist.He was the first advocate of an Art Strike and formed the Union of Writers during the strikes of May 1968 in France with Jean-Pierre Faye...
  
  , poet, art critic, plastician

L

• Jean de La Bruyère
  Jean de La Bruyère
  Jean de La Bruyère was a French essayist and moralist.-Ancestry:He was born in Paris, not, as was once thought, at Dourdan in 1645...
  
  
• Jean de La Fontaine
  Jean de La Fontaine
  Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous 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, and in French regional...
  
  
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses ....
  
  
• Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
• Leconte de Lisle, parnassian poet
• Alphonse de Lamartine
  Alphonse de Lamartine
  Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...
  
  
• Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
  
  , psychoanalyst
• Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ancien regime, particularly the history of the peasantry.-Early life and career:...
  
  , historian
• Paul Lafargue
  Paul Lafargue
  Paul Lafargue was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer 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...
  
  
• Jules Laforgue
  Jules Laforgue
  Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
  
  
• Valéry Larbaud
  Valery Larbaud
  Valery Larbaud was a French writer.-Life:He was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy...
  
  
• Maurice Leblanc
  Maurice Leblanc
  Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.- Biography :Leblanc was born in...
  
  , created Arsène Lupin
  Arsène Lupin
  Arsène Lupin is a fictional character who appears in a book series of detective fiction / crime fiction novels written by French writer Maurice Leblanc, as well as a number of non-canonical sequels and numerous film, television such as Night Hood, stage play and comic book adaptations.- Overview :A...
  
  
• Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon...
  
  , journalist and author, credited with creating the locked room puzzle mystery novel Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room) and author of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera)

M–O

• Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was 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 Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
  
  , poet
• Hector Malot
  Hector Malot
  Hector 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.His first book, published in 1859, was Les...
  
  , 19th century author
• André Malraux
  André Malraux
  André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
  
  
• Matthieu Marais
  Matthieu Marais
  Matthieu Marais was a French jurist and writer. Legal advocate at the Parlement of Paris, he was one of the luminaries of the bar during his times. Friend of Pierre Bayle and Henry de Boulainviller, he collaborated on the Dictionnaire Historique, and wrote the articles "Henri III", "Henri, duc de...
  
  , 18th century lawyer and writer
• Marcel Marceau
  Marcel Marceau
  Marcel Marceau was an internationally acclaimed French actor and mime most famous for his persona as Bip the Clown.-Early years:...
  
  , 20th century mime (and member of the French Resistance
  French Resistance
  The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
  
   in World War II)
• Pierre de Marivaux
  Pierre de Marivaux
  Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux , commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist....
  
  , playwright
• Clément Marot
  Clément Marot
  Clément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...
  
  , poet
• Guy de Maupassant
  Guy de Maupassant
  Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents....
  
  , novelist
• François Mauriac
  François Mauriac
  François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...
  
  , Roman Catholic writer
• Prosper Mérimée
  Prosper Mérimée
  Prosper Mérimée was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.-Life:...
  
  , 19th century novelist
• Catherine Millet
  Catherine Millet
  Catherine Millet is a French writer, art critic, curator, and founder and editor of the magazine Art Press, which focuses on modern art and contemporary art....
  
  , art expert, editor and erotic memoirist
• Patrick Modiano
  Patrick Modiano
  Patrick Modiano is a French novelist born 30 July 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt of a father of Jewish Italian origins and a Belgian mother, Louisa Colpijn . He is a winner of the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972, the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for his novel Rue des boutiques obscures...
  
  
• Jean Baptiste Poquelin dit Molière
  Molière
  Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
  
  , 17th century comedic playwright and actor
• Alfred de Musset
  Alfred de Musset
  Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...
  
  , 19th century poet
• Gérard de Nerval
  Gérard de Nerval
  Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...
  
  
• Anaïs Nin
  Anaïs Nin
  Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
  
  

P–R

• Marcel Pagnol
  Marcel Pagnol
  Marcel Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. In 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie Française.-Biography:...
  
  
• Charles Péguy
  Charles Péguy
  Charles Péguy was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a devout but non-practicing Roman Catholic.From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his...
  
  , 20th century poet
• Charles Perrault
  Charles Perrault
  Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known include Le Petit Chaperon rouge , Cendrillon , Le Chat Botté and La Barbe bleue...
  
  , Mother Goose Tales
• Georges Perec
  Georges Perec
  Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
  
  
• Saint-John Perse
  Saint-John Perse
  Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...
  
  
• Roger Peyrefitte
  Roger Peyrefitte
  Roger Peyrefitte was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and gossipy non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Jean Piaget
  Jean Piaget
  Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
  
  , psychologist
• Jean Piat
  Jean Piat
  Jean Piat is a French actor and writer.-Life:Piat was born in Lannoy, Nord. He enlisted in the Comédie-Française on 1 September 1947, and became a member on 1 January 1953. He left the Comédie-Française on 31 December 1972, and became an honorary member the following day...
  
  
• Christine de Pizan
  Christine de Pizan
  Christine de Pizan was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the male-dominated medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career , and can be regarded as...
  
  , historian, poet, philosopher
• Jacques Prévert
  Jacques Prévert
  Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
  
  , 20th century poet
• Abbé Prévost
• Marcel Prevost
  Marcel Prévost
  Eugene Marcel Prévost was a French author and dramatist.-Biography:He was born in Paris on 1 May 1862, and educated at Jesuit schools in Bordeaux and Paris, entering the École polytechnique in 1882...
  
  
• Marcel Proust
  Marcel Proust
  Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
  
  , novelist
• Raymond Queneau
  Raymond Queneau
  Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
  
  
• François Rabelais
  François Rabelais
  François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
  
  , Renaissance writer
• Raymond Radiguet
  Raymond Radiguet
  Raymond Radiguet was a French author whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes and writing style and tone.-Early life:...
  
  
• Jean Racine
  Jean Racine
  Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
  
  , classicist
  Classicism
  Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
  
   playwright
• Pauline Réage
  Pauline Réage
  Anne Desclos was a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage.-Early life:...
  
  , novelist
• Arthur Rimbaud
  Arthur Rimbaud
  Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
  
  , symbolist
  Symbolism (arts)
  Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
  
   poet
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
  Alain Robbe-Grillet
  Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
  
  
• Pierre de Ronsard
  Pierre de Ronsard
  Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet and "prince of poets" .-Early life:...
  
  
• Edmond Rostand
  Edmond Rostand
  Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century...
  
  , neo-romantic playwright
• Raymond Roussel
  Raymond Roussel
  Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau...
  
  
• Maximilien Rubel
  Maximilien Rubel
  Maximilien Rubel was a famous Marxist historian. He was educated in law and philosophy in Vienna and Chernivtsi before moving to France to take German studies at the Sorbonne, from which he received his Licence-dès-lettres in 1934...
  
  

S–Z

• Marquis de Sade
  Marquis de Sade
  Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...
  
  , erotic and philosophic author
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.-Early years:...
  
  
• George Sand
  George Sand
  Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...
  
  , feminist author
• Jean Paul Sartre, 20th century existentialist philosopher
• Nathalie Sarraute
  Nathalie Sarraute
  Nathalie Sarraute was a French lawyer and writer of Russian Jewish origin.-Life:Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo , 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 , and, following...
  
  
• Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel was a gay Holocaust survivor and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.-Biography:...
  
  , homosexual survivor of the concentration camps, activist, author
• Victor Segalen
  Victor Segalen
  Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic....
  
  
• Madame de Sévigné
• Madame de Staël
  Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
  Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 19th century.- Childhood :...
  
  
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry , was a French writer, poet and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of France's highest literary awards, and in 1939 was the winner of the U.S. National Book Award...
  
  , author and aviator.
• Claude Simon
  Claude Simon
  Claude Simon was a French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature. He was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and died in Paris, France....
  
  
• Stendhal
  Stendhal
  Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...
  
  , novelist (born Henry Beyle)
• Alain Tasso
  Alain Tasso
  Alain Tasso is a Franco-Lebanese poet, painter and essayist, born in Beirut on July 22, 1962.Autodidact, his literary intensive profuse work is received by much critical attention.- Biography :...
  
  , poet, painter, essayist, art critic, literary critic
• François Truffaut
  François Truffaut
  François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
  
  , 20th century filmmaker
• Paul Valéry
  Paul Valéry
  Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
  
  , 20th century poet
• Vercors
  Jean Bruller
  Jean Marcel Bruller was a French writer and illustrator who co-founded Les Éditions de Minuit with Pierre de Lescure and Yvonne Paraf. During the World War II occupation of northern France he joined the Resistance and his texts were published under the pseudonym Vercors.Several of his novels have...
  
  , pseudonym of Jean Bruller
• Paul Verlaine
  Paul Verlaine
  Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
  
  , symbolist
  Symbolism (arts)
  Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
  
   poet
• Jules Verne
  Jules Verne
  Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
  
  , novelist
• Boris Vian
  Boris Vian
  Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their...
  
  , 20th century author
• Alfred de Vigny
  Alfred de Vigny
  Alfred Victor de Vigny was a French poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life:Alfred de Vigny was born in Loches into an aristocratic family...
  
  , 19th century poet
• Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
  Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
  Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was a French symbolist writer.-Life:Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, to a distinguished aristocratic family...
  
  
• François Villon
  François Villon
  François Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
  
  
• Voltaire
  Voltaire
  François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
  
  
• Marguerite Yourcenar
  Marguerite Yourcenar
  Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.-Biography:Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie...
  
  
• Émile Zola
  Émile Zola
  Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
  
  , naturalist
  Natural history
  Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
  
   author

Aviators

• Clément Ader
  Clément Ader
  Clément Ader was a French inventor and engineer born in Muret, Haute Garonne, and is remembered primarily for his pioneering work in aviation.- The inventor :...
  
  
• Jacqueline Auriol
  Jacqueline Auriol
  Jacqueline Auriol was a French aviatrix who set several world speed records.-Biography:...
  
  
• Louis Blériot
  Louis Blériot
  Louis Charles Joseph Blériot was a French aviator, inventor and engineer. In 1909 he completed the first flight across a large body of water in a heavier-than-air craft, when he crossed the English Channel. For this achievement, he received a prize of £1,000...
  
  
• Henry Farman
  Henry Farman
  Henri Farman Henri Farman Henri Farman (26 May 1874 – 17 July 1958 was a French pilot, aviator and aircraft designer and manufacturer with his brother Maurice Farman. His family was British and he took French nationality in 1937.-Biography:...
  
  
• René Fonck
  René Fonck
  René Paul Fonck was a French aviator who ended the First World War as the top Allied 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 ...
  
  
• Roland Garros, first to cross the Mediterranean; French Open is named after him.
• Georges Guynemer
  Georges Guynemer
  Georges Guynemer was a top fighter ace for France during World War I, and a French national hero at the time of his death.-Early life and military career:...
  
  
• Raymonde de Laroche
  Raymonde de LaRoche
  Raymonde de Laroche , born Elise Raymonde Deroche, was a French aviatrix and the first woman in the world to receive an aeroplane pilot's licence.-Early life:...
  
  
• Hubert Latham
  Hubert Latham
  Arthur Charles Hubert Latham was a French aviation pioneer. He was the first person to attempt to cross the English Channel in an aeroplane...
  
  
• Léon Lemartin
  Léon Lemartin
  Théodore Clovis Edmond Lemartin, known as Léon Lemartin was a pioneer aviator who set a world record on 3 February 1911 at Pau, France when he carried seven passengers in a Bleriot XIII Aerobus...
  
  
• Marie Marvingt
  Marie Marvingt
  Marie Marvingt was a French athlete, mountaineer, and aviator, and the most decorated woman in the history of France. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements and was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps...
  
  
• Jean Mermoz
  Jean Mermoz
  Jean Mermoz was a French aviator, viewed as a hero by many in both Argentina and his native France, where many schools bear his name...
  
  
• Les Frères Robert
  Robert brothers
  Les Frères Robert were two French brothers. Anne-Jean Robert , and Nicolas-Louis Robert , The brothers were the engineers who built the world's first hydrogen balloon for professor Jacques Charles; it flew from central Paris on...
  
   – balloonists Anne-Jean Robert and Nicolas-Louis Robert
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry , was a French writer, poet and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of France's highest literary awards, and in 1939 was the winner of the U.S. National Book Award...
  
  , author and aviator
• André Edouard Turcat
  André Edouard Turcat
  French Major André Edouard Turcat, born October 23, 1921, is a former French test pilot.A graduate of France's prestigious École Polytechnique, Turcat joined the Free French air force during the final years of World War II and stayed with Armée de l'Air after the war...
  
  

Business

• Bernard Arnault
  Bernard Arnault
  Bernard Arnault is a French business magnate who is best known as the chairman and CEO of the French conglomerate LVMH. According to Forbes Magazine, Arnault is the world's 4th and Europe's richest person, with a 2011 net worth of US$41 billion.-Education and business career:Arnault was born...
  
   (born 1949), entrepreneur
• Liliane Bettencourt
  Liliane Bettencourt
  Liliane Bettencourt is a French heiress, socialite, businesswoman and philanthropist. She is one of the principal shareholders of L'Oréal and, with a fortune estimated at US$23.5 billion, is one of the wealthiest people in the world.-Biography:...
  
  , cosmetics, one of the richest persons in Europe
• Marcel Bich
  Marcel Bich
  Marcel Bich was the co-founder of Bic, the world's leading producer of ballpoint pens.-History:In 1945, Bich and his partner, Edouard Buffard, bought an empty factory near Paris, France...
  
  , (1914–1994), Bic pens
• Vincent Bolloré
  Vincent Bolloré
  Vincent Bolloré is a French industrialist, corporate raider and businessman.He heads the family investment group Bolloré and is ranked 736th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated fortune of US$1.7 billion...
  
   (born 1952), transportation and engineering
• Marcel Boussac
  Marcel Boussac
  Marcel Boussac was a French entrepreneur best known for his ownership of the Maison Dior and one of the most successful thoroughbred race horse breeding farms in European history....
  
  , textiles, fashion, newspapers, race horse breeding
• Ettore Bugatti
  Bugatti
  Automobiles E. Bugatti was a French car manufacturer founded in 1909 in Molsheim, Alsace, as a manufacturer of high-performance automobiles by Italian-born Ettore Bugatti....
  
   (1881–1947), automobile manufacturer
• André Citroën
  André Citroën
  André-Gustave Citroën was a French industrialist. He is remembered chiefly for the make of car named after him, but also for his application of double helical gears.- Life and career :...
  
   (1878–1935), automobile manufacturer
• Adolphe Clément-Bayard (1855–1928) entrepreneur manufacturer of bicycles, pneumatic tyres, motorcycles, automobiles, aeroplanes and airships
• Marcel Dassault
  Marcel Dassault
  Marcel Dassault, born Marcel Bloch was a French aircraft industrialist.-Biography:Dassault was born in Paris. After graduating from the lycée Condorcet, Breguet School and Supaero, he invented a type of aircraft propeller used by the French army during World War I and founded the Société des...
  
   (1892–1986), aviation
• Alexandre Darracq
  Alexandre Darracq
  Alexandre Darracq was a French automobile manufacturer.Born Pierre Alexandre Darracq in Bordeaux, France, of Basque parents, he trained as a draftsman at the Arsenal in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées département...
  
   (1855–1931), automotive pioneer
• Louis Delâge
  Louis Delâge
  Louis Delâge , was a French pioneer automotive engineer and manufacturer.Born Pierre Louis Delâge to a family of modest means in Cognac in the Charente département of France, as an infant he lost the sight in one eye...
  
   (1874–1947) automotive pioneer
• Emile Delahaye
  Emile Delahaye
  Emile Delahaye was a French automotive pioneer who founded Delahaye Automobiles.Emile Delahaye was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, in the Loire Valley. He studied engineering at a trade school in the city of Angers, the same school later attended by Louis Delâge, another automobile pioneer...
  
   (1843–1905), automotive pioneer
• Gerard Louis-Dreyfus
  Gérard Louis-Dreyfus
  William Louis-Dreyfus is a French-born American businessman. With his family's net worth estimated at $2.9 billion by Forbes, he is one of the richest men in the world. He is the chairman of Louis Dreyfus Energy Services and the great grandson of Léopold Louis-Dreyfus, founder of Louis Dreyfus Group...
  
   (born 1932), agricultural commodities
• Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours
  Eleuthère Irénée du Pont
  Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours , known as Irénée du Pont, or E.I. du Pont, was a French-born Huguenot chemist and industrialist who immigrated to the United States in 1799 and founded the gunpowder manufacturer, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company...
  
   (1771–1834), founder of DuPont
  DuPont
  E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company , commonly referred to as DuPont, is an American chemical company that was founded in July 1802 as a gunpowder mill by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. DuPont was the world's third largest chemical company based on market capitalization and ninth based on revenue in 2009...
  
  
• Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours
  Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours
  Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was a French nobleman, writer, economist, and government official, who was the father of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder of E.I...
  
   (1739–1817), entrepreneur
• Jacques Foccart
  Jacques Foccart
  Jacques Foccart was a chief adviser for the government of France on African policy as well as the co-founder of the Gaullist Service d'Action Civique in 1959 with Charles Pasqua, which specialized in covert operations in Africa.From 1960 to 1974, he was the President of France's chief of staff...
  
   (19..–1997), import-export
• Léon Gaumont
  Léon Gaumont
  Léon Gaumont was a French inventor, engineer, and industrialist who was a pioneer of the motion picture industry....
  
  , pioneer film inventor
• Paul-Louis Halley (1934–2004), supermarket tycoon
• Max Hymans
  Max Hymans
  Max Hymans , was a notable leftist French politician, member of the resistance, and director of Air France.-Gallery:...
  
   (1900–1961), aviation
• Jean-Marie Messier
  Jean-Marie Messier
  Jean-Marie Messier is a French businessman who was Chairman and Chief Executive of the multinational media conglomerate Vivendi SA until 2002...
  
   (born 1957), former Vivendi CEO
• Gérard Mestrallet
  Gérard Mestrallet
  Gérard Mestrallet is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of GDF Suez.-Biography:Gérard Mestrallet was born on 1 April 1949. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration....
  
   (born 1949), Chairman and CEO of Suez
• Gérard Mulliez
  Gérard Mulliez
  Gérard Paul Louis Marie-Joseph Mulliez is a French businessman. He is the second richest person in France.-Biography:...
  
  , entrepreneur (Auchan, Decathlon, Flunch...), whose family is considered as one of the richest in Europe
• Charles Pathé
  Charles Pathé
  Charles Pathé was a major French pioneer of the film and recording industries.The son of a butcher shop owner, Charles Pathé was born at Chevry-Cossigny, in the Seine-et-Marne département of France. In 1894, together with his brother Émile, he formed Pathé Records...
  
  , pioneer of film industry
• Armand Peugeot
  Armand Peugeot
  Armand Peugeot was a French industrialist, pioneer of the automobile industry and the founder of the French firm Peugeot.-Family:...
  
  , (1849–1915) automobile manufacturer
• François Pinault
  François Pinault
  François Pinault is a French businessman who runs the retail company PPR. He is a friend of former French President Jacques Chirac....
  
   (born 1936), entrepreneur
• Jacques-Donatien Le Ray
  Jacques-Donatien Le Ray
  Jacques-Donatien Le Ray was a French "Father of the American Revolution", but later an opponent of the French Revolution. His son of the same name, known also in America as James Le Ray, eventually became a United States citizen and settled in Le Ray, New York USA.-Early life:Born in the port...
  
   (1726–1803), shipping magnate and a "Father of the American Revolution
  American Revolution
  The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
  
  "
• Marcel Renault
  Marcel Renault
  Marcel Renault was a French racing car driver and industrialist, co-founder of the car maker Renault, and the brother of Louis and Fernand Renault....
  
   (1872–1903), automobile manufacturer
• James Mayer Rothschild (1792–1868), banker
• Philippe de Rothschild
  Philippe de Rothschild
  Baron Philippe de Rothschild was a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty who became a Grand Prix race-car driver, a screenwriter and playwright, a theatrical producer, a film producer, a poet, and one of the most successful wine growers in the world.-Early life:Born in Paris, Georges Philippe...
  
   (1902–1988), wine maker
• Eugene Schueller
  Eugène Schueller
  Eugène Schueller was the founder of L'Oréal, the world's leading company in cosmetics and beauty.- Career with L'Oréal :...
  
