Montparnasse Cemetery
Encyclopedia
Montparnasse Cemetery is a cemetery in the 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...

 quarter of Paris, part of the city's 14th arrondissement.

History

Created from three farms in 1824, the cemetery at Montparnasse was originally known as Le Cimetière du Sud. Cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the closure, owing to health concerns, of the Cimetière des Innocents in 1786. Several new cemeteries outside the precincts of the capital replaced all the internal Parisian ones in the early 19th century: Montmartre Cemetery
Montmartre Cemetery
Montmartre Cemetery is a cemetery in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, France.-History:Cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the shutting down of the Cimetière des Innocents in 1786, as they presented health hazards...

 in the north, Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the...

 in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. At the heart of the city, and today sitting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower is a puddle iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris. Built in 1889, it has become both a global icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world...

, is Passy Cemetery
Passy Cemetery
The Passy Cemetery is a famous cemetery located at 2, rue du Commandant Schlœsing in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France.-History:...

.
Montparnasse Cemetery is the eternal home of many of France's intellectual and artistic elite as well as publishers and others who promoted the works of authors and artists. There are also monuments to police and firefighters killed in the line of duty in the city of Paris.

Because of the many notable people buried there, it is a highly popular tourist attraction.

A

  • Henri Alekan
    Henri Alekan
    Henri Alekan was a French cinematographer.-Life:Henri Alekan was born in Montmartre in 1909. At the age of sixteen he and his brother became travelling puppeteers. A little later he started work as third assistant cameraman at the Billancourt studios. He then spent a short time in the army,...

     (1909–2001), cinematographer
  • Alexander Alekhine
    Alexander Alekhine
    Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was the fourth World Chess Champion. He is often considered one of the greatest chess players ever.By the age of twenty-two, he was already among the strongest chess players in the world. During the 1920s, he won most of the tournaments in which he played...

     (1892–1946), Russian-born chess
    Chess
    Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

     world champion
  • Michèle Arnaud
    Michèle Arnaud
    Michèle Arnaud , was a French singer, producer, and director. She was entombed on September 18, 1998 in Montparnasse Cemetery...

     (1919–1998), singer
  • 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...

     (1905–1983), philosopher, sociologist and political scientist
  • Jean-Michel Atlan
    Jean-Michel Atlan
    -Biography:Of Algerian Jewish descent, Atlan was born in Constantine, French Algeria, and moved to Paris in 1930. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He started as a self taught painter in 1941. He was arrested for being Jewish and for his political activism in 1942. He pleaded insanity and was...

     (1913–1960), poet and painter
  • Tina Aumont
    Tina Aumont
    Maria Christina Aumont , best known as Tina Aumont, was an American actress.She was of French Jewish and Dominican descent....

     (1946–2006), actress, daughter of 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...

     and Maria Montez
    María Montez
    María Montez was a Dominican-born motion picture actress who gained fame and popularity in the 1940s as an exotic beauty starring in a series of filmed-in-Technicolor costume adventure films. Her screen image was that of a hot-blooded Latin seductress, dressed in fanciful costumes and sparkling...

  • 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...

     (1899–1983), composer, member of 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...


B

  • Shapour Bakhtiar
    Shapour Bakhtiar
    Shapour Bakhtiar was an Iranian political scientist, writer and the last Prime Minister of Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi...

     (1914–1991), last prime minister of the constitutional monarchy
    Constitutional monarchy
    Constitutional monarchy is a form of government in which a monarch acts as head of state within the parameters of a constitution, whether it be a written, uncodified or blended constitution...

     in Iran
  • César Baldaccini
    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...

     (1921–1988), sculptor
  • Théodore de Banville
    Théodore de Banville
    Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the...

     (1823–1891), poet, writer
  • Frédéric Bartholdi
    Frédéric Bartholdi
    Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a French sculptor who is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty.-Life and career:...

     (1834–1904), sculptor of the Statue of Liberty
    Statue of Liberty
    The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886...

  • Maryse Bastié
    Maryse Bastié
    Maryse Bastié was a French aviator. Born Marie-Louise Bombec in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, at age eleven Bastié's father died and her family struggled to survive. However, as an employee in a shoe factory, money was scarce and an early marriage that failed left her with a child and limited means...