   (1881–1954), founder of L'Oréal
• Bernard Tapie
  Bernard Tapie
  Bernard Tapie is a French businessman, politician and occasional actor, singer, and TV host. He was Ministre de la Ville in the government of Pierre Bérégovoy, a businessman specializing in recovery for bankrupted companies, among which Adidas is the most famous ; and owner of sports teams...
  
   (born 1943), entrepreneur

Chefs

• Raymond Blanc
  Raymond Blanc
  Raymond Blanc OBE is a French chef, born in Besançon, France. Today he is one of the Britain's most respected chefs. Blanc is the owner and chef at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, a hotel-restaurant in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, England. The restaurant has two Michelin stars and scored 9/10 in the...
  
  
• Paul Bocuse
  Paul Bocuse
  Paul Bocuse is a French chef based in Lyon who is famous for the high quality of his restaurants and his innovative approaches to cuisine...
  
  
• Daniel Boulud
  Daniel Boulud
  Daniel Boulud is a French chef and restaurateur with restaurants in New York City, Palm Beach, Miami, Montreal, Beijing, and Singapore...
  
  
• Michel Bras
  Michel Bras
  Michel Bras is a chef from France.He and his son run a restaurant and hotel in Laguiole , in the Aveyron department. He learned to cook from his mother who still makes the "Aligot" dish with maestria from time to time...
  
  
• Marie-Antoine Carême
  Marie-Antoine Carême
  Marie Antoine Carême , known as the "King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings" was an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as haute cuisine, the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery favored by both international royalty and by the newly rich of...
  
  
• Alain Ducasse
  Alain Ducasse
  Alain Ducasse is a Monégasque chef. He formerly held French nationality. He operates a number of restaurants including Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester which holds three stars in the Michelin Guide....
  
  
• Adolphe Dugléré
  Adolphe Dugléré
  Adolphe Dugléré was a French chef and a pupil of Carême.- Les Frères Provençaux :Dugléré was a chef de cuisine to the Rothschild family until 1848, and was manager at the restaurant Les Frères Provençaux at the Palais-Royal from 1848 to 1866 which was owned by three men from Provence named...
  
  
• Auguste Escoffier
  Auguste Escoffier
  Georges Auguste Escoffier was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who popularized and updated traditional French cooking methods. He is a legendary figure among chefs and gourmands, and was one of the most important leaders in the development of modern French cuisine...
  
  
• Pierre Gagnaire
  Pierre Gagnaire
  Pierre Gagnaire is a well known French chef, and is the Head Chef and owner of the eponymous Pierre Gagnaire restaurant at 6 rue Balzac in Paris . Gagnaire is an iconoclastic chef at the forefront of the fusion cuisine movement. Beginning his career in St...
  
  
• Michel Guérard
  Michel Guérard
  Michel Guérard is a French chef, author, one of the founders of nouvelle cuisine, and the inventor of cuisine minceur.- Biography :...
  
  
• Victor Hirtzler
  Victor Hirtzler
  Victor Hirtzler was a French chef who was head chef of San Francisco, California's St. Francis Hotel from its opening in 1904 until 1926...
  
  
• Ludovic Lefebvre
  Ludovic Lefebvre
  Ludo Lefebvre is a French chef. He received his training in restaurants in France beginning in adolescence and in his early twenties immigrated to the United States where he quickly earned recognition, making appearances on television in culinary shows and earning an award for one of the...
  
  
• Jacques Pepin
  Jacques Pépin
  Jacques Pépin is an internationally recognized French chef, television personality, and author working in the United States. Born in Bourg-en-Bresse, Lyon in France, Pepin was raised by a father and mother who jointly owned a restaurant, where he later credited the start of his love for food. He...
  
  
• Georges Perrier
• Fernand Point
• Charles Ranhofer
  Charles Ranhofer
  Charles Ranhofer was the chef at the famous Delmonico's Restaurant in New York from 1862 to 1876 and 1879 to 1896...
  
  
• Eric Rippert
• Joël Robuchon
  Joël Robuchon
  Joël Robuchon is a French chef and restaurateur. He was titled "Chef of the Century" by the guide Gault Millau in 1989 and also awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France in cuisine in 1976...
  
  
• Albert Roux
  Albert Roux
  Albert Roux OBE is a French-born restaurateur and chef working in Britain. He and his brother Michel operated Le Gavroche, the first restaurant in the UK to gain three Michelin stars. He helped train a series of chefs that went on to win Michelin stars, and his son, Michel Roux, Jr...
  
  
• Michel Roux
  Michel Roux
  Michel Roux is a French-born chef and restaurateur working in Britain.Born in Charolles, Saône-et-Loire, Roux moved to Paris with his family after the war, where they set up a charcuterie...
  
  
• Guy Savoy
  Guy Savoy
  Guy Savoy is a world-renowned French chef, and is the Head Chef and owner of the eponymous Guy Savoy restaurant in Paris and sister restaurant in Las Vegas.The Paris restaurant has garnered the 3 Michelin stars, being elevated in 2002...
  
  
• François Vatel
  François Vatel
  François Vatel was the maître d'hôtel of Nicolas Fouquet and prince Louis II de Bourbon-Condé.He is widely, but incorrectly, credited with creating crème Chantilly , a sweet, vanilla-flavoured whipped cream, for an extravagant banquet for 2,000 people hosted in honour of Louis XIV by Louis, the...
  
  
• Marc Veyrat
  Marc Veyrat
  Marc Veyrat is a French chef from the Haute-Savoie region, who specialises in molecular gastronomy and the use of mountain plants and herbs. Although he is hardly known in the American culinary scene, he is one of the most famous chefs in the European restaurant scene.Veyrat is considered by some...
  
  
• Jean-Georges Vongerichten
  Jean-Georges Vongerichten
  Jean-Georges Vongerichten is a French chef. He was born in Alsace, France, in 1956 and now resides in the United States of America. Vongerichten commands restaurants in culinary capitals Las Vegas, London, Paris and Shanghai, as well as New York's Jean Georges restaurant...
  
  

Colonial administrators

• Félix Éboué
  Félix Éboué
  Félix Adolphe Éboué was a Black French colonial administrator and Free French leader. He was the first black French man appointed to high post in the French colonies, when appointed as Governor of Guadeloupe in 1936...
  
  , Governor general of French Equatorial Africa
  French Equatorial Africa
  French Equatorial Africa or the AEF was the federation of French colonial possessions in Middle Africa, extending northwards from the Congo River to the Sahara Desert.-History:...
  
  
• Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
  Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
  Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà, best known as Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de Brazza , was a Franco-Italian explorer, born in Italy and later naturalized Frenchman...
  
  , French Congo
• Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Louisiana
• Samuel de Champlain
  Samuel de Champlain
  Samuel de Champlain , "The Father of New France", was a French navigator, cartographer, draughtsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler. He founded New France and Quebec City on July 3, 1608....
  
  , New France
  New France
  New France was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763...
  
  
• François Caron
  François Caron
  François Caron was a French Huguenot refugee to the Netherlands who served the Dutch East India Company for 30 years, rising from cabin boy to Director-General at Batavia , only one grade below Governor-General...
  
  , first Governor of French territories of India
• François Martin
  François Martin
  François Martin was the first Governor General of Pondicherry. He founded Pondicherry, the future capital of French India in 1674. He was Commissioner of French East India Company before holding this post and was preceded by François Baron and succeeded by Pierre Dulivier. There is a street named...
  
  , Governor for French territories in India
• Pierre Christoph Le Noir
  Pierre Christoph Le Noir
  Pierre Christoph Le Noir was Governor General of Pondicherry twice . During his rule, Yanaon was added to the French Establishments of India as a third colony in 1727. He expanded the Pondicherry area and made it a large and rich town...
  
  , Governor for French territories in India
• Pierre Benoît Dumas
  Pierre Benoît Dumas
  Pierre Benoît Dumas was the French Governor General for Pondichéry and Réunion. Predecessor of La Bourdonnais on the Isles and Dupleix in the Indies, Dumas hailed from Southern France. There is still a street in Pondicherry named after him....
  
  , Governor for French territories in India
• Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais
  Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais
  Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais was a French naval officer and administrator, in the service of the French East India Company.-Biography:...
  
  , French naval officer and administrator, in the service of the French East India Company
  French East India Company
  The French East India Company was a commercial enterprise, founded in 1664 to compete with the British and Dutch East India companies in colonial India....
  
  .
• Joseph François Dupleix
  Joseph François Dupleix
  Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix was governor general of the French establishment in India, and the rival of Robert Clive.-Biography:Dupleix was born in Landrecies, France...
  
  , Governor for French territories in India
• Lally-Tollendal, Governor for French territories in India
• Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau
  Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau
  Charles Joseph Patissier, Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau was the Governor General of the French colony of Pondicherry from 1783 to 1785. He servied with distinction under Joseph François Dupleix in the East Indies, receiving the Order of Saint Louis...
  
  , Governor for French territories in India
• Louis Faidherbe
  Louis Faidherbe
  Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French general and colonial administrator. He created the Senegalese Tirailleurs when he was governor of Senegal.- Background :...
  
  , Senegal
  Senegal
  Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
  
  
• Joseph Gallieni
  Joseph Gallieni
  Joseph Simon Gallieni was a French soldier, most active as a military commander and administrator in the French colonies and finished his career during the First World War. He was made Marshal of France posthumously in 1921...
  
  , Madagascar
  Madagascar
  The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
  
  
• Francis Garnier
  Francis Garnier
  Marie Joseph François Garnier was a French officer and explorer known for his exploration of the Mekong River in Southeast Asia.- Early career :...
  
  , French Indochina
  French Indochina
  French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....
  
   (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos)
• Émile Gentil
  Émile Gentil
  Émile Gentil was a French colonial administrator, naval officer, and colonial military leader.Born at Volmunster in the department of Moselle, he later attended the École Navale, the school that formed French naval officers. As an ensign, he was assigned to conduct hydrographic soundings along the...
  
  , French Congo
  French Congo
  The French Congo was a French colony which at one time comprised the present-day area of the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and the Central African Republic...
  
  
• Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey
  Hubert Lyautey
  Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey was a French Army general, the first Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925 and from 1921 Marshal of France.-Early life:...
  
  , Algeria
  Algeria
  Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, Louisiana
  Louisiana
  Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
  
  
• Jean Talon
  Jean Talon
  Jean Talon, Comte d'Orsainville was a French colonial administrator who was the first and most highly regarded Intendant of New France under King Louis XIV...
  
  , Canada

Composers

• Georges Auric
  Georges Auric
  Georges Auric was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault. He was a child prodigy and at age 15 he had his first compositions published. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Caussade, and under the composer Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum...
  
  
• Hector Berlioz
  Hector Berlioz
  Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...
  
  
• Georges Bizet
  Georges Bizet
  Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...
  
  , composer of Carmen
  Carmen
  Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...
  
  
• Nicolas-Charles Bochsa
  Nicolas-Charles Bochsa
  Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa was a musician and composer.-Life:...
  
  
• Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
  
  , avant-garde
  Avant-garde
  Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
  
   composer
• Marc Antoine Charpentier
• Frédéric Chopin
  Frédéric Chopin
  Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....
  
   Polish and French composer
• François Couperin
  François Couperin
  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.-Life:Couperin was born in Paris...
  
  
• Michel Richard Delalande
  Michel Richard Delalande
  Michel Richard Delalande [de Lalande] was a French Baroque composer and organist who was in the service of King Louis XIV. He was one of the most important composers of grand motets. He also wrote orchestral suites known as "Simphonies pour les Soupers du Roy" and ballets...
  
  
• Georges Delerue
  Georges Delerue
  Georges Delerue , was a French film composer who composed over 350 scores for cinema and television. He won numerous important awards including Rome Prize , Emmy Award , Genie Award , ACE Award and Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1979 for A...
  
  
• Claude Debussy
  Claude Debussy
  Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
  
  , Impressionist composer
• Alexandre Desplat
  Alexandre Desplat
  Alexandre Michel Gérard Desplat is a French film composer. He has received four Academy Award nominations, five BAFTA nominations, five Golden Globe nominations, winning a Golden Globe for his work on The Painted Veil in 2006, and two Grammy nominations. In 2011, Desplat won his first British...
  
  
• Paul Dukas
  Paul Dukas
  Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
  
  , composer of The Sorcerer's Apprentice
  The Sorcerer's Apprentice
  The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the English name of a poem by Goethe, Der Zauberlehrling, written in 1797. The poem is a ballad in fourteen stanzas.-Story:...
  
  
• Henri Duparc
• Gabriel Fauré
  Gabriel Fauré
  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...
  
  
• César Franck
  César Franck
  César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....
  
  , also considered Belgian
• Gérard Grisey
  Gérard Grisey
  Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...
  
  , avant-garde
  Avant-garde
  Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
  
   composer
• Reynaldo Hahn
  Reynaldo Hahn
  Reynaldo Hahn was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic and diarist. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie....
  
  
• Pierre Henry
  Pierre Henry
  Pierre Henry is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.-Biography:...
  
  , writer of musique concrète
  Musique concrète
  Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
  
   and electronic music
  Electronic music
  Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
  
  
• Jean Michel Jarre
  Jean Michel Jarre
  Jean Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and New Age genres, and known as an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music featuring lights, laser displays, and fireworks.Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and...
  
  
• Maurice Jarre
  Maurice Jarre
  Maurice-Alexis Jarre was a French composer and conductor.Although he composed several concert works, he is best known for his film scores, and is particularly known for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia...
  
  , film music composer
• Louis-Antoine Jullien
• Michel Legrand
  Michel Legrand
  Michel Jean Legrand is a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist...
  
  
• Jean François Lesueur
• Fabien Lévy
  Fabien Lévy
  -Biography:Lévy was born in Paris, France. After having been a jazz pianist, he studied composition with Gérard Grisey, orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie and ethnomusicology with Gilles Leothaud at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1996 to 2000. In 2001, he went to Berlin on the DAAD Artist...
  
  , avant-garde
  Avant-garde
  Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
  
   composer
• Jean Baptiste Lully
  Jean-Baptiste Lully
  Jean-Baptiste de Lully was an Italian-born French composer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered the chief master of the French Baroque style. Lully disavowed any Italian influence in French music of the period. He became a French subject in...
  
  , court composer to Louis XIV
  Louis XIV of France
  Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...
  
  
• Olivier Messiaen
  Olivier Messiaen
  Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...
  
  
• Darius Milhaud
  Darius Milhaud
  Darius Milhaud was a French composer 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 make use of polytonality...
  
  
• Tristan Murail
  Tristan Murail
  Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...
  
  , avant-garde
  Avant-garde
  Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
  
   composer
• Jacques Offenbach
  Jacques Offenbach
  Jacques Offenbach was a Prussian-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr....
  
  , noted for his operetta
  Operetta
  Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...
  
  s
• Gabriel Pierné
  Gabriel Pierné
  Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné was a French composer, conductor, and organist.-Biography:Gabriel Pierné was born in Metz in 1863. His family moved to Paris to escape the Franco-Prussian War. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, gaining first prizes for solfège, piano, organ, counterpoint and fugue...
  
  
• Francis Poulenc
  Francis Poulenc
  Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...
  
  
• Jean Philippe Rameau
• Maurice Ravel
  Maurice Ravel
  Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
  
  
• Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
  Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
  Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle , was a French Army officer of the 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.- Biography :Rouget de Lisle was...
  
  , composer of "La Marseillaise", French National Anthem
• Camille Saint-Saëns
  Camille Saint-Saëns
  Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
  
  
• Erik Satie
  Erik Satie
  Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
  
  , composer of Musiques d'ameublement
• Pierre Schaeffer
  Pierre Schaeffer
  Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
  
  , inventor of musique concrète
  Musique concrète
  Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
  
  
• Florent Schmitt
  Florent Schmitt
  Florent Schmitt was a French composer.-Early life:A Lorrainer, born in Meurthe-et-Moselle, Schmitt originally took music lessons in Nancy with the local composer Gustave Sandré. Subsequently he entered the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied with Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois,...
  
  
• Les Six
  Les Six
  Les six is a name, inspired by The Five, given in 1920 by critic Henri Collet in an article titled "" to a group of six composers working in Montparnasse whose music is often seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner and impressionist music.-Members:Formally, the Groupe des...
  
  , group of composers
• Germaine Tailleferre
  Germaine Tailleferre
  Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the famous composers' group Les Six.-Biography:...
  
  
• Charles-Marie Widor
  Charles-Marie Widor
  Charles-Marie Jean Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher.-Life:Widor was born in Lyon, to a family of organ builders, and initially studied music there with his father, François-Charles Widor, titular organist of Saint-François-de-Sales from 1838 to 1889...
  
  

Criminals

For collaboration

Collaborationism

Collaborationism is cooperation with enemy forces against one's country. Legally, it may be considered as a form of treason. Collaborationism may be associated with criminal deeds in the service of the occupying power, which may include complicity with the occupying power in murder, persecutions,...

 with Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 see also the politicians section.

• Jacques de Bernonville
  Jacques de Bernonville
  Jacques Charles Noel Duge de Bernonville was a French collaborationist and senior police officer in the Vichy regime in France infamously known as the man who hunted down resistance fighters during World War II....
  
   (1897–1972), war criminal sentenced to death
• Jules Bonnot
  Bonnot gang
  The Bonnot Gang was a French criminal anarchist group that operated in France and Belgium during the Belle Époque, from 1911 to 1912...
  
  
• Émile Louis
  Émile Louis
  Émile Louis is a retired French bus driver and prime suspect in the disappearance of seven young women in the département of Yonne, Burgundy, in the late 1970s...
  
  
• Henri Désiré Landru
  Henri Désiré Landru
  Henri Désiré Landru was a French serial killer and real-life "Bluebeard".-Early life:Landru was born in Paris. After leaving school, he spent four years in the French Army from 1887 – 1891. After he was discharged from service, he proceeded to have a sexual relationship with his cousin...
  
  , serial killer
• Jacques Mesrine
  Jacques Mesrine
  Jacques Mesrine was the most famous criminal in modern French history. He was responsible for numerous bank robberies, burglaries, and kidnappings in France and Canada. Mesrine repeatedly escaped from prison and made international headlines during a final period as a fugitive when his exploits...
  
  
• Zacarias Moussaoui
  Zacarias Moussaoui
  Zacarias Moussaoui is a French citizen who was convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the US as part of the September 11 attacks...
  
  
• Maurice Papon
  Maurice Papon
  Maurice Papon was a French civil servant, industrial leader and Gaullist politician, who was convicted for crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of over 1600 Jews during World War II when he was secretary general for police of the Prefecture of Bordeaux.Papon also...
  
  , politician and war criminal
• Marcel Petiot
  Marcel Petiot
  Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was a French doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 26 people in his home in Paris during World War II...
  
  , serial killer
• Gilles de Rais
  Gilles de Rais
  Gilles de Montmorency-Laval , Baron de Rais, was a Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best known as a prolific serial killer of children...
  
  , prolific serial killer
• Jean-Claude Romand
  Jean-Claude Romand
  Jean-Claude Romand is a French impostor and murderer who pretended to be a medical doctor. He killed his family when he was about to be exposed.- Early life :...
  
  , murderer
• Albert Spaggiari
  Albert Spaggiari
  Albert Spaggiari , nicknamed Bert, was a French criminal chiefly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France in 1976.-Earlier life:...
  
  
• Charles Sobhraj
  Charles Sobhraj
  Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj , better known as Charles Sobhraj, is a serial killer of Indian and Vietnamese origin, who preyed on Western tourists throughout Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Nicknamed "the Serpent" and "the Bikini killer" for his skill at deception and evasion, he...
  
  , killer
• Paul Touvier
  Paul Touvier
  Paul Touvier was a French Nazi collaborator. In 1994, he was the first Frenchman convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions in Vichy France.- Early life :...
  
  , one of only two Frenchmen to be convicted of crimes against humanity

Dancers

• Jane Avril
  Jane Avril
  Jane Avril was a French can-can dancer made famous by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec through his paintings. Extremely thin, 'given to jerky movements and sudden contortions', she was nicknamed La Mélinite, after an explosive. -Biography:...
  
  
• La Goulue
  La Goulue
  Louise Weber was a French can-can dancer who performed under the stage name of La Goulue...
  
  
• Sylvie Guillem
  Sylvie Guillem
  Sylvie Guillem CBE is a French ballet dancer. She was the top-ranking female dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet from 1984 to 1989, before becoming a principal guest artist with the Royal Ballet in London. She is currently performing contemporary dance as an Associate Artist of London's Sadler's...
  