     (1898–1952), pioneer aviatrix
  • Pierre Batcheff
    Pierre Batcheff
    Pierre Batcheff was a French actor. His best-known film was Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali...

     (1901–1932), actor
  • 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....

     (1877–1970), opera singer
  • 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...

     (1821–1867), famous poet
  • 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:...

     (1929–2007), French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer
  • 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...

     (1908–1986), feminist philosopher & author
  • 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...

     (1906–1960), filmmaker
  • Samuel Beckett
    Samuel Beckett
    Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

     (1906–1989), Irish author, playwright & poet
  • Eugène Belgrand
    Eugène Belgrand
    Eugène Belgrand was a French engineer who made significant contributions to the modernization of the Parisian sewer system during the 19th century rebuilding of Paris. Much of Belgrand's work remains in use today.-Civil engineering:...

     (1810–1878), civil engineer
  • Paul Belmondo
    Paul Belmondo (sculptor)
    Paul Belmondo was a French sculptor. He is the father of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.-Biography :...

     (1898–1982), French sculptor
  • Jean Béraud
    Jean Béraud
    Jean Béraud was a French Impressionist painter and commercial artist noted for his paintings of Parisian life during the Belle Époque.-Biography:...

     (1849–1935), painter
  • Emmanuel Berl
    Emmanuel Berl
    Emmanuel Berl was a French journalist, historian and essayist. He was born at Le Vésinet in the modern département of Yvelines, and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. In 1937 he married the singer, composer and film actress Mireille Hartuch; she had nicknamed him "Théodore"...

     (1892–1976), writer
  • Aloysius Bertrand
    Aloysius Bertrand
    Louis-Jacques-Napoléon “Aloysius” Bertrand was a French poet instrumental in the introduction of the prose poem into French literature and is credited with inspiring later Symbolist poets...

     (1807–1841), poet
  • Marcel Alexandre Bertrand
    Marcel Alexandre Bertrand
    Marcel Alexandre Bertrand was a French geologist who was born in Paris. He was a student at the École Polytechnique, and beginning in 1869 he attended the Ecole des Mines de Paris. Beginning in 1877 he performed geological mapping studies of Provence, Jura Mountains and the Alps...

     (1847–1907), geologist, founder of the plate tectonic theory
  • Louis Gustave Binger
    Louis Gustave Binger
    Louis Gustave Binger was a French officer and explorer who claimed the Côte d'Ivoire for France.Binger was born at Strasbourg in the Bas-Rhin . In 1887 he travelled from Senegal up to the Niger River, arriving at Grand Bassam in 1889. During this expedition he discovered that the Mountains of Kong...

     (1856–1936), explorer
  • Lucien Bodard
    Lucien Bodard
    Lucien Bodard was a French reporter and writer on events in Asia.Bodard was born on January 9, 1914 in Chongqing to the French consul Albert Bodard, who was stationed several years in China, i.e. in Chongking, Chengdu, Kunming and Shanghai. He grew up with the Chinese language and spoke Mandarin...

     (1914–1998), journalist
  • Marc Boegner
    Marc Boegner
    Marc Boegner, commonly known as pasteur Boegner , was a theologist, influential pastor, notable member of the French Resistance, and a French essayist, and a notable voice in the ecumenical movement.-Biography:...

     (1881–1970), theologist and academician
  • Jean-Marie Bonnassieux
    Jean-Marie Bonnassieux
    Jean-Marie Bienaimé Bonnassieux was a French sculptor.The son of a cabinet maker from Lyon, Bonnassieux showed talent as a boy and was educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Augustin-Alexandre Dumont...

     (1810–1892), sculptor
  • Aristide Boucicaut
    Aristide Boucicaut
    Aristide Boucicaut created what is considered to be among the first department stores.Born in Bellême, Orne, at 3:00 A. M. on Bastille Day, the son of a banker, he began as a simple clerk in Bellême before he left to become a fabric salesman selling shawls...

     (1810–1877), entrepreneur and creator of Le Bon Marché
    Le Bon Marché
    Le Bon Marché is the name of one of the best known department stores in Paris, France. It is sometimes regarded as the "first department store in the world". Although this depends on what is meant by 'department store', it may have had the first specially designed building for a store in Paris...

     chain of department stores
  • William-Adolphe Bouguereau
    William-Adolphe Bouguereau
    William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...