  
• Marcelle Lender
  Marcelle Lender
  Marcelle Lender was a French singer, dancer and entertainer made famous in paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.Born Anne-Marie Marcelle Bastien, she began dancing at the age of sixteen and within a few years made a name for herself performing at the Théâtre des Variétés in Montmartre.Marcelle...
  
  
• Cléo de Mérode
  Cléo de Mérode
  Cléo de Mérode was a French dancer of the Belle Époque.-Biography:Cléopatra Diane de Mérode was born in Paris, France, the daughter of the Austrian landscape painter, Karl von Merode . The painter belonged to a famous Belgian noble family 'de Mérode'...
  
  
• Hellé Nice
  Hellé Nice
  Hellé Nice was a model, dancer, and a Grand Prix motor racing driver.- Early life and fast lifestyle :...
  
  
• François Perron
  François Perron
  François Perron is a French born ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher, who now works and resides in the United States. Perron, is a graduate of the Paris Opera Ballet School where he studied under the direction of Claude Bessy.-Career:...
  
  
• Roland Petit
  Roland Petit
  Roland Petit was a French choreographer and dancer born in Villemomble, near Paris, France. He trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets.-Biography:...
  
  

See also Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge is a cabaret built in 1889 by Joseph Oller, who also owned the Paris Olympia. Close to Montmartre in the Paris district of Pigalle on Boulevard de Clichy in the 18th arrondissement, it is marked by the red windmill on its roof. The closest métro station is Blanche.The Moulin Rouge is...

 and Folies Bergère

Economists

• Antoine Augustin Cournot
  Antoine Augustin Cournot
  Antoine Augustin Cournot was a French philosopher and mathematician.Antoine Augustin Cournot was born at Gray, Haute-Saone. In 1821 he entered one of the most prestigious Grande École, the École Normale Supérieure, and in 1829 he had earned a doctoral degree in mathematics, with mechanics as his...
  
  
• Maurice Allais
  Maurice Allais
  Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French economist, and was the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources."...
  
  , Nobel Prize
• Raymond Barre
  Raymond Barre
  Raymond Octave Joseph Barre was a French centre-right politician and economist. He was a Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs under three Presidents and later served as Prime Minister under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing from 1976 until 1981...
  
  , economist and politician
• Frederic Bastiat
  Frédéric Bastiat
  Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost.-Biography:...
  
  
• Fernand Braudel
  Fernand Braudel
  Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
  
  
• Jules Dupuit
  Jules Dupuit
  Jules Dupuit was an Italian-born French civil engineer and economist.He was born in Fossano, Italy then under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the age of ten he emigrated to France with his family where he studied in Versailles — winning a Physics prize at graduation. He then studied in the...
  
  
• Gerard Debreu
  Gerard Debreu
  Gérard Debreu was a French economist and mathematician, who also came to have United States citizenship. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.-Biography:His father was the...
  
  , Nobel memorial prize 1983
• Charles Gide
  Charles Gide
  Charles Gide was a leading 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.- Academic work :...
  
  
• Dominique Guellec
  Dominique Guellec
  Dominique Guellec is a French economist. He formerly held the post of chief economist at the European Patent Office . He is senior economist at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development where he is in charge of the department monitoring innovation policies.-Bibliography :* The...
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Laffont
  Jean-Jacques Laffont
  Jean-Jacques Marcel Laffont was a French economist specializing in public economics and information economics. Educated at the University of Toulouse and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris, he was awarded the Ph.D...
  
  
• Pierre Émile Levasseur
  Pierre Émile Levasseur
  Pierre Émile Levasseur , was a French economist, son of Victor Levasseur .Pierre was born and educated in Paris, France. He began teaching in the lycée at Alençon in 1852, and in 1857 became professor of rhetoric at Besançon. He returned to Paris to become professor at the lycée Saint Louis...
  
  
• Alain Lipietz
  Alain Lipietz
  Alain Lipietz is a French engineer, economist and politician, a Member of the European Parliament, and a member of the French Green Party.-Education:...
  
  , green economist
• Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours
  Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours
  Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was a French nobleman, writer, economist, and government official, who was the father of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder of E.I...
  
  
• François Quesnay
  François Quesnay
  François Quesnay was a French economist of the Physiocratic school. He is known for publishing the "Tableau économique" in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats...
  
  
• Pascal Salin
  Pascal Salin
  Pascal Salin is a libertarian French economist, professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine and a specialist in public finance. He is a former president of the Mont Pelerin Society ....
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Say
  Jean-Baptiste Say
  Jean-Baptiste Say was a French economist and businessman. He had classically liberal views and argued in favor of competition, free trade, and lifting restraints on business...
  
  
• Turgot
• Léon Walras
  Léon Walras
  Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras was a French mathematical economist associated with the creation of the general equilibrium theory.-Life and career:...
  
  

Fashion

• Christian Audigier
  Christian Audigier
  thumb|Christian Audigier.Christian Audigier, born on May 21, 1958 in Avignon , is a fashion designer and French entrepreneur installed in the United States. In 2010, his fortune was estimated at 250 million dollars.- Biography :...
  
  , fashion designer and business man.
• Liliane Bettencourt
  Liliane Bettencourt
  Liliane Bettencourt is a French heiress, socialite, businesswoman and philanthropist. She is one of the principal shareholders of L'Oréal and, with a fortune estimated at US$23.5 billion, is one of the wealthiest people in the world.-Biography:...
  
  , majority owner of L'Oréal, one of the wealthiest people in Europe
• Pierre Cardin
  Pierre Cardin
  Pierre Cardin Cardin was known for his avant-garde style and his Space Age designs. He prefers geometric shapes and motifs, often ignoring the female form. He advanced into unisex fashions, sometimes experimental, and not always practical...
  
  , fashion designer
• Laetitia Casta
  Laetitia Casta
  Laetitia Marie Laure Casta is a French model and actress.-Early life:Laetitia Casta was born in Pont-Audemer, Normandy, France. Her mother, Line Blin, is from Normandy. Her father, Dominique Casta, is from Corsica. She has an older brother, Jean-Baptiste, and a younger sister, Marie-Ange...
  
  , model
• Coco Chanel, fashion designer
• Hubert de Givenchy
  Hubert de Givenchy
  Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy is a French aristocrat and fashion designer who founded The House of Givenchy in 1952. He is famous for having designed much of the personal and professional wardrobe of Audrey Hepburn, as well as clothing for clients such as Jacqueline Kennedy...
  
  
• Inès de la Fressange
  Inès de la Fressange
  Inès Marie Lætitia Églantine Isabelle de Seignard de La Fressange , is a French model, aristocrat and designer of fashion and perfumes. She was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1998.- Biography :...
  
  , model and fashion designer
• Christian Dior
  Christian Dior
  Christian Dior , was a French fashion designer, best known as the founder of one of the world's top fashion houses, also called Christian Dior.-Life:...
  
  , fashion designer
• Morgane Dubled
  Morgane Dubled
  Morgane Dubled , is a French model.-Early life:Dubled was first scouted at the age of 16 by a model scout for Elite Model Management in her hometown of Nice, France, in 2001...
  
  , model
• Julien Fournié
  Julien Fournié
  Julien Fournié is a French fashion designer and CEO of his own eponymous haute couture company founded in the summer of 2009. Previously, he was the last Creative Director of the Paris-based haute couture fashion house Torrente...
  
  
• Jean-Paul Gaultier
  Jean-Paul Gaultier
  Jean Paul Gaultier , born 24 April 1952 in Arcueil, Val-de-Marne, France) is a French haute couture fashion designer. Gaultier was the creative director of Hermès from 2003 to 2010. In the past, he has hosted the television series Eurotrash....
  
  
• Daniel Hechter
  Daniel Hechter
  Daniel Hechter is a French fashion designer, sometimes referred to as the inventor of Pret-a-Porter or ready-to-wear .-Personal life:...
  
  , inventor of ready-to-wear
• Noemie Lenoir
  Noémie Lenoir
  Noémie Lenoir is a French model and actress of African and European descent.-Career:Lenoir was first spotted by Ford Models when she was 16 years old. In 1995, Lenoir signed with L'Oréal, and has since appeared in their advertisements alongside Laetitia Casta and long-term model and actress Andie...
  
  , model
• Jennifer Messelier, model
• Paul Poiret
  Paul Poiret
  Paul Poiret was a French fashion designer. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion have been likened to Picasso's contributions to twentieth-century art.-Early life and career:...
  
  
• Yves Saint-Laurent, fashion designer
• Louis Vuitton
  Louis Vuitton
  Louis Vuitton Malletier – commonly referred to as Louis Vuitton , or shortened to LV – is a French fashion house founded in 1854 by Louis Vuitton. The label is well known for its LV monogram, which is featured on most products, ranging from luxury trunks and leather goods to ready-to-wear, shoes,...
  
  , fashion designer

Fictional characters

• Astérix
  Asterix
  Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix is a series of French comic books written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo . The series first appeared in French in the magazine Pilote on October 29, 1959...
  
  , Obelix
  Obelix
  Obelix is a fictional character from the French comic book series Asterix. He works as a menhir sculptor and deliveryman, and is Asterix's best friend. Obelix is noted for his fatness, the menhirs he carries around on his back and his superhuman strength...
  
   and Dogmatix
  Dogmatix
  Dogmatix is a fictional character, a tiny white dog who belongs to Obelix in the Asterix comics. Dogmatix is a pun on the words dog and dogmatic. In the original French his name is Idéfix, itself a pun on the French expression idée fixe meaning an obsession...
  
   (French: Idéfix) (René Goscinny
  René Goscinny
  René Goscinny was a French comics editor and writer, who is best known for the comic book Astérix, which he created with illustrator Albert Uderzo, and for his work on the comic series Lucky Luke with Morris and Iznogoud with Jean Tabary.-Early life:Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926, to a family...
  
   and Albert Uderzo
  Albert Uderzo
  Albert Uderzo is a French comic book artist, and scriptwriter. He is best known for his work on the Astérix series, but also drew other comics such as Oumpah-pah, also in collaboration with René Goscinny.-Early life:...
  
  ), Gaul
  Gaul
  Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
  
   warriors
• Athos
  Athos (fictional character)
  Olivier d'Athos de la Fère, Comte de la Fère is a fictional character, a Musketeer of the Guard in the novels The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas, père....
  
  , Porthos
  Porthos
  Porthos, Baron du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds is a fictional character in the novels The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas, père. He and the other two musketeers Athos and Aramis are friends of the novel's protagonist, d'Artagnan...
  
  , Aramis
  Aramis
  C. René d'Aramis de Vannes is a fictional character in the novels The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas, père...
  
   and D'Artagnan
  D'Artagnan
  Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Comte d'Artagnan served Louis XIV as captain of the Musketeers of the Guard and died at the Siege of Maastricht in the Franco-Dutch War. A fictionalized account of his life by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras formed the basis for the d'Artagnan Romances of...
  
   (Alexandre Dumas, père
  Alexandre Dumas, père
  Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
  
  ), Musketeers
  The Three Musketeers
  The Three Musketeers is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized in March–July 1844. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard...
  
   of the King of France
• Cyrano de Bergerac
  Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
  Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play bears very scant resemblance to his life....
  
   (Edmond Rostand
  Edmond Rostand
  Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century...
  
  ; fictionalized version of a real person)
• Lestat de Lioncourt
  Lestat de Lioncourt
  Lestat de Lioncourt is a fictional character appearing in several novels by Anne Rice, including The Vampire Lestat. He is a vampire and the main character in the majority of The Vampire Chronicles, narrated in first person.-Publication history:...
  
  , infamous vampire creation of Anne Rice
  Anne Rice
  Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...
  
  
• Louis de Pointe du Lac
  Louis de Pointe du Lac
  Louis de Pointe du Lac is a fictional character in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series. He began his life as a mortal man, and later became a vampire. He is the protagonist and antihero of Interview with the Vampire, the first book of The Vampire Chronicles...
  
  , French-born vampire companion of Lestat de Lioncourt
  Lestat de Lioncourt
  Lestat de Lioncourt is a fictional character appearing in several novels by Anne Rice, including The Vampire Lestat. He is a vampire and the main character in the majority of The Vampire Chronicles, narrated in first person.-Publication history:...
  
  
• Jean-Luc Picard
  Jean-Luc Picard
  Captain Jean-Luc Picard is a Star Trek character portrayed by Patrick Stewart. He appears in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and the feature films Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek Nemesis...
  
   (Patrick Stewart
  Patrick Stewart
  Sir Patrick Hewes Stewart, OBE is an English film, television and stage actor, who has had a distinguished career in theatre and television for around half a century...
  
  ), captain of three Federation starships within one television series and four motion pictures
• Le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint Exupéry), famous "little prince"
• Erik, The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon...
  
  ), The "Opera Ghost" who haunted the Palais Garnier
  Palais Garnier
  The Palais Garnier, , is an elegant 1,979-seat opera house, which was built from 1861 to 1875 for the Paris Opera. It was originally called the Salle des Capucines because of its location on the Boulevard des Capucines in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, but soon became known as the Palais Garnier...
  
  
• Vicomte Raoul
  Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny
  Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny is a main character from Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera.-Biography:Raoul de Chagny is a viscount and Christine Daaé's childhood friend. They first met when he was a young child when he went on vacation in Northern France...
  
   de Chagny (Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Leroux
  Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon...
  
  ), childhood friend of Christine Daae
  Christine Daaé
  Christine Daaé is the main female character in Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera , the young singer with whom the main character Erik, the Phantom of the Opera falls in love.- Character history :...
  
   and brother of Comte Phillipe; competed for the affections of Christine Daae
  Christine Daaé
  Christine Daaé is the main female character in Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera , the young singer with whom the main character Erik, the Phantom of the Opera falls in love.- Character history :...
  
   with Erik.
• Rastignac (Honoré de Balzac
  Honoré de Balzac
  Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
  
  ), fictional character from La Comédie humaine series of novels by Honoré de Balzac
• The Man in the Iron Mask, prisoner who was held in a number of jails, including the Bastille and the Fortress of Pinerolo, during the reign of Louis XIV of France
• Corporal Louis LeBeau, POW
  Prisoner of war
  A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
  
  , Stalag 13
  Stalag 13
  Stalag 13 was a post-World War II POW camp in Nuremberg, Germany, that held former SS military personnel. It imprisoned 15,000 SS members....
  
  
• Inspector Jacques Clouseau, bumbling French detective, star of the Pink Panther movies
• Inspector Tarconi
  François Berléand
  François Berléand is a French actor.Berléand was born in Paris, France of . He plays Gilles Triquet, the officer manager and equivalent of David Brent in Le Bureau, the French version of The Office, produced by Canal+. He released a book about his childhood in 2006, Le fils de l'homme invisible...
  
  , bumbling French detective, star of The Transporter
  The Transporter
  The Transporter is a 2002 French action film directed by Louis Leterrier and Corey Yuen and written by Luc Besson, who was inspired by BMW Films' The Hire series....
  
   movies
• Amélie Poulain, shy but kind-hearted waitress, star of 2001 film Amélie
  Amélie
  Amélie is a 2001 romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre...
  
  .
• Jean Valjean
  Jean Valjean
  Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables...
  
  , protagonist of Victor Hugo
  Victor Hugo
  Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
  
  's Les Misérables
  Les Misérables
  Les Misérables , translated variously from the French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, or The Victims), is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century...
  
  
• Inspector Javert, antagonist of Victor Hugo
  Victor Hugo
  Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
  
  's Les Misérables
  Les Misérables
  Les Misérables , translated variously from the French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, or The Victims), is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century...
  
  
• Le Peregrine
  Peregrine (comics)
  Le Peregrine is a fictional character in the Marvel Universe.-Fictional character biography:Alain Racine was born in Moulins, France...
  
   – Alain Racine, Superhero
  Superhero
  A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...
  
   in the Marvel Universe
  Marvel Universe
  The Marvel Universe is the shared fictional universe where most comic book titles and other media published by Marvel Entertainment take place, including those featuring Marvel's most familiar characters, such as Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Avengers.The Marvel Universe is further...
  
  
• Tanguy et Laverdure
  Tanguy et Laverdure
  Les Aventures de Tanguy et Laverdure is a Franco-Belgian comics series created by Jean-Michel Charlier and Albert Uderzo, about the two pilots Michel Tanguy and Ernest Laverdure, and their adventures in the French Air Force.-Publication history:...
  
  , duet of pilots known as Les Chevaliers du ciel
  Les Chevaliers du ciel
  Les Chevaliers du ciel is a 2005 French film directed by Gérard Pirès about two air force pilots preventing a terrorist attack on the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris...
  
  
• Glass Joe
  Glass Joe
  is a fictional boxer from Nintendo's video game series Punch-Out!! He first appeared in the arcade game Punch-Out!! in 1984, and three years later made his home console debut with the Nintendo Entertainment System game of the same name. His most recent appearance was in Punch-Out!! for the Wii...
  
  , boxer from Nintendo
  Nintendo
  is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel....
  
  's Punch-Out!!
  Punch-Out!!
  is a 1983–1984 boxing arcade game by Nintendo. It was the first in a series of successful Punch-Out!! games that produced an arcade sequel known as Super Punch-Out!!, a spin-off of the series titled Arm Wrestling, a highly popular version for the NES originally known as Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!,...
  
   series of boxing video games
• Aiber (Real name Thierry Morello), professional con-man in the employ of L
  L
  Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...
  
   from popular manga and anime Death Note
  Death Note
  is a manga created by writer Tsugumi Ohba and manga artist Takeshi Obata. The main character is Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook, the "Death Note", dropped on Earth by a god of death, or a shinigami, named Ryuk...
  
  , created by Tsugumi Ohba
  Tsugumi Ohba
  is a writer best known for the manga Death Note. His real identity is a closely guarded secret. As stated by the profile placed at the beginning of each Death Note manga, Ohba collects teacups and develops manga plots while holding his knees on a chair, similar to a habit of L, one of the main...
  
   and Takeshi Obata
  Takeshi Obata
  is a Japanese manga artist. He works as the artist in collaboration with a writer. He has also mentored several manga artists, including Kentaro Yabuki of Black Cat fame, Nobuhiro Watsuki of Rurouni Kenshin and Busou Renkin, and Yusuke Murata of Eyeshield 21.He originally became noticed in 1985...
  
  . Nationally, he is French.
• Pepé Le Pew
  Pepé Le Pew
  Pepé Le Pew is a fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons, first introduced in 1945. A French skunk that always strolls around in Paris in the springtime, when everyone's thoughts are of "love", Pepé is constantly seeking "l'amour" of his own...
  
  , character from the Looney Tunes
  Looney Tunes
  Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...
  
  .

Filmmakers

• Olivier Assayas
  Olivier Assayas
  Olivier Assayas is a French film director and screenwriter.He made his debut in 1986, after directing some short films and writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.-Career:...
  
  
• Jacques Becker
  Jacques Becker
  Jacques Becker was a French screenwriter and film director.Becker was born in Paris, in an upper class background. During the 1930s he worked as an assistant to director Jean Renoir during his peak period, which produced such cinematic masterpieces as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game...
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Beineix
  Jean-Jacques Beineix
  -Biography:In 1964, Jean-Jacques Beineix started his career as Jean Becker's assistant director on the famous French TV series, Les saintes chéries until the end of 1967. Then, in 1970 he worked for Claude Berri and in 1971 for Claude Zidi. In 1977, he directed his first short movie Le Chien de M....
  
  
• Luc Besson
  Luc Besson
  Luc Besson is a French film director, writer, and producer. He is the creator of EuropaCorp film company. He has been involved with over 50 films, spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer.-Early life:...
  
  
• Alice Guy-Blaché
  Alice Guy-Blaché
  Alice Guy-Blaché was a French pioneer filmmaker who was the first female director in the motion picture industry and is considered to be one of the first directors of a fiction film.-Early years:...
  
  
• Bertrand Blier
  Bertrand Blier
  Bertrand Blier is a French screenwriter and film director.Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. He is the son of Bernard Blier....
  
  
• Catherine Breillat
  Catherine Breillat
  Catherine Breillat is a French filmmaker, novelist and Professor of Auteur Cinema at the European Graduate School.-Life and career:Breillat was born in Bressuire, Deux-Sèvres, but grew up in Niort...
  
  
• Robert Bresson
  Robert Bresson
  -Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
  
  
• André Cayatte
  André Cayatte
  André Cayatte was a French New Wave filmmaker and lawyer, who became known for his films centering on themes of crime, justice, and moral responsibility, themes which Cayatte persisted in affirming regardless of changing contemporary attitudes.Some of Cayatte's earlier films that covered these...
  