     (1825–1905), artist (painter in realist
    Realism (arts)
    Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

     style)
  • Antoine Jacques Claude Joseph, comte Boulay de la Meurthe
    Antoine Jacques Claude Joseph, comte Boulay de la Meurthe
    Antoine Jacques Claude Joseph, comte Boulay de la Meurthe , was a French politician and magistrate, son of an agricultural labourer, born at Chamousey ....

     (1761–1840), statesman
  • Antoine Bourdelle
    Antoine Bourdelle
    Antoine Bourdelle , originally Émile Antoine Bourdelle, was an influential and prolific French sculptor, painter, and teacher.-Career:...

     (1861–1921), sculptor & teacher
  • Paul Bourget
    Paul Bourget
    Paul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...

     (1852–1935), writer
  • Marcel Bozzuffi
    Marcel Bozzuffi
    Marcel Bozzuffi was a French film actor, perhaps best remembered for his role as a brutal hitman in the Oscar-winning US film The French Connection...

     (1928–1988), actor
  • Gérard Brach
    Gérard Brach
    Gérard Brach was a French screenwriter best known for his collaborations with the film directors Roman Polanski and Jean-Jacques Annaud...

     (1927–2006), screenwriter
  • Constantin Brâncuşi
    Constantin Brancusi
    Constantin Brâncuşi was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris...

     (1876–1957), Romanian sculptor
  • 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 Gyula Halász) (1899–1984), photographer
  • Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard
    Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard
    Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard FRS , also known as Charles Edward, was a Mauritian physiologist and neurologist who, in 1850, became the first to describe what is now called Brown-Séquard syndrome.-Early life:...

     (1817–1894), physician
  • Jean Bruller
    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...

     (1902–1991), author who wrote under the nom de plume of Vercors

C

  • René Capitant
    René Capitant
    René Marie Alphonse Charles Capitant was a French lawyer and politician.He was the son of a lawyer, Henri Capitant, and attended the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris...

     (1901–1970), lawyer and statesman
  • Roger Caillois
    Roger Caillois
    Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, and philosophy by focusing on subjects as diverse as games, play and the sacred...

     (1913–1978), author
  • Jean Carmet
    Jean Carmet
    Jean Carmet, born July 25, 1920 in Bourgueil, Indre-et-Loire, France; died April 20, 1994 in Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine, was a French actor.-Biography:...

     (1920–1994), actor
  • Eugène Carrière
    Eugène Carrière
    Eugène Anatole Carrière was a French Symbolist artist of the Fin de siècle period. His work is best known for its brown monochrome palette. He was a close friend of the sculptor Rodin and his work influenced Picasso...

     (1849–1906), Symbolist painter
  • Rene Cassin
    René Cassin
    René Samuel Cassin was a French jurist, law professor and judge. A soldier in World War I, he later went on to form the Union Fédérale, a leftist, pacifist Veterans organisation...

     (1887–1976), jurist, Nobel Laureate. His remains were later transferred to the Panthéon.
  • Aristide Cavaillé-Coll
    Aristide Cavaillé-Coll
    Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was a French organ builder. He is considered by many to be the greatest organ builder of the 19th century because he combined both science and art to make his instruments...

     (1811–1899), organ builder
    Organ builder
    -Australia:* William Anderson * Australian Pipe Organs Pty Ltd* Robert Cecil Clifton * William Davidson* J.E. Dodd & Sons Gunstar Organ Works* Fincham & Hobday* Geo. Fincham & Son* Alfred Fuller * Peter D.G. Jewkes Pty Ltd...

  • Emmanuel Chabrier
    Emmanuel Chabrier
    Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas , songs, and piano music as well...

     (1841–1894), composer
  • Honoré Champion
    Honoré Champion
    Honoré Champion was a French publisher. He founded Éditions Honoré Champion in 1874 and published scientific works geared towards laymen, particularly concerning history and literature....

     (1846–1913), publisher
  • 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...

     (1911–1995), Romanian philosopher
  • 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), founded France's Citroën
    Citroën
    Citroën is a major French automobile manufacturer, part of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group.Founded in 1919 by French industrialist André-Gustave Citroën , Citroën was the first mass-production car company outside the USA and pioneered the modern concept of creating a sales and services network that...

     automobile factory
  • Antoni Clavé
    Antoni Clavé
    Antoni Clavé was a Catalan master painter, printmaker, sculptor, stage designer and costume designer. He was nominated for two Academy Awards for his work on the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen.Clavé was one of Spain's best known and most celebrated artists...

     (1913–2005), artist
  • François Coppée
    François Coppée
    François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...

     (1842–1908), poet and novelist
  • Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis
    Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis
    Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis or Gustave Coriolis was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He is best known for his work on the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference. See the Coriolis Effect...

     (1792–1843), mathematician
  • Julio Cortázar
    Julio Cortázar
    Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...

     (1914–1984), Argentinian
    Argentina
    Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

     author
  • 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...

     (1801–1877), economist
  • Maurice Couve de Murville
    Maurice Couve de Murville
    Maurice Couve de Murville was a French diplomat and politician who was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1958 to 1968 and Prime Minister from 1968 to 1969 under the presidency of General de Gaulle....

     (1907–1999), former Prime Minister of France
    Prime Minister of France
    The Prime Minister of France in the Fifth Republic is the head of government and of the Council of Ministers of France. The head of state is the President of the French Republic...

  • Adolphe Crémieux
    Adolphe Crémieux
    Adolphe Crémieux was a French-Jewish lawyer and statesman, and a staunch defender of the human rights of the Jews of France. - Biography :...

     (1796–1880), lawyer and statesman
  • 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....

     (1842–1888), poet and inventor

D

  • Jules Dalou
    Jules Dalou
    Aimé-Jules Dalou was a French sculptor, recognized as one of the most brilliant virtuosos of nineteenth-century France, admired for his perceptiveness, execution, and unpretentious realism.-Life:...

     (1838–1902), sculptor
  • Gabriel Davioud
    Gabriel Davioud
    Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud was a French architect.Davioud was born in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Léon Vaudoyer...

     (1824–1881), architect
  • Pierre David-Weill
    Pierre David-Weill
    Pierre David-Weill was a French investment banker.Born Pierre Sylvain Désiré Gérard David-Weill in Paris, France, he was the son of Flora Raphael and David David-Weill , Chairman of Lazard Frères...

     (1900–1975), banker, Chairman of Lazard Frères
  • Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (1900–1989), lover and, later, wife of Samuel Beckett
    Samuel Beckett
    Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

  • 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...

     (1931–1990), film director
  • Édouard Deperthes
    Édouard Deperthes
    Pierre Joseph Édouard Deperthes was an French architect.-Early life :Deperthes was born in Houdilcourt, a commune in the Ardennes in July 1833. He was the son of two farmers.-Education:...

     (1833–1898), architect
  • Paul Deschanel
    Paul Deschanel
    Paul Eugène Louis Deschanel was a French statesman. He served as President of France from 18 February 1920 to 21 September 1920.-Biography:...

     (1855–1922), former President of France
  • Robert Desnos
    Robert Desnos
    Robert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...

     (1900–1945), Surrealist poet
  • Porfirio Díaz
    Porfirio Díaz
    José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori was a Mexican-American War volunteer and French intervention hero, an accomplished general and the President of Mexico continuously from 1876 to 1911, with the exception of a brief term in 1876 when he left Juan N...

     (1830–1915), longest serving Mexican President, Dictator, General
  • Marie Dorval
    Marie Dorval
    Marie Dorval was a French actress.- Early life :Born Marie Thomase Amélie Delauney; abandoned by her father when she was five years old, and losing her mother to tuberculosis while still a teenager, at age of 15 she married Alain Dorval, a much older actor, who died five years later...

     (1798–1849), actress
  • 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...

     (1859–1935), Jewish military officer falsely accused of treason (the Dreyfus affair
    Dreyfus Affair
    The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

    )
  • 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...

     (1790–1842), explorer of South Pacific & discoverer of Venus de Milo
    Venus de Milo
    Aphrodite of Milos , better known as the Venus de Milo, is an ancient Greek statue and one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture. Created at some time between 130 and 100 BC, it is believed to depict Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love and beauty. It is a marble sculpture, slightly...

  • Marguerite Duras
    Marguerite Duras
    Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...

     (1914–1996), author & movie director
  • Émile Durkheim
    Émile Durkheim
    David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...