  
• René Clair
  René Clair
  René Clair born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker.-Biography:He was born in Paris and grew up in the Les Halles quarter. He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver. After the war, he started a career as a journalist...
  
  
• René Clément
• Henri-Georges Clouzot
  Henri-Georges Clouzot
  Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, which are critically recognized to be among the greatest films from the 1950s...
  
  
• Jean Cocteau
  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
  
  
• Fabien Cousteau
  Fabien Cousteau
  Fabien Cousteau is a French aquatic filmmaker and oceanographic explorer. He is son of Jean-Michel Cousteau and grandson of the noted oceanographic explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Born in Paris, he grew up in both France and the United States, and frequently accompanied his grandfather and father...
  
  
• Jacques-Yves Cousteau
  Jacques-Yves Cousteau
  Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water...
  
  
• Jacques Demy
  Jacques Demy
  Jacques Demy was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François...
  
  
• Henri Diamant-Berger
• Abel Gance
  Abel Gance
  Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse , La Roue , and the monumental Napoléon .-Early life:...
  
  
• Jean-Luc Godard
  Jean-Luc Godard
  Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
  
  
• Michel Gondry
  Michel Gondry
  Michel Gondry is an Academy Award winning filmmaker, whose works include being a commercial director, music video director, and a screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène. - Life and career :...
  
  
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  -Life and career:Jean-Pierre Jeunet was born in Roanne, Loire, France. He bought his first camera at the age of 17 and made short films while studying animation at Cinémation Studios. He befriended Marc Caro, a designer and comic book artist who became his longtime collaborator and...
  
  
• Mathieu Kassovitz
  Mathieu Kassovitz
  Mathieu Kassovitz is a French director, screenwriter, producer and actor, best known for his Cannes-winning drama La Haine. Kassovitz is also the founder of MNP Entreprise, a film production company....
  
  
• Jan Kounen
  Jan Kounen
  Jan Kounen is a Dutch-born French film director and producer.In France, he is mostly known for his films Dobermann , Blueberry, l'experience secrete and 99 francs ....
  
  
• Patrice Leconte
  Patrice Leconte
  Patrice Leconte is a French film director, actor, comic strip writer, and screenwriter.-Biography:...
  
  
• Claude Lelouch
• Louis Malle
  Louis Malle
  Louis Malle was a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. He worked in both French cinema and Hollywood. His films include Ascenseur pour l'échafaud , Atlantic City , and Au revoir, les enfants .- Early years in France :Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries,...
  
  
• André Malraux
  André Malraux
  André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
  
  
• Georges Méliès
  Georges Méliès
  Georges Méliès , full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects...
  
  
• Maurice Pialat
  Maurice Pialat
  Maurice Pialat was a French film director, screenwriter and actor noted for the rigorous and unsentimental style of his films...
  
  
• Jean Renoir
  Jean Renoir
  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...
  
  
• Alain Resnais
  Alain Resnais
  Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...
  
  
• Yves Robert
  Yves Robert
  Yves Robert was a French actor, screenwriter, director, and producer.Born in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, in his teens Robert went to Paris to pursue a career in acting, starting with unpaid parts on stage in the city's various theatre workshops. To support himself, he worked at a variety of jobs...
  
  
• Jean Rollin
  Jean Rollin
  Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil was a French film director, actor, and novelist best known for his films in the fantastique genre such as the vampire film Le Viol du Vampire and the first French gore film Les Raisins de la Mort .-Early life:Jean Rollin was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine , France to...
  
  
• Alain Sarde
  Alain Sarde
  Alain Sarde is a French film producer and actor who was born on the 28 March 1952 in Boulogne-Billancourt. One of his films, Mulholland Drive received the Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Picture. The Pianist was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and won the BAFTA Award for...
  
  
• Claude Sautet
  Claude Sautet
  Claude Sautet was a French author and film director.-Biography:Born in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Claude Sautet first studied painting and sculpture before attending a film university in Paris where he began his career and later became a television producer...
  
  
• Jacques Tati
  Jacques Tati
  Jacques Tati was a French filmmaker, working as a comedic actor, writer and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time...
  
  
• Jacques Tourneur
  Jacques Tourneur
  Jacques Tourneur was a French-American film director.-Life:Born in Paris, France, he was the son of film director Maurice Tourneur. At age 10, Jacques moved to the United States with his father. He started a career in cinema while still attending high school as an extra and later as a script clerk...
  
  
• Maurice Tourneur
  Maurice Tourneur
  Maurice Tourneur was an important international film director and screenwriter.-Life:Born Maurice Thomas in the Belleville district of Paris, France, his father was a jeweler. As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator but was soon drawn to the...
  
  
• François Truffaut
  François Truffaut
  François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
  
  
• Roger Vadim
  Roger Vadim
  Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and actor, who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the film And God Created Woman.-Early life:...
  
  
• Agnès Varda
  Agnès Varda
  Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....
  
  
• Jean Vigo
  Jean Vigo
  Jean Vigo was a French film director, who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.-Biography:...
  
  

Humorists

• Alain Chabat
  Alain Chabat
  Alain Chabat is a French actor and director who appeared in La Cité de la peur, French Twist, The Taste of Others and The Science of Sleep.- Life and career :Chabat was born in Oran, French Algeria. He is Jewish....
  
  
• Coluche
  Coluche
  Michel Colucci , better known as Coluche, was a French comedian and actor, famous for his irreverent sense of humour....
  
  
• Pierre Dac
  Pierre Dac
  André Isaac , better known as Pierre Dac was a French humorist and Résistance activist.He was born in Châlons-sur-Marne and died in Paris....
  
  , humorist and Resistance worker
• Jamel Debbouze
  Jamel Debbouze
  Jamel Debbouze is an actor, comedian and producer of Moroccan descent.-Biography:Debbouze is the oldest of five brothers. He was born in Paris, France, but his family moved to Morocco the following year...
  
  
• Pierre Desproges
  Pierre Desproges
  Pierre Desproges was a French humorist. He was famous for his elaborate, eloquent and above all, virulent diatribes criticizing anything and everything....
  
  
• Raymond Devos
  Raymond Devos
  Raymond Devos was a Belgian-French humorist, stand-up comedian and clown. He is best known for his sophisticated puns and surreal humour.- Early life :...
  
  
• Thierry Le Luron
  Thierry Le Luron
  Thierry Le Luron was a French impersonator and humorist.-External links:*...
  
  
• Dieudonné M'bala M'bala
  Dieudonné M'bala M'bala
  Dieudonné M'bala M'bala , generally known simply as Dieudonné, is a French comedian, actor and political activist....
  
  
• Florence Foresti
  Florence Foresti
  Florence Foresti is a French comedian and actress.-Background:Following her high school studies in literature, theatre and dramatic expression at Saint-Just de Lyon, Florence Foresti entered a school for cinematography at Lyon...
  
  

Military leaders

Monarchs and Royals

See also French monarchs, members of the French Royal Families

Members of the French Royal Families

This is a list of non-ruling members of the French royal family. It includes royal consorts, children, and some grandchildren, as well as more recent members of the French Royal House....

• Charlemagne
  Charlemagne
  Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
  
  
• Charles Martel
  Charles Martel
  Charles Martel , also known as Charles the Hammer, was a Frankish military and political leader, who served as Mayor of the Palace under the Merovingian kings and ruled de facto during an interregnum at the end of his life, using the title Duke and Prince of the Franks. In 739 he was offered the...
  
  
• Philip IV the Fair
  Philip IV of France
  Philip the Fair was, as Philip IV, King of France from 1285 until his death. He was the husband of Joan I of Navarre, by virtue of which he was, as Philip I, King of Navarre and Count of Champagne from 1284 to 1305.-Youth:A member of the House of Capet, Philip was born at the Palace of...
  
  
• King Francis I
  Francis I of France
  Francis I was King of France from 1515 until his death. During his reign, huge cultural changes took place in France and he has been called France's original Renaissance monarch...
  
  
• King Henry IV
  Henry IV of France
  Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....
  
  
• Louis XIV, the Sun King
  Louis XIV of France
  Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...
  
  , reigned 1643–1715
• Henriette Marie, Queen of England, wife of Charles I of England
  Charles I of England
  Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
  
   and mother to Charles II
  Charles II of England
  Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
  
   and James II
  James II of England
  James II & VII was King of England and King of Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685. He was the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland...
  
  
• Philip V of Spain
  Philip V of Spain
  Philip V was King of Spain from 15 November 1700 to 15 January 1724, when he abdicated in favor of his son Louis, and from 6 September 1724, when he assumed the throne again upon his son's death, to his death.Before his reign, Philip occupied an exalted place in the royal family of France as a...
  
  , grandson of Louis XIV through male line, born and bred in France, became King of Spain aged 17
• King Louis XV
  Louis XV of France
  Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...
  
  , reigned 1715–1774
• King Louis XVI
  Louis XVI of France
  Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....
  
  , reigned 1774–1792, executed in 1793 in Revolution
• Emperor Napoleon I
  Napoleon I of France
  Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
  
  , first to be styled 'Emperor of the French', reigned 1799–1814 and again in 1815
• Joséphine de Beauharnais
  Joséphine de Beauharnais
  Joséphine de Beauharnais was the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and thus the first Empress of the French. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she had been imprisoned in the Carmes prison until her release five days after Alexandre's...
  
  , first wife of above
• King Louis Philippe
  Louis-Philippe of France
  Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the July Monarchy. His father was a duke who supported the French Revolution but was nevertheless guillotined. Louis Philippe fled France as a young man and spent 21 years in exile, including considerable time in the...
  
  , only monarch styled King of the French; reigned 1830–1848
• Napoleon III
  Napoleon III of France
  Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III, the ruler of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I, christened as Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte...
  
  , nephew of Napoleon I, President (1848–1852) and Emperor (1852–1871); last French monarch
• Charles-Marie David de Mayréna I, King of the Kingdom of Sedang
  Kingdom of Sedang
  The Kingdom of Sedang was an ephemeral political entity established in the latter part of the 19th century by a French adventurer Charles-Marie David de Mayréna in part of what is present-day Vietnam....
  
  
• Henri Marie Jean André
  Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark
  Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark , is the husband of the Queen of Denmark, Margrethe II.-Early life:Henrik was born in Talence, Gironde, France...
  
  , Prince Consort of Denmark, married to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
• Marie Agathe Odile Cavallier
  Princess Marie of Denmark
  Marie Agathe Odile, Princess of Denmark, Countess of Monpezat, is the second wife of Prince Joachim of Denmark.-Early life:...
  
  , Princess of Denmark, married to Prince Joachim of Denmark
  Prince Joachim of Denmark
  Prince Joachim of Denmark, Count of Monpezat, , is a member of the Danish Royal Family. He is the younger son of Queen Margrethe II and Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark....
  
  

Musicians, singers

• Kenza Farah
  Kenza Farah
  Kenza Farah is an Algerian R&B singer. She is considered the second internet success story in the French music industry, after Yelle...
  
  
• Dominique A
  Dominique A
  Dominique Ané , better known as "Dominique A," is a French songwriter and singer.-Early life:Born on the 6 October 1968 in Provins, France, Dominique Ané is the only child of a teacher and a homemaker. He was passionate about literature and music from a young age...
  
  
• Air (band)
• Alizée
  Alizée
  Alizée Jacotey is a French singer, known professionally by her given name Alizée She was discovered by Mylène Farmer, following her winning performance in the talent show, Graines de Star, in 1999...
  
  
• Charles Aznavour
  Charles Aznavour
  Charles Aznavour, OC is an Armenian-French singer, songwriter, actor, public activist and diplomat. Besides being one of France's most popular and enduring singers, he is also one of the best-known singers in the world...
  
  
• Josephine Baker
  Josephine Baker
  Josephine Baker was an American dancer, singer, and actress who found fame in her adopted homeland of France. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess"....
  
  , American born entertainer
• Jane Bathori
  Jane Bathori
  Jane Bathori was a French opera singer. Born in Paris, France, she was famous on the operatic stage and important in the development of contemporary French music....
  
  , opera singer
• Barbara
  Monique Serf
  Monique Andrée Serf , known as Barbara , was a popular French female singer...
  
  
• Guy Béart
  Guy Béart
  Guy Béart is a French singer and songwriter.-Biography:He was born Guy Béhart-Hasson in Cairo, Egypt, to a family of Spanish, Swiss, and Russian background. His religious background is unclear, having been referred to as both Jewish and Christian...
  
  
• Bénabar
  Bénabar
  Bénabar is a French songwriter and singer, who could be compared to Vincent Delerm and other singers from his generation. As many of them he was influenced by Georges Brassens, Renaud, Jacques Higelin and also Tom Waits. His songs describe day-to-day life events with humour and a tender cynicism...
  
  
• Michel Berger
  Michel Berger
  Michel Berger , born Michel Jean Hamburger, was a very successful French singer and songwriter. He was a central figure of France's pop music scene for two decades both as a singer and as a songwriter for well-known French artists like his wife France Gall, Françoise Hardy and Johnny Hallyday...
  
  
• Pierre Bouvier
  Pierre Bouvier
  Pierre Charles Bouvier is a French Canadian musician, who is best known as the lead singer for pop punk band Simple Plan.At the age of 13, he founded the punk rock band Reset with his best friend Chuck Comeau in which he was the bassist and lead vocalist. He eventually wasn't enjoying his role...
  
  
• Lucienne Boyer
  Lucienne Boyer
  Lucienne Boyer was a French diseuse and singer, best known for her song "Parlez-moi d'amour". Her impresario was Bruno Coquatrix.-Early career:...
  
  
• Georges Brassens
  Georges Brassens
  Georges Brassens , 22 October 1921 – 29 October 1981), was a French singer-songwriter and poet.Brassens was born in Sète, a town in southern France near Montpellier...
  
  
• Aristide Bruant
  Aristide Bruant
  Aristide Bruant was a French cabaret singer, comedian, and nightclub owner. He is best known as the man in the red scarf and black cape featured on certain famous posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec...
  
  
• Julie Budet
  Yelle
  Yelle is a French band founded by lead singer and namesake, Yelle and GrandMarnier . A third member, Tepr , joined the band before the recording of their debut album. Budet and GrandMarnier began working on music together in 2000...
  
  
• Manu Chao
  Manu Chao
  Manu Chao , is a French singer of Spanish roots . He sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Galician, Arabic and Portuguese and occasionally in other languages...
  
  
• Richard Clayderman
  Richard Clayderman
  Richard Clayderman is a French pianist who has released numerous albums including the compositions of Paul de Senneville and Olivier Toussaint, instrumental renditions of popular music, rearrangements of movie soundtracks, ethnic music, and easy-listening arrangements of most popular works of...
  
  , pianist
• Daft Punk
  Daft Punk
  Daft Punk are an electronic music duo consisting of French musicians Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter . Daft Punk reached significant popularity in the late 1990s house movement in France and met with continued success in the years following, combining elements of house with synthpop...
  
  
• Dalida
  Dalida
  Dalida , born with Italian name of Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a world-famous singer and actress born in Egypt with Italian origins but naturalised French with the name Yolanda Gigliotti. She spent her early years in Egypt amongst the Italian Egyptian community, but she lived most of her adult...
  
  
• Damia
  Marie-Louise Damien
  Marie-Louise Damien was a French singer and actress better known by the stage name Damia.-Robert Hollard:...
  
  
• Natalie Dessay
  Natalie Dessay
  Natalie Dessay is a French coloratura soprano. She dropped the silent "h" in her first name in honor of Natalie Wood when she was in grade school and subsequently simplified the spelling of her surname outside France...
  
  , opera singer
• Sacha Distel
  Sacha Distel
  Sacha Distel was a French singer and guitarist who had hits with a cover version of the Academy Award-winning "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" , "Scoubidou", and "The Good Life". He was born in Paris.-Career:Sacha Distel, born Alexandre Distel, was a son of Russian White émigré Leonid Distel...
  
  , heartthrob covered "Raindrops keep falling on my head"
• Marie Dubas
  Marie Dubas
  Marie Dubas was a music-hall singer, diseuse and comedienne.Born in Paris, France, Marie Dubas began her career as a stage actress but became famous as a singer. Using the great Yvette Guilbert as her model, Dubas started singing in the small cabarets of Montmartre mixing comedy into her routine...
  
  
• Jacques Dutronc
  Jacques Dutronc
  Jacques Dutronc is a French singer, songwriter, guitarist, composer, and actor. He has been married to singer Françoise Hardy since 30 March 1981 and the two have a son . He also has been a longtime songwriting collaborator with Jacques Lanzmann...
  
  
• Mylène Farmer
  Mylène Farmer
  Mylène Farmer, , born Marie-Hélène Jeanne Gautier, , , is a French singer, songwriter, occasional actress and author....
  
  
• Jean Ferrat
  Jean Ferrat
  Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.-Biography:...
  
  
• Léo Ferré
  Léo Ferré
  Léo Ferré was a Franco-Monegasque poet, composer, singer and musician.Born in Monaco, Ferré mixed love and melancholy with moral anarchy, lyricism with slang, rhyming verse with prose monologues...
  
  
• Nino Ferrer
  Nino Ferrer
  Nino Ferrer was a famous French – Italian singer, actor and jazz musician.- From prehistory to jazz :...
  
  
• Thomas Fersen
  Thomas Fersen
  Thomas Fersen is a French singer-songwriter.During his childhood, he was part of a punk group before playing the piano in café-theatres...
  
  
• Claude François
  Claude François
  Claude François was a French pop singer, songwriter and dancer. He wrote "Comme d'habitude," the original version of "My Way."-Early life:...
  
  , popular singer 1960s and 1970s
• Fréhel
  Fréhel
  Fréhel was a French singer and actress.-Biography:Born in Paris, France to a poor and dysfunctional Breton family, Marguerite Boulc'h was a child left to a life on the streets in the dark side of Paris...
  
  
• David Desrosiers
  David Desrosiers
  David Philippe Desrosiers is a French Canadian musician, who is best known as the bassist and backing vocalist for pop punk band Simple Plan. He grew up in Matane, Quebec.-Career:...
  
  
• Sebastien Lefebvre
  Sébastien Lefebvre
  Lefebvre has also released songs on his Myspace page. These include a cover of Weezer's song Can't Stop Partying and a cover of Tik Tok from Kesha...
  
  
• Chuck Comeau
  Chuck Comeau
  Charles-André "Chuck" Comeau is a French Canadian musician, who is best known as the drummer for pop punk band Simple Plan.-Biography:Comeau started his music career in Reset with fellow bandmate Pierre Bouvier...
  
  
• France Gall
  France Gall
  France Gall is a popular French yé-yé singer.Gall was married to, and had a successful singing career in partnership with, French singer-songwriter Michel Berger....
  
  
• Charlotte Gainsbourg
  Charlotte Gainsbourg
  Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg is an Anglo-French actress and singer. After releasing an album with her father at the age of fifteen, more than twenty years passed before she released two albums as an adult to commercial and critical success...
  
  
• Serge Gainsbourg
  Serge Gainsbourg
  Serge Gainsbourg, born Lucien Ginsburg was a French singer-songwriter, actor and director. Gainsbourg's extremely varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorize...
  
  
• Gipsy Kings
  Gipsy Kings
  The Gipsy Kings are a group of musicians from Arles and Montpellier, who perform in Spanish with an Andalucían accent. Although group members were born in France, their parents were mostly gitanos, Spanish Romani people who fled Catalonia during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. Chico Bouchikhi is of...
  
  
• Georgius
  Georges Guibourg
  Georges Guibourg was a French singer, author, writer, playwright, and actor, George Guibourg, alias Georgius, alias Theodore Crapulet, was one of the most popular and versatile performers in Paris for more than 50 years....
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Goldman
  Jean-Jacques Goldman
  Jean-Jacques Goldman is a Grammy Awards-winning French singer-songwriter. He is hugely popular in the French-speaking world, and since 2003 was the second-highest-grossing French living pop singer, after Johnny Hallyday.- Biography :...
  
  
• Stéphane Grappelli
  Stéphane Grappelli
  Stéphane Grappelli was a French jazz violinist who founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands....
  
  , jazz musician
• Juliette Gréco
  Juliette Gréco
  Juliette Gréco, — also Michelle – is a French actress and popular chanson singer.-Early life and family:Juliette Gréco was born in Montpellier to a Corsican father and a mother who became active in the Résistance, in the Hérault département of southern France. She was raised by her maternal...
  
  
• Gribouille
  Gribouille
  Marie-France Gaîté , better known as Gribouille, was a singer.As a teenager, she suffered from mental disorder and for a time was confined against her will to a psychiatric hospital in Lyon. With medication, she was able to function well enough to leave her hometown and moved on to Paris...
  
   (Marie-France Gaîté)
• David Guetta
  David Guetta
  Pierre David Guetta , known professionally as David Guetta , is a French house music producer and DJ. Originally a DJ at nightclubs during the 1980s and 1990s, he co-founded Gum Productions and released his first album, Just a Little More Love, in 2002. Later, he released Guetta Blaster and Pop Life...
  
  
• Yvette Guilbert
  Yvette Guilbert
  Yvette Guilbert was a French cabaret singer and actress of the Belle Époque.-Biography:...
  
  
• Arthur H
  Arthur H
  Arthur Higelin , better known under his stage name Arthur H , is a pianist, songwriter and singer. He is best known in France for his live performances - four of his albums were recorded live - and remains relatively little-known in the English-speaking world.-Career:He is the son of the French...
  
  
• David Hallyday
  David Hallyday
  David Hallyday is a French singer/songwriter and amateur sports car racer. He was born in Boulogne-Billancourt and is the son of the French singers Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday....
  
  
• Johnny Hallyday
  Johnny Hallyday
  Johnny Hallyday is a French singer and actor. An icon in the French-speaking world since the beginning of his career, he was considered by some to have been the French Elvis Presley. He was married for 15 years to one of the most popular French female singers: Sylvie Vartan...
  
  , born in Belgium, served in the French army
• Françoise Hardy
  Françoise Hardy
  Françoise Madeleine Hardy is a French singer, actress and astrologer. Hardy is an iconic figure in fashion, music and style. She is married to the singer and movie actor Jacques Dutronc.-Biography:...
  
  
• Jacques Higelin
  Jacques Higelin
  Jacques Joseph Victor Higelin is a French pop singer who rose to prominence in the early 1970s. Early in his career, many of Higelin's songs were effectively blacklisted from French radio because of his controversial left wing political beliefs, and his association with socialist groups...
  
  
• Sébastien Izambard
  Sébastien Izambard
  Sébastien Izambard is a French pop singer and a member of the operatic pop musical quartet Il Divo.-Early life:Sébastien Izambard was born in Paris, France on 7 March 1973 to a poor family...
  
  , member of the quartet Il Divo
  Il Divo
  Il Divo is a multinational operatic pop vocal group created by music manager, executive, and reality TV star Simon Cowell. Formed in the United Kingdom, they are also signed to Cowell's record label, Syco Music...
  
  
• IAM
  IAM (band)
  IAM is a French hip hop band from Marseille, created in 1989, and composed of Akhenaton , Shurik'n , Khéops , Imhotep , and Kephren . 'IAM' has several meanings, including 'Invasion Arrivée de Mars'...
  
  
• Joëlle
  Joëlle Mogensen
  Joëlle Choupay-Mogensen was a singer of French songs.Born in Long Island, New York, Joëlle was the daughter of a French/Vietnamese/American mother and a Danish father who was serving with UNICEF at the United Nations in New York City...
  
  
• Justice (French band)
  Justice (French band)
  Justice is a French electronic music duo consisting of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay . The duo is one of the most successful groups on Ed Banger Records and is managed by the label's head, Pedro Winter...
  
  
• Patricia Kaas
  Patricia Kaas
  Patricia Kaas is a French singer and actress.Kaas is a very successful French-speaking singer, with an International following...
  
  
• Kassav'
  Kassav'
  Kassav' is a Francophone zouk band formed in Paris in 1979. The core members of the band are Jocelyne Béroard, Jacob Desvarieux, Jean-Philippe Marthély, Patrick St. Eloi, Jean-Claude Naimro, Claude Vamur and Georges Décimus...
  
  
• Rina Ketty
  Rina Ketty
  Rina Ketty , born Rina Pichetto, was a French chanteuse.-Life:Rina Ketty was born Rina Pichetto on 1 March 1911 in Sarzana, Italy. She went to Paris in the 1930s. In 1938 and 1939, she made her breakthrough with songs like Sombreros et mantilles and J'attendrai...
  
  
• Kiki
  Alice Prin
  Alice Ernestine Prin , nicknamed Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated, early 1920s culture of Paris.- Early life :Alice Prin was born in...
  
  , "Queen of Montparnasse
  Montparnasse
  Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
  
  "
• La Goulue
  La Goulue
  Louise Weber was a French can-can dancer who performed under the stage name of La Goulue...
  
  
• Boby Lapointe
  Boby Lapointe
  Robert Lapointe was a French singer, noted for his humorous texts, alliterations and plays on words.He was born in Pézenas, in the Hérault département of France...
  
  
• Bernard Lavilliers
  Bernard Lavilliers
  Bernard Lavilliers is a French singer.He was born Bernard Oulion in Saint-Étienne, Loire.The band Fatals Picards wrote a song Bernard Lavilliers, satirizing Lavilliers' image as a former adventurer.-Discography:...
  
  
• Maxime Le Forestier
  Maxime Le Forestier
  Maxime Le Forestier is a French singer.He was born in Paris to an English father and a French mother who had lived in England. He had two older sisters, Anne and Catherine....
  
  
• Gérard Lenormand
• Claudine Longet
  Claudine Longet
  Claudine Georgette Longet is a French singer and recording artist who was popular during the 1960s and 1970s. She is also an actress and a dancer.Born in Paris, France, Longet was married to pop singer Andy Williams from 1961 until 1975...
  
  
• Sheryfa Luna
  Sheryfa Luna
  Sheryfa Luna is a French R&B singer born to an Algerian father and a French mother.She won the fourth series of the French edition of popular Popstars in October 2007....
  
  
• Matthieu Chedid
  Matthieu Chedid
  Matthieu Chedid is a French rock singer-songwriter and guitar player.-Biography:...
  
  
• Christophe Maé
  Christophe Maé
  Christophe Maé is a French pop singer.-Career:Maé learned to play the violin at age 6, and later began playing the guitar and harmonica at age 16 after he was immobilised from a chronic illness. He has stated that this was the time when he became inspired by Stevie Wonder...
  
  
• Mano Negra
  Mano Negra
  Mano Negra was a music band in France, during 1987–1995, fronted by Manu Chao.The band, founded in 1987 by Chao, his brother Antoine, and his cousin Santiago Casariego in Paris, France, was very influential in Europe during the early 1990s. Although it reached mainstream success in countries...
  
  
• Luis Mariano
  Luis Mariano
  Mariano Eusebio González y García aka Luis Mariano was a popular tenor of Spanish Basque origin who achieved celebrity in 1946 with « La belle de Cadix » an operetta by Francis Lopez...
  
  
• Alain Marion
  Alain Marion
  Alain Marion was a French flutist, and considered one of the world's best flute players of the late twentieth century.-Biography:...
  
  
• Anna Marly
  Anna Marly
  Anna Marly , , was a Russian born French singer-songwriter. She is best remembered as the composer of the Chant des Partisans, a protest song that was used as the ersatz anthem of the Free French Forces during World War II; the popularity of the Chant des Partisans was such that it was proposed as...
  
  
• Didier Marouani
  Didier Marouani
  Didier Marouani is a French composer and musician. He is one of the pioneers in the Electronic music genre.Didier started his career as a pop singer and made his first album with Etienne Roda-Gil as lyricist, he's done concerts tour with Johnny Hallyday, Claude François and Joe Dassin...
  
  , musician and composer
• Mireille Mathieu
  Mireille Mathieu
  Mireille Mathieu is a French chanteuse, and pop singer. Hailed in the French press as the successor to Édith Piaf, she has achieved great commercial success, recording over 1200 songs in nine different languages, with more than 120 million records sold worldwide.-Childhood to early...
  
  
• Félix Mayol
  Félix Mayol
  Félix Mayol was a French singer and entertainer.-Career:Mayol was born in Toulon, France. His parents were both amateur singers and actors, who arranged for Felix to make his debut stage at six years of age....
  
  
• Miossec
  Miossec
  Christophe Miossec is a Breton singer and songwriter born in Brest, Brittany, France on December 24, 1964.-Beginnings:Christophe Miossec was not new to the world of music when he met his first great success. Between 14 and 17, he was in a teenage band, Printemps Noir , touring around Brest...
  
  
• Mireille
  Mireille Hartuch
  Mireille Hartuch was a French singer, composer, and actress. She was generally known by the stage name "Mireille"....
  
  
• Mistinguett
  Mistinguett
  Mistinguett was a French actress and singer, whose birth name was Jeanne Bourgeois. She was at one time the best-paid female entertainer in the world...
  
  
• Ginette Neveu
  Ginette Neveu
  Ginette Neveu was a French violinist.-Biography:Born in Paris into a musical family, Ginette Neveu became a violinist and her brother Jean-Paul Neveu a classical pianist. She was also the grandniece of composer Charles-Marie Widor...
  
  
• Yannick Noah
  Yannick Noah
  Yannick Noah is a former professional tennis player from France. He is best remembered for being the last French man to win the French Open in 1983, and as a highly-successful captain of France's Davis Cup and Fed Cup teams...
  
  
• Claude Nougaro
  Claude Nougaro
  Claude Nougaro was a French songwriter and singer.Claude Nougaro was born in Toulouse to a respected French opera singer, Pierre Nougaro, and an Italian piano teacher, Liette Tellini. He was raised by his grandparents in Toulouse where he heard Glenn Miller, Édith Piaf and Louis Armstrong on the...
  
  
• NTM
  Suprême NTM
  Suprême NTM is a French hip hop group formed in 1989 in the Seine-Saint-Denis département. The group comprises rappers Joey Starr and Kool Shen...
  
  
• Noir Désir
  Noir Désir
  Noir Désir was a French rock band from Bordeaux. They were active during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, and have had two albums certified double platinum in France and three certified gold. They have been an influence on numerous French musicians including Cali, Louise Attaque and Miossec...
  
  
• Vanessa Paradis
  Vanessa Paradis
  Vanessa Chantal Paradis is a French singer, model and actress. She became a child star at 14 with the worldwide success of her single "Joe le taxi"...
  
  
• Pierre Perret
  Pierre Perret
  Pierre Perret , is a French singer and composer. Pierre Perret resides in the city of Nangis.- Biography :...
  
  
• Michel Petrucciani
  Michel Petrucciani
  Michel Petrucciani was a French jazz pianist.-Biography:...
  
  
• Édith Piaf
  Édith Piaf
  Édith Piaf , born Édith Giovanna Gassion, was a French singer and cultural icon who became widely regarded as France's greatest popular singer. Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads...
  
  
• Yann Tiersen
  Yann Tiersen
  Yann Tiersen is a musician from France. His musical career is split between studio albums, collaborations and film soundtracks with a distinctive sound that is always involved...
  
  
• Michel Polnaref
• Lily Pons
  Lily Pons
  Lily Pons was a French-American operatic soprano and actress who had an active career from the late 1920s through the early 1970s. As an opera singer she specialized in the coloratura soprano repertoire and was particularly associated with the title roles in Léo Delibes' Lakmé and Gaetano...
  
  , opera singer (naturalized as a United States citizen in 1940)
• Tino Rossi
  Tino Rossi
  Tino Rossi was a singer and film actor.Born Constantino Rossi in Ajaccio, Corsica, France, he became a tenor of French cabaret and one of the great romantic idols of his time. Gifted with an operatic voice, a "Latin Lover" persona made him a movie star as well...
  
  
• Rene Rancourt
  Rene Rancourt
  Rene Rancourt is a professional singer. He has sung the U.S. and Canadian national anthems at Boston Bruins home hockey games for 35 years. Rancourt is such a part of the Bruins' establishment that he is the only person mentioned by name in the Dropkick Murphys' song: "Time to Go". He does not...
  
  
• Jean Sablon
  Jean Sablon
  Jean Sablon was a popular French singer and actor.The son of a composer, with brothers and sisters who had successful careers of their own in musical entertainment, Jean Sablon studied piano at the Lyceé Charlemagne in Paris...
  
  
• Renaud
  Renaud
  Renaud, born Renaud Séchan, is a French singer, songwriter and actor.Renaud may also refer to:* Renaud , a male French given name* Renaud , a 1783 opera by Antonio Sacchini* Renaud, Quebec, part of Laval, Quebec...
  
  
• Bob Sinclar
  Bob Sinclar
  Bob Sinclar, originally spelled "Sinclair" - , is a French record producer, House music DJ, remixer and owner of the label Yellow Productions.- Career history :...
  
  
• Alain Souchon
  Alain Souchon
  Alain Souchon is a French singer, songwriter and actor. He has released 15 albums and has played roles in seven films.-Profile:...
  
  
• Mano Solo
  Mano Solo
  Mano Solo , born Emmanuel Cabut, was a French singer. He was born in Châlons-sur-Marne on 24 April 1963 to the illustrator Cabu and Isabelle Monin, co-founder of the ecology-related magazine, La Gueule ouverte....
  
  
• Jeff Stinco
  Jeff Stinco
  Jean-François "Jeff" Stinco is a French Canadian musician, who is best known as the lead guitarist for pop punk band Simple Plan.-Early life:...
  
  
• Charles Trenet
  Charles Trenet
  Charles Trenet was a French singer and songwriter, most famous for his recordings from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s, though his career continued through the 1990s...
  
  
• Christian Vander
  Christian Vander (musician)
  Christian Vander is a French drummer, musician, and founder of the band Magma. Besides his work with Magma, he has also performed solo, with the Christian Vander Trio and Christian Vander Quartet, and in Offering....
  
  
• Sylvie Vartan
  Sylvie Vartan
  Sylvie Vartan is a French singer. She was one of the first rock girls in France. Vartan was the most productive and active of the yé-yé style artists, considered as the toughest-sounding of those. Her performance often featured elaborate show-dance choreography. She made many appearances on French...
  
  
• Boris Vian
  Boris Vian
  Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their...
  
  
• Pauline Viardot, opera singer and composer
• Zazie
  Zazie
  Zazie is a French singer and songwriter. Zazie co-produces all her albums.-Early life:...
  
  

Painters

• Jean René Bazaine
  Jean René Bazaine
  Jean René Bazaine was a French painter, designer of stained glass windows, and writer. He was the great great grandson of the English Court portraitist Sir George Hayter.-Studies:...
  
  
• Maurice Boitel
  Maurice Boitel
  Maurice Boitel Maurice Boitel Maurice Boitel (July 31, 1919 – August 11, 2007 in Audresselles (Pas-de-Calais), was a French painter.-Artistic life:Maurice Boitel belonged to the art movement called "La Jeune Peinture" ("Young Picture") of the School of Paris, with painters like Bernard Buffet, Yves...
  
  
• François Boucher
  François Boucher
  François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
  
  
• Pierre Brissaud
  Pierre Brissaud
  Pierre Brissaud was a French Art Deco illustrator, painter, and engraver whose father was Docteur Edouard Brissaud. He was born in Paris and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and Atelier Fernand Cormon in Montmartre, Paris. His fellow Cormon students were his brother Jacques, André-Édouard...
  
  
• Bernard Buffet
  Bernard Buffet
  Bernard Buffet was a French painter of Expressionism and Member of the Anti-Abstract Art Group "L'homme Témoin [the Witness-Man]".-Life and work:...
  
  
• Gustave Caillebotte
  Gustave Caillebotte
  Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter, member and patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group...
  
  
• Paul Cézanne
  Paul Cézanne
  Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
  
  
• Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...
  
  
• Jules Chéret
  Jules Chéret
  Jules Chéret was a French painter and lithographer who became a master of Belle Époque poster art. He has been called the father of the modern poster. -Biography:...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
• Gustave Courbet
  Gustave Courbet
  Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
  
  
• Thomas Couture
  Thomas Couture
  Thomas Couture was an influential French history painter and teacher. Couture taught such later luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Karel Javůrek, and J-N Sylvestre.-Life:He was born at Senlis, Oise, France...
  
  
• Jacques Louis David
• Edgar Degas
  Edgar Degas
  Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
  
  
• Georges de la Tour
  Georges de La Tour
  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...
  
  
• Eugène Delacroix
  Eugène Delacroix
  Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
  
  
• Robert Delaunay
  Robert Delaunay
  Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
  
  
• André Derain
  André Derain
  André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
  
  
• Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
  
  
• Suzanne Duchamp
  Suzanne Duchamp
  Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter. Born in Blainville-Crevon, Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, she was the fourth of six children born into the artistic family of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp.Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was the younger sister of:*Jacques Villon née...
  
  
• Henri Fantin-Latour
  Henri Fantin-Latour
  Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.-Biography:...
  
  
• Jean-Honoré Fragonard
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard
  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...
  
  
• Antonio de La Gandara
  Antonio de La Gandara
  Antonio de la Gándara was a French painter, pastellist and draughtsman.-Biography:He was born in Paris, France, but his father was of Spanish ancestry, born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and his mother was from England. La Gandara's talent was strongly influenced by both cultures...
  
  
• Pierre Gandon
  Pierre Gandon
  Pierre Gandon was a French illustrator and engraver of postage stamps. He was born January 20, 1899 in L'Haÿ-les-Roses and died July 23, 1990.-Youth:...
  
  
• Paul Gauguin
  Paul Gauguin
  Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
  
  
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
  Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
  
  
• Georges Lacombe
• Pierre Laffillé
  Pierre Laffillé
  Pierre Laffillé was a French painter, born at Envermeu, Seine-Maritime.- Biography :Pierre Laffillé studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1956 then studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1959 to 1961. His first exhibition was in 1960 at Dieppe...
  
  
• Fernand Léger
  Fernand Léger
  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...
  
  
• Édouard Manet
  Édouard Manet
  Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
  
  
• Henri Matisse
  Henri Matisse
  Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
  
  
• Claude Monet
  Claude Monet
  Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
  
  
• Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...
  
  
• Berthe Morisot
  Berthe Morisot
  Berthe Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.In 1864, she exhibited for the first...
  
  
• Gen Paul
  Gen Paul
  Gen Paul , was a French painter and engraver.-Biography:Born as Eugène Paul in a house in Montmartre on the Rue Lepic painted by Van Gogh, he began drawing and painting as a child. His father died when he was only ten years old and Gen Paul was trained to work in decorative furnishings...
  
  
• Francis Picabia
  Francis Picabia
  Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...
  
  
• Camille Pissarro
  Camille Pissarro
  Camille Pissarro was a 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, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...
  
  
• Nicolas Poussin
  Nicolas Poussin
  Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...
  
  
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  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...
  
  
• Georges Seurat
• Nicolas de Staël
  Nicolas de Staël
  Nicolas de Staël was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting...
  
  
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
  Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...
  
  
• Maurice Utrillo
  Maurice Utrillo
  Maurice Utrillo, , born Maurice Valadon, was a French painter who specialized in cityscapes. Born in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who were born there....
  
  
• Suzanne Valadon
  Suzanne Valadon
  Suzanne Valadon was a French painter 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...
  
  
• Horace Vernet
  Horace Vernet
  Émile Jean-Horace Vernet was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist Arab subjects.Vernet was born to Carle Vernet, another famous painter, who was himself a son of Claude Joseph Vernet. He was born in the Paris Louvre, while his parents were staying there during the French...
  
  
• Jacques Villon
  Jacques Villon
  Jacques Villon was a French cubist painter and printmaker.-Early life:Born Gaston Emile Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family...
  
  
• Antoine Watteau
  Antoine Watteau
  Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement...
  
  
• Félix Ziem
  Félix Ziem
  Félix Ziem was a French painter in the style of the Barbizon School.Born Félix-Francois Georges Philibert Ziem in Beaune in the Côte-d'Or département of the Burgundy région of France, his mother was a native of Burgundy who married a Croatian immigrant...
  
  

Philosophers

• Pierre Abélard
• Louis Althusser
  Louis Althusser
  Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
  
  
• Raymond Aron
  Raymond Aron
  Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist and political scientist.He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people -- in contrast, Aron argued that in...
  
  , sociologist & philosopher
• Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie...
  
  
• Gaston Bachelard
  Gaston Bachelard
  Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...
  