     (1858–1917), sociologist

E

  • Émile Egger
    Émile Egger
    Émile Egger was a French scholar who was born in Paris.From 1840 to 1855, Egger was assistant professor, and from 1855 until his death he was professor of Greek literature in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris University...

     (1813–1885), philologist
  • 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...

     (1811–1832), mathematician
  • Robert Enrico
    Robert Enrico
    Robert Georgio Enrico was a French film director and scriptwriter.He was born in Liévin, Pas-de-Calais, in the north of France.-Filmography as director:* Fait d'hiver...

     (1931–2001), film director
  • Antoine Étex
    Antoine Étex
    Antoine Étex was a French sculptor, painter and architect. He was born in Paris.He first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1833, his work including a reproduction in marble of his "Death of Hyacinthus", and the plaster cast of his "Cain and his race cursed by God"...

     (1808–1888), sculptor

F

  • 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:...

     (1836–1904), artist
  • 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...

     (1876–1947), poet and essayist
  • Henri Flammarion (1846–1936), publisher
  • Paul Foucher
    Paul Foucher
    Paul-Henri Foucher was a French playwright, theatre and music critic, political journalist, and novelist.-Early career:...

     (1810–1875), dramatist and journalist
  • 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....

     (1822–1890), composer & organist
  • Othon Friesz
    Othon Friesz
    Achille-Émile Othon Friesz who later called himself just Othon Friesz , a native of Le Havre, was a French artist of the Fauvist movement....

     (1879–1949), painter

G

  • 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...

     (1928–1991), poet and singer
  • 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:...

     (1825–1898), designed the original Paris Opera
    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...

     House for Napoleon III
  • Henry Gauthier-Villars
    Henry Gauthier-Villars
    Henry Gauthier-Villars or Willy, his nom-de-plume, was a French fin-de-siecle writer and music critic who is today mostly known as the mentor and bisexual first husband of Colette...

     (1859–1931), writer and first husband of 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...

  • François Gérard (1770–1837), artist
  • Alexandre Guilmant
    Alexandre Guilmant
    Félix-Alexandre Guilmant was a French organist and composer.- Short biography :Guilmant was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer...

     (1837–1911), organist and composer

H

  • Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette
    Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette
    Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette , French mathematician, was born at Mézières, where his father was a bookseller.For his early education he proceeded first to the college of Charleville, and afterwards to that of Reims...

     (1769–1834), mathematician
  • Clara Haskil
    Clara Haskil
    Clara Haskil was a Romanian classical pianist, renowned as an interpreter of the classical and early romantic repertoire....

     (1895–1960), Romanian pianist
  • Pierre-Jules Hetzel
    Pierre-Jules Hetzel
    Pierre-Jules Hetzel was a French editor and publisher. He is best known for his extraordinarily lavishly illustrated editions of Jules Verne's novels highly prized by collectors today...

     (1814–1886), publisher and literary editor
  • Jean-Antoine Houdon
    Jean-Antoine Houdon
    Jean-Antoine Houdon was a French neoclassical sculptor. Houdon is famous for his portrait busts and statues of philosophers, inventors and political figures of the Enlightenment...

     (1741–1828), famous sculptor of notable men
  • 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...

     (1848–1907), author

I

  • Roger Ibáñez (1931–2005), actor
  • Vincent d'Indy
    Vincent d'Indy
    Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...

     (1851–1931), composer
  • 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...

     (1909–1994), Romanian playwright
  • Jean Robert Ipousteguy (1920–2006), sculptor, painter
  • Joris Ivens
    Joris Ivens
    Joris Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and committed communist.-Early life and career:...

     (1898–1989), Dutch filmmaker

J

  • Jean Bernard Jauréguiberry (1815–1887), admiral and statesman
  • 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...

     (1953–1982), American-born French singer
  • Gustave Jundt (1830–1884), painter

K

  • Joseph Kessel
    Joseph Kessel
    Joseph Kessel was a French journalist and novelist.He was born in Villa Clara, Entre Ríos, Argentina, because of the constant journeys of his father, a Lithuanian doctor of Jewish origin. Joseph Kessel lived the first years of his childhood in Orenburg, Russia, before the family moved to France...

     (1898–1979), writer
  • 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...