  
• Georges Bataille
  Georges Bataille
  Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
  
  
• Roland Barthes
  Roland Barthes
  Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
  
  
• Jean Baudrillard
  Jean Baudrillard
  Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
  
  , philosopher and sociologist
• Pierre Bourdieu
  Pierre Bourdieu
  Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
  
  , sociologist
• Julien Benda
  Julien Benda
  Julien Benda was a French philosopher and novelist. He remains famous for his essay The Betrayal of the Intellectuals.- Life :...
  
  
• Henri Bergson
  Henri Bergson
  Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
  
  
• Emile Boutroux
  Emile Boutroux
  Étienne Émile Marie Boutroux was an eminent 19th century French philosopher of science and religion, and an historian of philosophy. He was a firm opponent of materialism in science. He was a spiritual philosopher who defended the idea that religion and science are compatible at a time when the...
  
  
• Michel de Certeau
  Michel de Certeau
  Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.-Education:...
  
  
• André Comte-Sponville
  André Comte-Sponville
  André Comte-Sponville is a French philosopher born in Paris, France. He studied in the École Normale Supérieure, and is aggregated in philosophy...
  
  
• Jean de Crèvecoeur
  Jean de Crèvecoeur
  Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur , naturalized in New York as John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the Comte and Comtesse de Crèvecœur .-Biography:In 1755 he immigrated to New France in North America...
  
  
• Guy Debord
  Guy Debord
  Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
  
  
• Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
  
  
• Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
  
  
• René Descartes
  René Descartes
  René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
  
  , scientist and philosopher
• Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
  
  , Enlightenment author and deist philosopher
• Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
  
  
• Félix Guattari
  Félix Guattari
  Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
  
  
• Vladimir Jankelevitch
  Vladimir Jankélévitch
  Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist.- Biography :Jankélévitch was the son of Russian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France....
  
  
• Étienne de La Boétie
  Étienne de La Boétie
  Étienne de La Boétie was a French judge, writer, anarchist, and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France." He "has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships."-Life:"La Boétie was born in...
  
  , philosopher and politician
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator....
  
  
• Henri Lefèbvre
  Henri Lefebvre
  Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...
  
  
• Marcel Légaut
  Marcel Légaut
  Marcel Légaut was a French Christian philosopher and mathematician.-Biography:Marcel Légaut received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure of Paris in 1925. He taught in various faculties until 1943...
  
  , Christian philosopher
• Jean de Léry
  Jean de Léry
  Jean de Léry was an explorer, writer and Reformed Pastor born in Lamargelle, Côte-d'Or, France. Little is known of his early life; and he might have remained unknown had he not accompanied a group of Protestants to their new colony on an island in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil...
  
  , corsaire and ethnologist, anti-racism activist
• Emmanuel Lévinas
  Emmanuel Lévinas
  Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...
  
  
• Jean-François Lyotard
  Jean-François Lyotard
  Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
  
  
• Nicolas Malebranche
  Nicolas Malebranche
  Nicolas Malebranche ; was a French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world...
  
  
• Gabriel Marcel
  Gabriel Marcel
  Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society...
  
  , philosopher
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
  
  , phenomenologist
• Michel de Montaigne
  Michel de Montaigne
  Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...
  
  , philosopher essayist
• Montesquieu
  Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
  Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu , generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment...
  
  , political philosopher
• Edgar Morin
  Edgar Morin
  Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist born Edgar Nahoum in Paris on July 8, 1921. He is of Judeo-Spanish origin. He is known for the transdisciplinarity of his works.- Biography :...
  
  
• Emmanuel Mounier
  Emmanuel Mounier
  Emmanuel Mounier was a French philosopher.Mounier was the guiding spirit in the French Personalist movement, and founder and director of Esprit, the magazine which was the organ of the movement. Mounier, who was the child of peasants, was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne...
  
  , philosopher
• Jean Luc Nancy, philosopher
• Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
  
  , scientist, Christian philosopher and author
• Jean-François Revel
  Jean-François Revel
  Jean-François Revel was a French politician, journalist, author, prolific philosopher and member of the Académie française from June 1998...
  
  
• Paul Ricoeur
  Paul Ricoeur
  Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
  
  
• Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
  
  , existentialist philosopher
• Michel Serres
  Michel Serres
  Michel Serres is a French philosopher and author, celebrated for his unusual career.-Life and career:...
  
  
• François-Marie Arouet
  Voltaire
  François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
  
   (Voltaire), Enlightenment
  Age of Enlightenment
  The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
  
   author, deist/agnostic philosopher
• Éric Weil, philosopher
• Simone Weil
  Simone Weil
  Simone Weil , was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.-Biography:Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, and her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was...
  
  

Photographers

• Yann Arthus-Bertrand
  Yann Arthus-Bertrand
  Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a French photographer, journalist, reporter and environmentalist.- Early life :Yann Arthus-Bertrand was born in Paris on March 13, 1946 in a renowned jewellers' family founded in 1803 by Claude Arthus-Bertrand and Michel-Ange Marion. His sister Catherine is one of his...
  
  
• Brassaï
  Brassaï
  Brassaï was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars...
  
    born in Hungary
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
  Henri Cartier-Bresson
  Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...
  
  
• Raymond Depardon
  Raymond Depardon
  Raymond Depardon is a French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker.-Photographer:...
  
  
• Robert Doisneau
  Robert Doisneau
  Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris; together with Henri Cartier-Bresson he was a pioneer of photojournalism...
  
  
• Pierre Dubreuil
  Pierre Dubreuil
  Pierre Dubreuil, born in Lille in 1872 and died in Grenoble in 1944, was a French photographer.- Biography :Pierre Dubreuil was born in a wealthy family, well-established in the wallpaper trade. In 1888 he joined the Jesuit College of Saint-Joseph in Lille and started to take pictures with a...
  
  
• Jules Gervais-Courtellemont
  Jules Gervais-Courtellemont
  Jules Gervais-Courtellemont was a French photographer who was famous for taking color autochromes during World War I. He was born in the province of Seine-et-Marne, near Paris, but grew up in Algeria, where he developed a passion for the pre-colonial Orient and devoted most of his professional...
  
  
• Willy Ronis
  Willy Ronis
  Willy Ronis was a French photographer, the best-known of whose work shows life in post-war Paris and Provence.-Early life:...
  
  

Politicians

See also: Prime Ministers of France, Presidents of France

• Robert Badinter
  Robert Badinter
  Robert Badinter is a high-profile French criminal lawyer, university professor and politician mainly known for his struggle against the death penalty, the abolition of which he successfully sponsored in Parliament in 1981...
  
  , lawyer, statesman and anti death sentence activist
• François Bayrou
  François Bayrou
  François Bayrou is a French centrist politician, president of Union for French Democracy since 1998 and was a candidate in the 2002 and 2007 French presidential elections. In the first round, he received 18.6% of the vote, finishing in 3rd place and therefore was eliminated from the race....
  
  , UDF party leader
• Léon Blum
  Léon Blum
  André Léon Blum was a French politician, usually identified with the moderate left, and three times the Prime Minister of France.-First political experiences:...
  
  , politician, Socialist party leader, prime minister
• José Bové
  José Bové
  Joseph Bové is a French farmer and syndicalist, member of the alter-globalization movement, and spokesman for Via Campesina. He was one of the twelve official candidates in the 2007 French presidential election...
  
  , anti-globalization activist, altermondialist
• Aristide Briand
  Aristide Briand
  Aristide Briand was a French statesman who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic and received the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.- Early life :...
  
  
• Jacques Chirac
  Jacques Chirac
  Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 , and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.After completing his studies of the DEA's degree at the...
  
  , politician, member of center-right wing party, former city mayor of Paris, two-term French president
• Georges Clemenceau
  Georges Clemenceau
  Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the...
  
  
• Gaspard de Coligny
  Gaspard de Coligny
  Gaspard de Coligny , Seigneur de Châtillon, was a French nobleman and admiral, best remembered as a disciplined Huguenot leader in the French Wars of Religion.-Ancestry:...
  
  
• Bertrand Delanoë
  Bertrand Delanoë
  Bertrand Delanoë is a French politician, and has been the mayor of Paris since 2001. He is member of the Socialist Party . Delanoë was born in Tunis, Tunisia to a French-Tunisian father and a French mother...
  
  , mayor of Paris
• Jacques Delors
  Jacques Delors
  Jacques Lucien Jean Delors is a French economist and politician, the eighth President of the European Commission and the first person to serve three terms in that office .-French Politics:...
  
  
• Félix Faure
  Félix Faure
  Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...
  
  , President of France who died of a heart attack while making love to his mistress
• Charles de Gaulle
  Charles de Gaulle
  Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....
  
  , World War II general, commander of the Free French Forces
  Free French Forces
  The Free French Forces were French partisans in World War II who decided to continue fighting against the forces of the Axis powers after the surrender of France and subsequent German occupation and, in the case of Vichy France, collaboration with the Germans.-Definition:In many sources, Free...
  
  , heroic French president
• Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
  Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
  Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing is a French centre-right politician who was President of the French Republic from 1974 until 1981...
  
  
• Guizot, Prime Minister
• Gisèle Halimi
  Gisèle Halimi
  Gisèle Halimi, born Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb in 1927, is a French-Tunisian lawyer, feminist activist, and essayist.-Career:Born in La Goulette, to a Jewish mother and father, she was educated at a French lycée in Tunis, and then attended the University of Paris, graduating in law and philosophy...
  
   lawyer and feminist activist
• François Hollande
  François Hollande
  François Gérard Georges Hollande is a French politician. From 1997 to 2008, he was the First Secretary of the French Socialist Party. He has also served as a Deputy of the National Assembly of France, representing the first constituency of Corrèze, since 1997. He previously represented that seat...
  
  , PS (Socialist Party) leader
• Jean Jaurès
  Jean Jaurès
  Jean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in...
  
  , politician, pacifist
• Lionel Jospin
  Lionel Jospin
  Lionel Jospin is a French politician, who served as Prime Minister of France from 1997 to 2002.Jospin was the Socialist Party candidate for President of France in the elections of 1995 and 2002. He was narrowly defeated in the final runoff election by Jacques Chirac in 1995...
  
  , socialist, former prime minister
• Bernard Kouchner
  Bernard Kouchner
  Bernard Kouchner is a French politician, diplomat, and doctor. He is co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde...
  
  , founder of Medecins du Monde
  Médecins du Monde
  Médecins du Monde or Doctors of the World, is a non-governmental humanitarian aid organisation created in March 1980 by 15 French doctors, including Bernard Kouchner after he had left Médecins Sans Frontières , the aid society which he had co-founded earlier in 1971...
  
   and other "French Doctors"
• Jean-Marie Le Pen
  Jean-Marie Le Pen
  Jean-Marie Le Pen is a French far right-wing and nationalist politician who is founder and former president of the Front National party. Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, most notably in 2002, when in a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than...
  
  , leader of the extreme right party in France, Front National, presidential candidate
• Louis Lépine
  Louis Lépine
  Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine was an eminent lawyer, politician and inventor who was Prefect of Police for Paris from 1893 to 1897 and again from 1899 to 1913. He earned the nickname of ‘’The Little Man with the Big Stick’’ for his skill in handling large Parisian crowds. He was responsible for the...
  
  , Paris police chief, governor of Algiers, founder of the Concours Lépine
• Émile Loubet
  Émile Loubet
  Émile François Loubet was a French politician and the 8th President of France.-Early life:He was born the son of a peasant proprietor and mayor of Marsanne . Admitted to the Parisian bar in 1862, he took his doctorate in law the next year...
  
  , President of France who was elected in 1899, after the death of Félix Faure
  Félix Faure
  Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...
  
  
• Henri-Auguste Lozé
  Henri-Auguste Lozé
  Henri-Auguste Lozé was a French politician who was Prefect of Police for Paris from 1888 to 1893, a member of the National Assembly of the third republic , from 1902 to 1906 and a member of the Senate from 1906 to 1915 .-Biography:...
  
  ,Paris police chief, senator of the Third Republic
• Jean-Claude Martinez
  Jean-Claude Martinez
  Jean-Claude Martinez is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the south-west of France. He was a member of the Front National, and was among the Non-Inscrits until the 2007 formation of the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Group in the European Parliament...
  
  , lawyer and European deputy
• Pierre Mendès-France
  Pierre Mendès-France
  Pierre Mendès France was a French politician. He descended from a Portuguese Jewish family that moved to France in the sixteenth century.-Third Republic and World War II:...
  
  , lawyer and statesman, prime minister
• Honoré Mirabeau
• François Mitterrand
  François Mitterrand
  François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was the 21st President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, serving from 1981 until 1995. He is the longest-serving President of France and, as leader of the Socialist Party, the only figure from the left so far elected President...
  
  , lawyer and statesman, president
• Jean Monnet
  Jean Monnet
  Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet was a French political economist and diplomat. He is regarded by many as a chief architect of European Unity and is regarded as one of its founding fathers...
  
  
• Henri Philippe Pétain, head of Vichy France
• Alexandre de Prouville
  Alexandre de Prouville
  Marquis Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy was a French aristocrat, statesman, and military leader. He was the seigneur of Tracy-le-Val and Tracy-le-Mont...
  
  , Viceroy of New France
  New France
  New France was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763...
  
  
• Marthe Richard
  Marthe Richard
  Marthe Richard, née Betenfeld was a prostitute and spy. She later became a politician and worked towards the closing of brothels in France in 1946.-Early life:...
  
  
• Ségolène Royal
  Ségolène Royal
  Marie-Ségolène Royal , known as Ségolène Royal, is a French politician. She is the president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council, a former member of the National Assembly, a former government minister, and a prominent member of the French Socialist Party...
  
  , politician, Socialist party, presidential candidate
• Nicolas Sarkozy
  Nicolas Sarkozy
  Nicolas Sarkozy is the 23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. He assumed the office on 16 May 2007 after defeating the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal 10 days earlier....
  
  , politician, President of the right wing party, current French president
• Victor Schoelcher
  Victor Schoelcher
  Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist writer in the 19th century and the main spokesman for a group from Paris who worked for the abolition of slavery, and formed an abolition society in 1834...
  
  , anti-slavery activist
• Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
• Maurice Thorez
  Maurice Thorez
  thumb|A Soviet stamp depicting Maurice Thorez.Maurice Thorez was a French politician and longtime leader of the French Communist Party from 1930 until his death. He also served as vice premier of France from 1946 to 1947....
  
  
• Jacques Toubon
  Jacques Toubon
  Jacques Toubon is a right-wing French politician who held several major national and Parisian offices.-Political career:Governmental functionsMinister of Culture : 1993–1995....
  
  
• Dominique de Villepin
  Dominique de Villepin
  Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin is a French politician who served as the Prime Minister of France from 31 May 2005 to 17 May 2007....
  
  , former Prime Minister of France
• Dominique Voynet
  Dominique Voynet
  Dominique Voynet was a French senator for the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, the mayor of Montreuil and a member of The Greens.-Life:...
  
  , physician and Green party politician

Resistance workers

Resistance workers during the German occupation of France in World War II

German occupation of France in World War II

The Military Administration in France was an interim occupation authority established by Nazi Germany during World War II. It remained in existence from May 1940 to December 1944. As a result of the defeat of France and its Allies in the Battle of France, the French cabinet sought a cessation...

• Lucie Samuel-Aubrac
  Lucie Aubrac
  Lucie Samuel born Lucie Bernard , and better known as Lucie Aubrac, was a French history teacher and member of the French Resistance during World War II....
  
   (1912–2007), human rights activist
• Raymond Aubrac
  Raymond Aubrac
  Raymond Aubrac is a French engineer, and was a member of the French Resistance.Born Raymond Samuel in Vesoul, Haute-Saône in a Jewish family, Aubrac and wife, Lucie in 1940 were in the Resistance in Lyon and took pseudonym Aubrac to escape the persecution of the occupation...
  
   (born 1914), statesman
• Robert Benoist
  Robert Benoist
  Robert Marcel Charles Benoist was a French Grand Prix motor racing driver and war hero.-Early life:Born near Rambouillet, Île-de-France, France, Robert Benoist was the son of Baron Henri de Rothschild's gamekeeper...
  
   (1895–1944), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative, champion race car driver
• Denise Bloch
  Denise Bloch
  Denise Madeleine Bloch was a French secret agent working with the British Special Operations Executive in World War II.- Early life :...
  
   (1915–1945), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: King's Commendation for Brave Conduct, Legion of Honor, French Resistance Medal
• Andrée Borrel
  Andrée Borrel
  Andrée Raymonde Borrel was a French heroine of World War II.-Early life:Andrée Borrel was born into a working-class family in Louveciennes, Yvelines in the suburbs of Paris, growing up an active girl who liked hiking and most other outdoor activities...
  
   (1919–1944), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: Croix de Guerre
• Madeleine Damerment
  Madeleine Damerment
  Madeleine Zoe Damerment was a World War II spy.-Biography:...
  
   (1917–1944), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre, Médaille combattant volontaire de la Résistance
• Marie Louise Dissard
  Marie Dissard
  Marie Dissard, GM, was a member of French Resistance during the German occupation of France in World War II who took over the escape network of Ian Garrow and Albert Guérisse and arranged for over 250 Allied airmen to return to Britain....
  
   (1880–1957), U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom
  Presidential Medal of Freedom
  The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
  
   recipient
• William Grover-Williams
  William Grover-Williams
  William Charles Frederick Grover-Williams , also known as "W Williams", was a Grand Prix motor racing driver and special agent who worked for the Special Operations Executive inside France. He organized and coordinated the Chestnut network...
  
   (1903–1945), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative, champion race car driver
• Cecily Lefort
  Cecily Lefort
  Cecily Lefort was a British SOE agent, during World War II.-Early life:Born as Cecily Margot MacKenzie in London of Scottish ancestry, she lived on the coast of Brittany in France from the age of 24 with her French husband, Dr...
  
   (1900–1945), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: Croix de Guerre
• Pierre Mendès-France
  Pierre Mendès-France
  Pierre Mendès France was a French politician. He descended from a Portuguese Jewish family that moved to France in the sixteenth century.-Third Republic and World War II:...
  
   (1907–1982), lawyer, statesman
• Jean Moulin
  Jean Moulin
  Jean Moulin was a high-profile member of the French Resistance during World War II. He is remembered today as an emblem of the Resistance primarily due to his role in unifying the French resistance under de Gaulle and his courage and death at the hands of the Germans.-Before the war:Moulin was...
  
   (1899–1943), statesman
• Abbé Pierre
  Abbé Pierre
  LAbbé Pierre, was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement . He founded in 1949 the Emmaus movement, which has the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees...
  
   (1912–2007), Priest and founder of Emmaus
  Emmaus
  Emmaus was an ancient town located approximately northwest of present day Jerusalem...
  
  
• Christian Pineau
  Christian Pineau
  Christian Pineau was a noted French Resistance fighter.He was born in Chaumont-en-Bassigny, Haute-Marne, France and died in Paris.His father-in-law was the writer Jean Giraudoux, who was married to Pineau's mother...
  
   (1904–1995), statesman
• Eliane Plewman
  Eliane Plewman
  Eliane Plewman was a French SOE agent and member of French resistance.Plewman was born Eliane Browne-Bartroli in Marseille. The daughter of an English father and Spanish mother, she was educated in England and in Spain...
  
   (1917–1944), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: Croix de Guerre
• Germaine Ribière
  Germaine Ribière
  Germaine Ribière was a French Catholic, member of the Résistance, who saved numerous Jews during World War II, and was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations ....
  
   (1917–1999), Righteous among the Nations
  Righteous Among the Nations
  Righteous among the Nations of the world's nations"), also translated as Righteous Gentiles is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis....
  
  
• Élise Rivet
  Élise Rivet
  Élise Rivet was a Roman Catholic nun and World War II heroine....
  
   (1890–1945), nun executed by Nazis for aiding the resistance
• Lilian Rolfe
  Lilian Rolfe
  Lilian Vera Rolfe was an Allied secret agent in World War II.-Early life:...
  
   (1914–1945), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   agent executed by the Nazis
• Odette Sansom
  Odette Sansom
  Odette Sansom Hallowes GC, MBE, Chevalier de la légion d'honneur was an Allied heroine of the Second World War.-Early years:...
  
   (1912–1995), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: George Cross, MBE, Legion of Honor
• Suzanne Spaak
  Suzanne Spaak
  Suzanne Spaak , World War II heroine.Suzanne Spaak was born into a prosperous Belgian banking family sometime around 1905...
  
  , Belgian-born agent: "Red Orchestra" intelligence network; executed 1944
• Violette Szabo
  Violette Szabo
  Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell Szabo, GC, was a Second World War French-British secret agent.-Early life and marriage:...
  