     (1901–1953), singer, actress, painter, "Queen of Montparnasse"
  • Adamantios Korais
    Adamantios Korais
    Adamantios Korais or Coraïs was a humanist scholar credited with laying the foundations of Modern Greek literature and a major figure in the Greek Enlightenment. His activities paved the way for the Greek War of Independence and emergence of a purified form of the Greek language, known as...

     (1748–1833), Greek writer and philosopher

L

  • Bernard Lacoste
    Bernard Lacoste
    Bernard Lacoste was a French fashion designer and businessman.- Biography :Lacoste was the son of René Lacoste, the founder of the fashion company Lacoste. He attended high school in France and earned the Bachelor of Science at Princeton University in the USA...

     (1931–2006), president of Lacoste apparel company
  • Henri Langlois
    Henri Langlois
    Henri Langlois was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema...

     (1914–1977), film preservationist
  • Pierre Larousse
    Pierre Larousse
    Pierre Athanase Larousse was a French grammarian, lexicographer and encyclopaedist. He published many of the outstanding educational and reference works of 19th-century France, including the 15 volume Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.-Early life:Pierre Larousse was born in Toucy, where...

     (1817–1875), author of encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique
    Larousse Gastronomique
    Larousse Gastronomique is an encyclopedia of gastronomy. The majority of the book is about French cuisine, and contains recipes for French dishes and cooking techniques...

  • Henri Laurens
    Henri Laurens
    Henri Laurens was a French sculptor and illustrator.-Early life and education:Born in Paris, Henri Laurens worked as a stonemason before he became a sculptor...

     (1885–1954), sculptor, engraver
  • Alphonse Laveran (1845–1922), physician, parasitologist
  • 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...

     (1864–1941), biographer of 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...

    , novelist
  • Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), poet
  • Jean Henri Lefortier (1819–1886), painter
  • Alexandre Lenoir
    Alexandre Lenoir
    Marie Alexandre Lenoir was a French archaeologist. Self-taught and devoted to saving France's historic monuments, sculptures and tombs from the ravages of the French Revolution, notably those of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Geneviève.- Life :The ravages of the Revolution caused the birth of the Musée...

     (1761–1839), archaeologist
  • Philippe Léotard
    Philippe Léotard
    Philippe Léotard was a French actor, poet, and singer....

     (1940–2001), teacher, actor, poet, singer
  • Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877), astronomer and mathematician
  • André Lhote
    André Lhote
    André Lhote was a French sculptor and painter of figure subjects, portraits, landscapes and still life. He was also very active and influential as a teacher and writer on art....

     (1885–1962), painter and sculptor
  • Jacques Lisfranc
    Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin
    Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin was a pioneering French surgeon and gynecologist. He pioneered a number of operations including removal of the rectum, lithotomy in women, and amputation of the cervix uteri....

     (1790–1847), gynecologist and surgeon
  • Émile Littré
    Émile Littré
    Émile Maximilien Paul Littré was a French lexicographer and philosopher, best known for his Dictionnaire de la langue française, commonly called "The Littré".-Biography:Émile Littré was born in Paris...

     (1801–1881) lexicographer, philosopher
  • Baltasar Lobo
    Baltasar Lobo
    Baltasar Lobo was a Spanish artist, anarchist and sculptor best known for his compositions depicting mother and child.-Life:...

     (1910–1993), Spanish sculptor
  • Sylvia Lopez
    Sylvia Lopez
    Sylvia Lopez was a French model and actress.Born Tatjana Bernt, she was raised in Paris, where she began a career in modelling. Eventually she modeled for couturier Jacques Fath, the first French fashion designer to export his creations to the United States...

     (1931–1959), actress
  • Louis Loucheur
    Louis Loucheur
    Louis Loucheur was a French politician in the Third Republic, at first a member of the conservative Republican Federation, then of the Democratic Republican Alliance and of the Independent Radicals.-Life:Coming from a background in the arms industry, Loucheur became Minister of Munitions in...

     (1872–1931), statesman
  • Pierre Louÿs
    Pierre Louÿs
    Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...

     (1870–1925), poet, romance novelist

M

  • Ambrose Dudley Mann
    Ambrose Dudley Mann
    Ambrose Dudley Mann was the first United States Assistant Secretary of State and a commissioner for the Confederate States....