   (1921–1945), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative: George Cross, Croix de Guerre
• Jean-Pierre Wimille
  Jean-Pierre Wimille
  Jean-Pierre Wimille was a Grand Prix motor racing driver and a member of the French Resistance during World War II.-Biography:...
  
   (1908–1949), SOE
  Special Operations Executive
  The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
  
   operative, champion race car driver

• See also French Resistance
  French Resistance
  The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
  
  

A–M

• André-Marie Ampère
  André-Marie Ampère
  André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism. The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him....
  
  , physicist and mathematician
• Marcelin Berthelot, chemist
• Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
  Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
  Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was a French military engineer who, in his 1824 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, gave the first successful theoretical account of heat engines, now known as the Carnot cycle, thereby laying the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics...
  
  , physicist and military engineer
• Henri Cartan
  Henri Cartan
  Henri Paul Cartan was a French mathematician with substantial contributions in algebraic topology. He was the son of the French mathematician Élie Cartan.-Life:...
  
  , mathematician
• Georges Charpak
  Georges Charpak
  Georges Charpak was a French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.-Life:Georges Charpak was born to Jewish family in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland . Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old...
  
  , physicist, Nobel prize winner 1992
• Alain Connes
  Alain Connes
  Alain Connes is a French mathematician, currently Professor at the Collège de France, IHÉS, The Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University.-Work:...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1982
• Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The [SI unit] of charge, the coulomb, was named after him....
  
  , physicist
• Marie Curie
  Marie Curie
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie was a physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry...
  
  , physicist and chemist
• Pierre Curie
  Pierre Curie
  Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity, and Nobel laureate. He was the son of Dr. Eugène Curie and Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie ...
  
  , physicist and chemist
• Jean Dausset
  Jean Dausset
  Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was a French immunologist born in Toulouse, France. He married Rose Mayoral in 1963, with whom he had two children, Henri and Irène...
  
  , biologist, Nobel prize winner 1980
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, mathematician and astronomer
• Guillaume Delisle
  Guillaume Delisle
  Guillaume Delisle was a French cartographer who lived in Paris.His father, Claude Delisle studied law and then later settled in Paris as private teacher in geography and history, and afterwards filled the office of royal censor...
  
  , cartographer
• René Descartes
  René Descartes
  René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
  
  , scientist and philosopher
• Girard Desargues, mathematician
• Georges Duby
  Georges Duby
  Georges Duby was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages...
  
  , historian
• Robert Debré
  Robert Debré
  Robert Debré was a French physician at Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris.He gave his name to the most important ....
  
  , physician
• Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality...
  
  , mathematician
• Hervé Faye
  Hervé Faye
  Hervé Auguste Étienne Albans Faye was a French astronomer, born at Saint-Benoît-du-Sault and educated at the Ecole Polytechnique, which he left in 1834, before completing his course, to accept a position in the Paris Observatory to which he had been appointed on the recommendation of M. Arago.He...
  
  , astronomer
• Joseph Fourier
  Joseph Fourier
  Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's Law are also named in his honour...
  
  , mathematician and physicist
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel
  Augustin-Jean Fresnel
  Augustin-Jean Fresnel , was a French engineer who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally....
  
  , physicist
• Pierre Gassendi
  Pierre Gassendi
  Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With 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...
  
  , philosopher mathematician
• Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
  Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
  Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.-Biography:...
  
  , physicist, Nobel prize winner 1991
• Évariste Galois
  Évariste Galois
  Évariste Galois was a French mathematician born in Bourg-la-Reine. 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 long-standing problem...
  
  , mathematician
• Camille Guérin
  Camille Guérin
  Jean-Marie Camille Guérin was a French veterinarian, bacteriologist and immunologist who, together with Albert Calmette, developed the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin , a vaccine for immunization against tuberculosis....
  
  , biologist
• Alexander Grothendieck
  Alexander Grothendieck
  Alexander Grothendieck is a mathematician and the central figure behind the creation of the modern theory of algebraic geometry. His research program vastly extended the scope of the field, incorporating major elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1966 (German-born)
• Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
  Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
  Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a French physician who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it...
  
  
• François Jacob
  François Jacob
  François Jacob is a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.-Childhood and education:François Jacob is...
  
  , biologist, Nobel prize winner 1965
• Irène Joliot-Curie
  Irène Joliot-Curie
  Irène Joliot-Curie was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies...
  
  , physicist and Nobel Prize winner
• Frédéric Joliot-Curie
  Frédéric Joliot-Curie
  Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie , born Jean Frédéric Joliot, was a French physicist and Nobel laureate.-Early years:...
  
  , physicist, Nobel Prize winner 1935
• Daniel Kahneman
  Daniel Kahneman
  Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....
  
  , psychologist, Nobel Prize winner in Economics 2006
• Laurent Lafforgue
  Laurent Lafforgue
  Laurent Lafforgue is a French mathematician.He won 2 silver medals at International Mathematical Olympiad in 1984 and 1985....
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 2002
• Joseph Louis Lagrange
  Joseph Louis Lagrange
  Joseph-Louis Lagrange , born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, was a mathematician and astronomer, who was born in Turin, Piedmont, lived part of his life in Prussia and part in France, making significant contributions to all fields of analysis, to number theory, and to classical and celestial mechanics...
  
  , mathematician
• Paul Langevin
  Paul Langevin
  Paul Langevin was a prominent 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 antifascist organization created in the wake of the 6 February 1934 far right riots...
  
  , physicist
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
  Pierre-Simon Laplace
  Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer whose work was pivotal to the development of mathematical astronomy and statistics. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five volume Mécanique Céleste...
  
  , mathematician and physicist
• Antoine Lavoisier
  Antoine Lavoisier
  Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier , the "father of modern chemistry", was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology...
  
  
• Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie...
  
  , mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher
• Jean-Marie Lehn
  Jean-Marie Lehn
  Jean-Marie Lehn is a French chemist. He received the Nobel Prize together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen in 1987 for his work in Chemistry, particularly his synthesis of the cryptands...
  
  , chemist, Nobel prize winner in 1987
• Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
  Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
  Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, born in 1940, is a physicist and essayist.After a doctorate in Theoretical Physics at the université d’Orsay in 1965, he was successively in charge of research at CNRS, lecturer at the université de Nice, a professor at the Paris Diderot University, and at Nice, where he...
  
  , physicist
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
  Claude Lévi-Strauss
  Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
  
  , anthropologist
• Pierre-Louis Lions
  Pierre-Louis Lions
  Pierre-Louis Lions is a French mathematician. His parents were Jacques-Louis Lions, a mathematician and at that time professor at the University of Nancy, who in particular became President of the International Mathematical Union, and Andrée Olivier, his wife...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1994
• Edmond Locard
  Edmond Locard
  Dr. Edmond Locard was a pioneer in forensic science who became known as the Sherlock Holmes of France. He formulated the basic principle of forensic science: "Every contact leaves a trace"...
  
  
• André Lwoff, biologist, Nobel prize winner 1965
• Benoit Mandelbrot
  Benoît Mandelbrot
  Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a French American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child...
  
  , mathematician
• Albert Mathiez
  Albert Mathiez
  Albert Mathiez was a French historian, known for his work on the French Revolution.He was a student of Alphonse Aulard. His La Révolution française appeared in three volumes . He wrote it as a socialist , pro-Robespierre interpretation, where Aulard had been pro-Danton...
  
  , historian
• André Michaux
  André Michaux
  André Michaux was a French botanist and explorer.-Biography:Michaux was born in Satory, now part of Versailles, Yvelines. After the death of his wife within a year of their marriage he took up the study of botany and was a student of Bernard de Jussieu...
  
  , botanist and explorer
• François André Michaux
  François André Michaux
  François André Michaux was a French botanist, son of André Michaux. He accompanied his father to the United States, and his Histoire des arbres forestiers de l'Amérique septentrionale contains the results of his explorations and gives an account of the distribution and the scientific...
  
  , botanist
• Jules Michelet
  Jules Michelet
  Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...
  
  , historian
• Abraham de Moivre
  Abraham de Moivre
  Abraham de Moivre was a French mathematician famous for de Moivre's formula, which links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. He was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and James Stirling...
  
  , mathematician
• Jacques Monod
  Jacques Monod
  Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis"...
  
  , biologist, Nobel prize winner 1965
• Theodore Monod
  Théodore Monod
  Théodore André Monod was a French naturalist, explorer, and humanist scholar.-Exploration:...
  
  , naturalist and theologian

N–Z

• Louis Néel, physicist, Nobel prize winner 1970
• Denis Papin
  Denis Papin
  Denis Papin was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the steam engine and of the pressure cooker.-Life in France:...
  
  , physicist, mathematician and inventor
• Louis Pasteur
  Louis Pasteur
  Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax. His experiments...
  
  , scientist
• Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
  
  , mathematician and philosopher
• Étienne Pascal
  Étienne Pascal
  Étienne Pascal was the father of Blaise Pascal. His father and mother were Martin Pascal, the treasurer of France, and Marguerite Pascal de Mons. He also had three daughters, two of whom survived past childhood: Gilberte and Jacqueline...
  
  , mathematician
• Henri Poincaré
  Henri Poincaré
  Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...
  
  , mathematician and physicist
• Simeon Poisson, mathematician and physicist
• Michel Rolle
  Michel Rolle
  Michel Rolle was a French mathematician. He is best known for Rolle's theorem , and he deserves to be known as the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination .-Life:...
  
  , mathematician
• Jean Rostand
  Jean Rostand
  Jean Rostand was a French biologist and philosopher.Active as an experimental biologist, Rostand became famous for his work as a science writer, as well as a philosopher and an activist...
  
  , biologist and philosopher.
• Paul Rohmer
  Paul Rohmer
  Paul Rohmer was an Alsacian physician considered the father of modern pædiatrics in eastern France after World War I.-Life:...
  
  , physician
• Laurent Schwartz
  Laurent Schwartz
  Laurent-Moïse Schwartz was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields medal in 1950 for his work...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1950
• Jean-Pierre Serre
  Jean-Pierre Serre
  Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician. He has made contributions in the fields of algebraic geometry, number theory, and topology.-Early years:...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1954
• Albert Soboul
  Albert Soboul
  Albert Marius Soboul was a French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was Chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation.-Early life and education:Albert Marius Soboul...
  
  , historian
• Maria Skłodowska-Curie, chemist, physicist, and two time Nobel Prize winner
• René Thom
  René Thom
  René Frédéric Thom was a French mathematician. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1958
• Jean-Pierre Vernant
  Jean-Pierre Vernant
  Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars...
  
  , historian
• Pierre Vidal-Naquet
  Pierre Vidal-Naquet
  Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1969....
  
  , historian and Civil Rights activist
• Jean-Christophe Victor
  Jean-Christophe Victor
  Jean Christophe Victor, born in Paris, is a political scientist focusing on international relations. He earned a Master in Chinese language, a PHD in anthropology in the French Men Museum, and a PHD in Defense and Strategy from Sorbonne University...
  
  , geographer
• Paul-Emile Victor
  Paul-Émile Victor
  Paul-Émile Victor was a French ethnologist and explorer.Victor was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He graduated from École Centrale de Lyon in 1928. In 1934, he participated in an expedition traversing Greenland...
  
  , ethnologist
• Wendelin Werner
  Wendelin Werner
  Wendelin Werner is a German-born French mathematician working in the area of self-avoiding random walks, Schramm-Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 2006 (German-born)
• Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
  Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
  Jean-Christophe Yoccoz is a French mathematician. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994, for his work on dynamical systems.-Biography:...
  
  , mathematician; Fields Medalist 1994

Sculptors

• Frédéric Bartholdi
  Frédéric Bartholdi
  Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a French sculptor who is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty.-Life and career:...
  
  
• Antonin Carlès
  Antonin Carlès
  Jean-Antonin Carles was a French sculptor.Born in Gimont, Carlès began his studies in Marseille and then successively to the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse and that of Paris. He was a pupil of François Jouffroy and Ernest-Eugène Hiolle , he won the Grand Prix de l'Exposition Universelle in 1889...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
  Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
  Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter.Born in Valenciennes, Nord, son of a mason, his early studies were under François Rude. Carpeaux entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and won the Prix de Rome in 1854, and moving to Rome to find inspiration, he there studied the works of...
  
  
• César
  César Baldaccini
  César Baldaccini , usually called César was a noted French sculptor.César was at the forefront of the Nouveau Réalisme movement with his radical compressions , expansions , and fantastic representations of animals and insects.- Biography :He...
  
  
• Antoine-Denis Chaudet
  Antoine-Denis Chaudet
  Antoine-Denis Chaudet was a French sculptor who worked in a neoclassical style.-Works:*Joseph Sold by his Brothers Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763–1810) was a French sculptor who worked in a neoclassical style.-Works:*Joseph Sold by his Brothers Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763–1810) was a French sculptor...
  
  
• Camille Claudel
  Camille Claudel
  Camille Claudel was a French sculptor and graphic artist. She was the elder sister of the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel.- Early years :...
  
  
• Paul Dubois
• Raymond Duchamp-Villon
  Raymond Duchamp-Villon
  Raymond Duchamp-Villon was a French sculptor.Duchamp-Villon was born Pierre-Maurice-Raymond Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, the second son of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp. Of the six Duchamp children, four would become successful artists...
  
  
• Alexandre Falguière
  Alexandre Falguière
  Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière was a French sculptor and painter.He was born in Toulouse...
  
  
• Jean Antoine Houdon
• René Iché
  René Iché
  For the town in Morocco see Iche, MoroccoRené Iché was a 20th century French sculptor.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Antonin Idrac
  Antonin Idrac
  Jean-Antoine-Marie "Antonin" Idrac was a French sculptor.A pupil of Falguière, his works include:*Salammbô / Eve and the Serpent, based on the novel Salammbô*Cupid Stung...
  
  
• Antonin Mercié
  Antonin Mercié
  Marius Jean Antonin Mercié , was a French sculptor and painter.- Life :Mercié was born in Toulouse. He entered the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, and studied under Alexandre Falguière and François Jouffroy, and in 1868 gained the Grand Prix de Rome at the age of 23...
  
  
• Hippolyte Moulin
  Hippolyte Moulin
  Hippolyte Alexandre Julien Moulin, sometimes given as Julien-Hippolyte Moulin or Hypolite Moulin, was a 19th-century French sculptor....
  
  
• Émile Louis Picault
  Émile Louis Picault
  Émile Louis Picault was a French sculptor, best known for works depicting allegorical and patriotic subjects, and mythological heroes.-Bronzes:*Le Supplice de Tantale *Persée délivrant Andromède...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Pigalle
  Jean-Baptiste Pigalle
  Jean-Baptiste Pigalle was a French sculptor.He was born in Paris, the seventh child of a carpenter. Although he failed to obtain the Grand Prix, after a severe struggle he entered the Académie Royale and became one of the most popular sculptors of his day.His earlier work, such as Child with Cage ...
  
  
• Auguste Préault
• Auguste Rodin
  Auguste Rodin
  François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
  
  
• Francois Rude
  François Rude
  François Rude was a French sculptor. He was the stepfather of Paul Cabet, a sculptor.Born in Dijon, he worked at his father's trade as a stovemaker till the age of sixteen, but received training in drawing from François Devosges, where he learned that a strong, simple contour was an invaluable...
  
  
• Niki de Saint Phalle
  Niki de Saint Phalle
  Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.-The early years:...
  
  
• Sacha Sosno
  Sacha Sosno
  Alexandre Joseph Sosnowsky, , better known by his name Sacha Sosno, is an internationally renowned French sculptor and painter. Working most of the time in Nice, in the last decades he has achieved international recognition for his monumental outdoor sculptures in Côte d'Azur, France...
  
  

Social activists

• Hubertine Auclert
  Hubertine Auclert
  Hubertine Auclert was a leading French feminist and a campaigner for women's suffrage.Born in the Allier département in the Auvergne area of France into a middle-class family, Hubertine Auclert's father died when she was thirteen years old and her mother sent her to live and study in a Roman...
  
  , journalist and feminist leader
• Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
  
  , author, philosopher, and feminist
• Sophie de Condorcet
  Sophie de Condorcet
  Sophie de Condorcet , best known as Madame de Condorcet, was a prominent salon hostess from 1789 to the Reign of Terror, and again from 1799 until her death in 1822. She was the wife, then widow, of the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who died during the Reign of Terror...
  
  , feminist
• Maria Deraismes
  Maria Deraismes
  Maria Deraismes was a French author and major pioneering force for women's rights.- Biography :Born in Paris, Maria Deraismes grew up in Pontoise in the city's northwest outskirts...
  
  , feminist
• Marguerite Durand
  Marguerite Durand
  Marguerite Durand was a French stage actress, journalist, and a leading suffragette.-Biography:Born into a middle-class family, Marguerite Durand was sent to study at a Roman Catholic convent...
  
  , journalist and feminist leader
• Olympe de Gouges
  Olympe de Gouges
  Olympe de Gouges , born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience....
  
  , feminist
• Samir Kassir
  Samir Kassir
  Samir Kassir was a Lebanese professor of history at Saint-Joseph University and journalist. Born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, Kassir received his degree in philosophy and political philosophy in 1984, in 1990, Kassir earned his PhD in Modern History also from the University of...
  
  , journalist
• Jean Theophile Victor Leclerc
  Jean Theophile Victor Leclerc
  Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc, aka Jean-Theophilus Leclerc and Theophilus Leclerc d'Oze , was a radical French revolutionist and publicist...
  
  , radical revolutionist, newspaper publisher
• Victor Schoelcher
  Victor Schoelcher
  Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist writer in the 19th century and the main spokesman for a group from Paris who worked for the abolition of slavery, and formed an abolition society in 1834...
  
  , abolitionist
• Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel was a gay Holocaust survivor and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.-Biography:...
  
  , homosexual concentration camp survivor, activist, author
• Séverine
  Severine
  Severine or Séverine can refer to:* the nom de plume of the French journalist Caroline Rémy de Guebhard* a pseudonym of the Hungarian model Eve Angel...
  
  ,feminist
• Flora Tristan
  Flora Tristan
  Flora Tristan was a socialist writer and activist. She was also one of the founders of modern feminism...
  
  , feminist

Soldiers

• Jehanne d'Arc
  Joan of Arc
  Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...
  
  
• Chevalier Bayard
  Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard
  Pierre Terrail LeVieux, seigneur de Bayard was a French soldier, generally known as the Chevalier de Bayard. Throughout the centuries since his death, he has been known as "the knight without fear and beyond reproach"...
  
  
• François Achille Bazaine
  François Achille Bazaine
  François Achille Bazaine was a French General and from 1864, a Marshal of France, who surrendered the last organized French army to the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian war. He was the first Marshal who had started as a legionnaire and like the great Marshals of the First Empire, he had risen...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  Charles XIV John of Sweden
  Charles XIV & III John, also Carl John, Swedish and Norwegian: Karl Johan was King of Sweden and King of Norway from 1818 until his death...
  
  
• Georges Boulanger
  Georges Boulanger
  Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger was a French general and reactionary politician. At the apogee of his popularity in January 1889 many republicans including Georges Clemenceau feared the threat of a coup d'état by Boulanger and the establishment of a dictatorship.- Early life and career :Born...
  
  
• Thomas Robert Bugeaud
• François de Charette
  François de Charette
  François Athanase de Charette de la Contrie was a French soldier and politician, one of the leaders of the bloody events termed the "Revolt in the Vendée"...
  
  
• Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, known as le Grand Condé.
• Gaspard de Coligny
  Gaspard de Coligny
  Gaspard de Coligny , Seigneur de Châtillon, was a French nobleman and admiral, best remembered as a disciplined Huguenot leader in the French Wars of Religion.-Ancestry:...
  
  
• François Darlan
  François Darlan
  Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan was a French naval officer. His great-grandfather was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar...
  
  
• Louis Nicolas Davout
  Louis Nicolas Davout
  Louis-Nicolas d'Avout , better known as Davout, 1st Duke of Auerstaedt, 1st Prince of Eckmühl, was a Marshal of France during the Napoleonic Era. His prodigious talent for war along with his reputation as a stern disciplinarian, earned him the title "The Iron Marshal"...
  
  
• Bob Denard
  Bob Denard
  Colonel Bob Denard , born Gilbert Bourgeaud, was a French soldier and mercenary. He was known for having done various jobs in support of Françafrique for Jacques Foccart, in charge of French president Charles de Gaulle's policy in Africa...
  
  
• Alfred Dreyfus
  Alfred Dreyfus
  Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...
  
  
• Charles François Dumouriez
  Charles François Dumouriez
  Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez was a French general during the French Revolutionary Wars. He shared the victory at Valmy with General François Christophe Kellermann, but later deserted the Revolutionary Army and became a royalist intriguer during the reign of Napoleon.-Early life:Dumouriez...
  
  
• Ferdinand Foch
  Ferdinand Foch
  Ferdinand Foch , GCB, OM, DSO was a French soldier, war hero, military theorist, and writer credited with possessing "the most original and subtle mind in the French army" in the early 20th century. He served as general in the French army during World War I and was made Marshal of France in its...
  
  
• Louis Franchet d'Espèrey
• Joseph Gallieni
  Joseph Gallieni
  Joseph Simon Gallieni was a French soldier, most active as a military commander and administrator in the French colonies and finished his career during the First World War. He was made Marshal of France posthumously in 1921...
  
  
• Maurice Gamelin
  Maurice Gamelin
  Maurice Gustave Gamelin was a French general. Gamelin is best remembered for his unsuccessful command of the French military in 1940 during the Battle of France and his steadfast defense of republican values....
  
  
• Henri Gouraud
• Bertrand du Guesclin
  Bertrand du Guesclin
  Bertrand du Guesclin , known as the Eagle of Brittany or the Black Dog of Brocéliande, was a Breton knight and French military commander during the Hundred Years' War. He was Constable of France from 1370 to his death...
  
  
• Joseph Joffre
  Joseph Joffre
  Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre OM was a French general during World War I. He is most known for regrouping the retreating allied armies to defeat the Germans at the strategically decisive First Battle of the Marne in 1914. His popularity led to his nickname Papa Joffre.-Biography:Joffre was born in...
  
  
• Edmond Jouhaud
  Edmond Jouhaud
  Edmond Jouhaud was one of four French generals who briefly staged a putsch in Algeria in April 1961. As Army General he had been the Inspector General of the Air Force in French North Africa. After the failure of the putsch, he became the deputy of Raoul Salan in the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète...
  
  
• Jean-Baptiste Jourdan
  Jean-Baptiste Jourdan
  Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, 1st Comte Jourdan , enlisted as a private in the French royal army and rose to command armies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Emperor Napoleon I of France named him a Marshal of France in 1804 and he also fought in the Napoleonic Wars. After 1815, he became reconciled...
  
  
• Alphonse Juin
  Alphonse Juin
  - Early years :Juin was born at Bône in French Algeria, and enlisted in the French Army, graduating from the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in 1912.- Career :...
  
  
• Marie Pierre Koenig
  Marie Pierre Koenig
  Marie Pierre Kœnig was a French army officer and politician. He commanded a Free French Brigade at the Battle of Bir Hakeim in North Africa in 1942....
  
  
• Jacques de la Palice
  Jacques de la Palice
  Jacques de la Palice was a French nobleman and military officer. His full name and titles are Jacques II de Chabannes, Lord of La Palice, of Pacy, of Chauverothe, of Bort-le-Comte and of Héron...
  
  
• Charles Leclerc
  Charles Leclerc
  Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc was a French Army general and husband to Pauline Bonaparte, sister to Napoleon Bonaparte.-To 1801:...
  
  
• Jean Lannes
  Jean Lannes
  Jean Lannes, 1st Duc de Montebello, was a Marshal of France. He was one of Napoleon's most daring and talented generals. Napoleon once commented on Lannes: "I found him a pygmy and left him a giant"...
  
  
• Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
  Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
  Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, GCB, MC was a French military hero of World War II and commander in the First Indochina War.-Early life:...
  
  
• Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque
• François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg
• Hubert Lyautey
  Hubert Lyautey
  Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey was a French Army general, the first Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925 and from 1921 Marshal of France.-Early life:...
  
  
• Patrice MacMahon
  Patrice MacMahon, duc de Magenta
  Marie Edme Patrice Maurice de Mac-Mahon, 1st Duke of Magenta was a French general and politician with the distinction Marshal of France. He served as Chief of State of France from 1873 to 1875 and as the first president of the Third Republic, from 1875 to 1879.-Early life:Born in Sully , in the...
  
  
• Charles Mangin
  Charles Mangin
  Charles Emmanuel Marie Mangin was a French general during World War I.-Early career:...
  
  
• Claude Martin
  Claude Martin
  Major General Claude Martin was an officer in the French, and later the British, army in India. He rose to the position of Major General in the British East India Company...
  
  
• André Masséna
  André Masséna
  André Masséna 1st Duc de Rivoli, 1st Prince d'Essling was a French military commander during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars....
  
  
• Jacques Massu
  Jacques Massu
  Jacques Émile Massu was a French general who fought in World War II, the First Indochina War, the Algerian War and the Suez crisis.-Early life:Jacques Massu was born in Châlons-sur-Marne to a family of military officers; his father was an artillery officer...
  
  
• Louis-Joseph de Montcalm
  Louis-Joseph de Montcalm
  Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, Marquis de Saint-Veran was a French soldier best known as the commander of the forces in North America during the Seven Years' War .Montcalm was born near Nîmes in France to a noble family, and entered military service...
  
  
• Simon de Montfort
  Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester
  Simon IV de Montfort, Seigneur de Montfort-l'Amaury, 5th Earl of Leicester , also known as Simon de Montfort the elder, was a French nobleman who took part in the Fourth Crusade and was a prominent leader of the Albigensian Crusade...
  
  
• Philippe Morillon
  Philippe Morillon
  Philippe Morillon is a former French general and was a Member of the European Parliament until 2009. He was elected on the Union for French Democracy ticket with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group...
  
  
• Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte
  Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte
  Count Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte was a French admiral.Aged fifteen, he joined the navy as a midshipman and served in Morocco, the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean Islands and in India. Noted for his strategic skills, he was called to Paris in 1775 to help the Secretary of State prepare the...
  
  
• Joachim Murat
  Joachim Murat
  Joachim-Napoléon Murat , Marshal of France and Grand Admiral or Admiral of France, 1st Prince Murat, was Grand Duke of Berg from 1806 to 1808 and then King of Naples from 1808 to 1815...
  
  
• Michel Ney
  Michel Ney
  Michel Ney , 1st Duc d'Elchingen, 1st Prince de la Moskowa was a French soldier and military commander during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He was one of the original 18 Marshals of France created by Napoleon I...
  
  
• Robert Nivelle
  Robert Nivelle
  Robert Georges Nivelle was a French artillery officer who served in the Boxer Rebellion, and the First World War. In May 1916, he was given command of the French Third Army in the Battle of Verdun, leading counter-offensives that rolled back the German forces in late 1916...
  
  
• Philippe Pétain
  Philippe Pétain
  Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain , generally known as Philippe Pétain or Marshal Pétain , was a French general who reached the distinction of Marshal of France, and was later Chief of State of Vichy France , from 1940 to 1944...
  
  
• Comte de Rochambeau
• Raoul Salan
  Raoul Salan
  Raoul Albin Louis Salan was a French Army general and the fourth French commanding general during the First Indochina War. Salan was one of four generals who organized the 1961 Algiers Putsch operation and then founded the Organisation de l'armée secrète....
  
  
• Maurice Sarrail
  Maurice Sarrail
  Maurice-Paul-Emmanuel Sarrail was a French general of the First World War. Sarrail endeared himself to the political elite of the Third Republic through his openly socialist views, all the more conspicuous in contrast to the Catholics, conservatives and monarchists who dominated the French Army...
  
  
• Nicolas Soult
  Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult
  Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, 1st Duke of Dalmatia , the Hand of Iron, was a French general and statesman, named Marshal of the Empire in 1804. He was one of only six officers in French history to receive the distinction of Marshal General of France...
  
  
• Louis Jules Trochu
  Louis Jules Trochu
  Louis Jules Trochu was a French military leader and politician. He served as President of the Government of National Defense—France's de facto head of state—from 4 September 1870 until his resignation on 22 January 1871 .- Military career :He was born at Palais...
  
  
• Henri de Turenne
  Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne
  Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne,often called simply Turenne was the most illustrious member of the La Tour d'Auvergne family. He achieved military fame and became a Marshal of France...
  
  
• Étienne de Vignolles, called La Hire
• Claude Louis Hector de Villars
  Claude Louis Hector de Villars
  Claude Louis Hector de Villars, Prince de Martigues, Marquis then Duc de Villars, Vicomte de Melun was the last great general of Louis XIV of France and one of the most brilliant commanders in French military history, one of only six Marshals who have been promoted to Marshal General of...
  
  
• Maxime Weygand
  Maxime Weygand
  Maxime Weygand was a French military commander in World War I and World War II.Weygand initially fought against the Germans during the invasion of France in 1940, but then surrendered to and collaborated with the Germans as part of the Vichy France regime.-Early years:Weygand was born in Brussels...
  
  

Theologians

O.P. (Ordo Praedicatorum) is the abbreviation used to indicate that someone is/was a member of Dominican order

Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

, a Catholic

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 religious order

Religious order

A religious order is a lineage of communities and organizations of people who live in some way set apart from society in accordance with their specific religious devotion, usually characterized by the principles of its founder's religious practice. The order is composed of initiates and, in some...

.
S.J. (Societas Iesu) is the abbreviation used to indicate that someone is/was a member of the Society of Jesus

Society of Jesus

The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

, another Catholic

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 religious order.

• Marie-Émile Boismard
  Marie-Émile Boismard
  Claude Boismard was a French biblical scholar.He was educated in Rome, he was professor of the New Testament. As part of the École Biblique, he was one of the translators who created the Jerusalem Bible...
  
   O.P.
• Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was a French bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist....
  
  
• Jean Calvin
  John Calvin
  John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...
  
  
• Sebastian Castellion, translator of the Bible
• Pierre Cauchon
  Pierre Cauchon
  Pierre Cauchon , bishop of Beauvais. A strong partisan of English interests in France during the latter years of the Hundred Years' War, his role in arranging Joan of Arc's downfall led most subsequent observers to condemn his extension of secular politics into an ecclesiastical trial...
  
  , condemned Joan of Arc
• Bernard of Clairvaux
  Bernard of Clairvaux
  Bernard of Clairvaux, O.Cist was a French abbot and the primary builder of the reforming Cistercian order.After the death of his mother, Bernard sought admission into the Cistercian order. Three years later, he was sent to found a new abbey at an isolated clearing in a glen known as the Val...
  
  
• Jean Claude
  Jean Claude
  Jean Claude was a French Protestant divine.He was born at La Sauvetat-du-Dropt near Agen. After studying at Montauban, Jean Claude entered the ministry in 1645...
  
  
• Yves Congar
  Yves Congar
  Yves Marie Joseph Congar was a French Dominican cardinal and theologian.-Early life:Born in Sedan, in northeast France, in 1904, Congar's home was occupied by the Germans for much of World War I...
  
  , O.P.
• Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
  Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. was a Catholic theologian and, among Thomists of the scholastic tradition, is generally thought to be the greatest Catholic Thomist of the 20th century. Outside the ranks of Thomists of that sort, his reputation is somewhat more mixed. He taught at the...
  
  , O.P.
• Pierre Lagrange O.P., founder of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique de Jérusalem
• Hubert Languet
  Hubert Languet
  Hubert Languet was a French diplomat and reformer. The leading idea of his diplomacy was that of religious and civil liberty for the protection and expansion of Protestantism...
  
  
• Maurice Leenhardt
  Maurice Leenhardt
  Maurice Leenhardt, was a French pastor and ethnologist specialising in the Kanak people of New Caledonia.-Life:Leenhardt was born in Montauban....
  
  , ethnologist, theologian
• Alexandre de Rhodes S.J., 17th c. missionary to Indochina
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man. Teilhard conceived the idea of the Omega Point and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of Noosphere...
  
   S.J.
• Auguste Sabatier
• Antonin Sertillanges
  Antonin Sertillanges
  Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges , O.P., was a French Catholic philosopher and spiritual writer. Born Antonin-Dalmace, he took the name Antonin-Gilbert when he entered the Dominican order. His scholarly work was concerned with the moral theory of Thomas Aquinas. In the English-speaking world, he is...
  
   O.P., founder of the Revue Thomiste

Others

• André Charles Boulle
  André Charles Boulle
  André-Charles Boulle was the French cabinetmaker who is generally considered to be the preeminent artist in the field of marquetry, even "the most remarkable of all French cabinetmakers." His fame in marquetry led to his name being given to the fashion he perfected of inlaying brass and...
  
  , cabinet maker
• Louis Braille
  Louis Braille
  Louis Braille was the inventor of braille, a system of reading and writing used by people who are blind or visually impaired...
  
  , blind inventor
• Charles Cros
  Charles Cros
  Charles Cros was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne....
  
  , poet and inventor
• Jeanne Calment
  Jeanne Calment
  Jeanne Louise Calment was a French supercentenarian who had the longest confirmed human life span in history, living to the age of . She lived in Arles, France, for her entire life, and outlived both her daughter and grandson. She became especially well known from the age of 113, when the...
  
  , who reached the longest lifespan
  Oldest people
  This is a list of tables of the verified oldest people in the world in ordinal rank, such as oldest person or oldest man. In these tables, a supercentenarian is considered 'verified' if his or her claim has been validated by an international body that specifically deals in longevity research, such...
  
   in human history at 122 years and 164 days
• Jean René Champion, first Free French Forces
  Free French Forces
  The Free French Forces were French partisans in World War II who decided to continue fighting against the forces of the Axis powers after the surrender of France and subsequent German occupation and, in the case of Vichy France, collaboration with the Germans.-Definition:In many sources, Free...
  
   soldier to enter the city of Paris on its liberation in August 1944.
• Pierre de Coubertin
  Pierre de Coubertin
  Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin was a French educationalist and historian, founder of the International Olympic Committee, and is considered the father of the modern Olympic Games...
  
  , initiator of the modern Olympic Games
  Olympic Games
  The Olympic Games is a major international event featuring summer and winter sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition where more than 200 nations participate...
  
  
• Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc), commander and Saint
• Jean-Louis David, hairdresser
• Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt
  Edmond de Goncourt
  Edmond de Goncourt , born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.-Biography:...
  
  
• Ninon de l'Enclos
  Ninon de l'Enclos
  Anne "Ninon" de l'Enclos also spelled Ninon de Lenclos and Ninon de Lanclos was a French author, courtesan and patron of the arts.-Early life:...
  
  , courtesan, patron of the arts
• Cavalier de la Salle, explorer
• Marcel Deprez, electrical engineer
• René Dumont
  René Dumont
  René Dumont was a French engineer in agronomy, a sociologist, and an environmental politician.He was born in Cambrai, Nord, in the north of France. His father was a professor in agriculture and his grandfather was a farmer. He graduated from the INA P-G, as an engineer in agronomy...
  
  , agronomist engineer and sociologist and ecology activist
• Jules Dumont d'Urville
  Jules Dumont d'Urville
  Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was a French explorer, naval officer and rear admiral, who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica.-Childhood:Dumont was born at Condé-sur-Noireau...
  
  
• Maurice Duverger
  Maurice Duverger
  Maurice Duverger is a French jurist, sociologist and politician. He was born in Angoulême, Charente.Starting his career as a jurist at the University of Bordeaux, Duverger became more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in...
  
  , jurist
• Jean-Baptiste Ebrard, founder of Liverpool
  Liverpool (store)
  Liverpool is mid-to-high biggest chain of department stores in Mexico, operating 79 stores and one luxury shopping center Galerías Insurgentes, throughout Mexico and continuing to grow...
  
  , a chain of department stores in Mexico
• Gustave Eiffel
  Gustave Eiffel
  Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer from the École Centrale Paris, an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures...
  
  , engineer
• Pierre Charles L'Enfant
  Pierre Charles L'Enfant
  Pierre Charles L'Enfant was a French-born American architect and civil engineer best known for designing the layout of the streets of Washington, D.C..-Early life:...
  
  , planned Washington, D.C.
• Charles Michel de l'Épée, founder of world's first public school for deaf people
• Marquis de la Fayette, military leader in the American Revolution
  American Revolution
  The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
  
  
• Arthur de Gobineau
  Arthur de Gobineau
  Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races...
  
  , diplomat, author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
  An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
  Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was intended as a work of philosophical enquiry into decline and degeneration...
  
  
• Paul Héroult
  Paul Héroult
  The French scientist Paul Héroult was the inventor of the aluminium electrolysis and of the electric steel furnace. He lived in Thury-Harcourt, Normandy.Christian Bickert said of him...
  
  , inventor
• Claude de Jouffroy d'Abbans
  Claude-François-Dorothée, marquis de Jouffroy d'Abbans
  Claude-François-Dorothée, marquis de Jouffrey d'Abbans is claimed to be the first inventor of the steamboat.In 1773, Jouffroy d'Abbans met with the Perier brothers and studied in their workshop the , which had been used as a motive force for the hydraulic machine developed by Chaillot, in order...
  
  , designed the first steamship in 1783
• René Lalique
  René Lalique
  René Jules Lalique was a French glass designer known for his creations of perfume bottles, vases, jewellery, chandeliers, clocks and automobile hood ornaments. He was born in the French village of Ay on 6 April 1860 and died 5 May 1945...
  
  , artist
• Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds
  Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds
  Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds better known as Linant Pasha was an explorer of Egypt and, as the chief engineer of Egypt's public works, 1831–1869, the chief engineer of the Suez Canal.- Life and work :Having taken advantage of a sound education that emphasized mathematics,...
  
  , explorer and canal engineer
• Auguste and Louis Lumière
  Auguste and Louis Lumière
  The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean , were among the earliest filmmakers in history...
  
  , inventors
• Jean Paul Marat
  Jean-Paul Marat
  Jean-Paul Marat , born in the Principality of Neuchâtel, was a physician, political theorist, and scientist best known for his career in France as a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution...
  
  
• Jacques Mayol
  Jacques Mayol
  Jacques Mayol was the holder of many world records in free diving.Jacques Mayol was a French national born in Shanghai, China. He was the first free diver to descend to 100 meters , and he managed to descend to 105 meters when he was 56 years old...
  
  , freediver
• Montgolfier brothers
  Montgolfier brothers
  Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were the inventors of the montgolfière-style hot air balloon, globe aérostatique. The brothers succeeded in launching the first manned ascent, carrying Étienne into the sky...
  
  , balloonists
• Jean-Marie Pelt
  Jean-Marie Pelt
  Professor Jean-Marie Pelt is a French botanist.Pelt founded the European Institute of Ecology in 1972. He is the author of several books and produced several television series for French TV.-Bibliography:...
  
  , botanist
• Elisée Reclus
  Élisée Reclus
  Élisée Reclus , also known as Jacques Élisée Reclus, was a renowned 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...
  
  , geographer and anarchist
• César Ritz
  César Ritz
  César Ritz was a Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz, in Paris and The Ritz Hotel in London...
  
  , hotelier
• Maximilien Robespierre
  Maximilien Robespierre
  Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre is one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. He largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended with his...
  
  
• Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin
  Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin
  Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin was a French magician. He is widely considered the father of the modern style of conjuring.-Early life and entrance into conjuring:...
  
  , magician, namesake of "Harry Houdini
  Harry Houdini
  Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts...
  
  "
• Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel
  Pierre Seel was a gay Holocaust survivor and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.-Biography:...
  
  , homosexual survivor of the concentration camps, activist, author
• Philippe Starck
  Philippe Starck
  Philippe Patrick Starck is a French product designer and probably the best known designer in the New Design style...
  
  , designer
• Vauban
  Vauban
  Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban and later Marquis de Vauban , commonly referred to as Vauban, was a Marshal of France and the foremost military engineer of his age, famed for his skill in both designing fortifications and breaking through them...
  
  , engineer
• François Henri de la Motte
  François Henri de la Motte
  Francis Henry de la Motte, or François Henri de la Motte, was a French citizen and ex-French army officer executed in London for High Treason on 27 July 1781. He had been arrested in January 1781 on suspicion of being a spy, and held for six months in the Tower of London...
  
  , French spy executed for treason 1781 in London
• Eugène François Vidocq
  Eugène François Vidocq
  Eugène François Vidocq was a French criminal and criminalist whose life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac...
  
  , French convict-turned-spy considered the father of modern forensics.

See also

• List of French Jews
• List of French people of immigrant origin
• List of people by nationality: Belgians, Catalans, Monégasque people, Quebecers, Swiss