     (1801–1889), Commissioner of the Confederate States of America for Belgium and the Vatican
  • Gaston Maspero
    Gaston Maspero
    Gaston Camille Charles Maspero was a French Egyptologist.-Life:Gaston Maspero was born in Paris to parents of Lombard origin. While at school he showed a special taste for history, and by the age of fourteen he was already interested in hieroglyphic writing...

     (1846–1916), Egyptologist
  • 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....

     (1850–1893), author
  • Rosita Mauri
    Rosita Mauri
    Rosita Isabel Armanda Mauri or Roseta Mauri y Segura was a dancer and ballet teacher of Catalan origin.-Career:...

     (1849–1923), principal ballerina at the Paris Opera
  • Claude Mauriac
    Claude Mauriac
    Claude Mauriac was a French author and journalist, eldest son of the author François Mauriac.He was the personal secretary of Charles de Gaulle from 1944 to 1949, before becoming a cinema critic and arts person of Figaro. He is the author of several novels and essays, and co-scripted the movie of...

     (1914–1996), author
  • René Mayer
    René Mayer
    René Mayer was a French Radical politician of the Fourth Republic who served briefly as Prime Minister during 1953. He led the Mayer Authority from 1955 to 1958.-Mayer's Ministry, 8 January – 28 June 1953:*René Mayer – President of the Council...

     (1895–1972), former Prime Minister of France
    Prime Minister of France
    The Prime Minister of France in the Fifth Republic is the head of government and of the Council of Ministers of France. The head of state is the President of the French Republic...

  • Catulle Mendès
    Catulle Mendès
    Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...

     (1841–1909), poet, man of letters
  • Adah Isaacs Menken
    Adah Isaacs Menken
    Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress, painter and poet.-Life and career:There are significant inconsistencies in the various accounts of Menken's early life. In her autobiographical "Some Notes of her life in her own Hand,", Menken claimed she was born Marie Rachel Adelaide de Vere Spenser...

     (1835–1868), actress, poet
  • André Meyer
    André Meyer
    André Benoit Mathieu Meyer was a French-born American Wall Street investment banker.Meyer was born in Paris to a low-income family. As a boy, he began following the workings of the stock market and out of necessity left school at age sixteen to work as a messenger at the Paris Bourse...

     (1898–1979), French/American financier
  • Mireille
    Mireille Hartuch
    Mireille Hartuch was a French singer, composer, and actress. She was generally known by the stage name "Mireille"....

     (1906–1996), singer, composer
  • Maria Montez
    María Montez
    María Montez was a Dominican-born motion picture actress who gained fame and popularity in the 1940s as an exotic beauty starring in a series of filmed-in-Technicolor costume adventure films. Her screen image was that of a hot-blooded Latin seductress, dressed in fanciful costumes and sparkling...

     (1912–1951), actress
  • Vincent de Moro-Giafferi
    Vincent de Moro-Giafferi
    Vincent de Moro-Giafferi was a French criminal attorney.Moro-Giafferi was the youngest person ever appointed to the Paris bar at the age of 24. Also active in politics, he was made a Deputy to the French National Assembly from Corsica at the age of 31 in 1919...

     (1878–1956), lawyer and statesman
  • Jean Mounet-Sully
    Jean Mounet-Sully
    Mounet-Sully , a French actor, was born at Bergerac. His birth name was Jean-Sully Mounet: "Mounet-Sully" was a stage name....

     (1841–1916), actor

N

  • Philippe Noiret
    Philippe Noiret
    Philippe Noiret was a French film actor.-Biography:Noiret's father was in the clothes trade. Philippe was an indifferent scholar and attended several prestigious Paris schools, including the Lycée Janson de Sailly. He failed several times to pass his baccalauréat exams, so he decided to study...

     (1930–2006), actor
  • Max Nordau
    Max Nordau
    Max Simon Nordau , born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in Pest, Hungary, was a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic....

     (1849–1923), Zionist leader, physician, author

O

  • Mathieu Orfila
    Mathieu Orfila
    Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila was a Spanish-born French toxicologist and chemist, the founder of the science of toxicology.- Role in Forensic Toxicology :...

     (1787–1853), toxicologist, chemist
  • Gérard Oury
    Gérard Oury
    Gérard Oury was a French film director, actor and writer. His real name was Max-Gérard Houry Tannenbaum.- A commercially successful French filmmaker :...

     (1919–2006), director

P

  • Jean-Claude Pascal
    Jean-Claude Pascal
    Jean-Claude Pascal was a French comedian and singer.After surviving the Second World War in Straßburg, Pascal first studied at the Sorbonne-university and then turned to fashion-designing for Christian Dior...

     (1927–1992), singer and actor
  • Adolphe Pégoud
    Adolphe Pegoud
    Adolphe Célestin Pégoud was a well known pre-war French aviator who became the first fighter ace.Pégoud served in the French Army from 1907 to 1913...

     (1889–1915), aviator
  • 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....

     (1874–1954), architect
  • Symon Petliura (1879–1926), Ukrainian
    Ukraine
    Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

     leader
  • Maurice Pialat
    Maurice Pialat
    Maurice Pialat was a French film director, screenwriter and actor noted for the rigorous and unsentimental style of his films...

     (1925–2003), film director
  • Charles Pigeon
    Charles Pigeon
    Charles-Joseph Pigeon was born in Le Mesnil-Lieubray in Normandy in France.He started as a salesman in Le Bon Marché in Paris, where he became a close friend of Ernest Cognacq, subsequently the founder of the Samaritaine department store.Pigeon became a dealer in cycle lamps and other lamps...

     (1838–1915), engineer, inventor and manufacturer
  • Jules Henri Poincaré, (1854–1912), mathematician and physicist
  • Jean Poiret
    Jean Poiret
    Jean Poiret, born Jean Poiré, was a French actor, director, and screenwriter. He is primarily known as the author of the original play La Cage Aux Folles. Jean Poiret was born in Paris, France, where he died of a heart attack in 1992...

     (1926–1992), actor, film director
  • François Charles Henri Laurent Pouqueville
    Francois Pouqueville
    François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville was a French diplomat, writer, explorer, physician and historian, member of the ....

     (1770–1838), Diplomat, writer, historian, archaeologist, physician
  • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
    Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
    Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism...

    , philosopher and statesman
  • Visarion Puiu
    Visarion Puiu
    Visarion Puiu was a metropolitan bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church....

     (1879–1964), Romanian metropolitan bishop

Q

  • Edgar Quinet
    Edgar Quinet
    Edgar Quinet was a French historian and intellectual.-Early years:Born at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the département of Ain. His father, Jérôme Quinet, had been a commissary in the army, but being a strong republican and disgusted with Napoleon's 18 Brumaire coup, he gave up his post and devoted himself...

     (1803–1875), historian

R

  • Denis Auguste Marie Raffet
    Denis Auguste Marie Raffet
    Denis Auguste Marie Raffet was a French illustrator and lithographer. He was a student of Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, and was a retrospective painter of the Empire.-Biography:Raffet was born in Paris....

     (1804–1860), painter
  • Jean-Pierre Rampal
    Jean-Pierre Rampal
    Jean-Pierre Louis Rampal was a French flautist. He has been personally "credited with returning to the flute the popularity as a solo classical instrument it had not held since the 18th century."-Early years:...

     (1922–2000), flautist
    Flautist
    A flautist or flutist is a musician who plays an instrument in the flute family. See List of flautists.The choice of "flautist" versus "flutist" is the source of dispute among players of the instrument...

  • Man Ray
    Man Ray
    Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...

     (1890–1976), American-born Dada
    Dada
    Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

     & Surrealist artist and photographer
  • Serge Reggiani
    Serge Reggiani
    Serge Reggiani was an Italian-born French singer and actor. He was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy and moved to France with his parents at the age of eight...

     (1922–2004), singer, actor
  • Jean-Marc Reiser
    Jean-Marc Reiser
    Jean-Marc Reiser, April 13, 1941 in Réhon was a French comics creator. He died November 5, 1983 in Paris, of bone cancer.-Biography:...

     (1941–1983), comic artist
  • Pierre Restany
    Pierre Restany
    Pierre Restany , was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher.Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On returning to France in 1949 he attended the Lycée Henri-IV before studying at universities in France,...

     (1930–2003), art critic
    Art critic
    An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

  • Paul Reynaud
    Paul Reynaud
    Paul Reynaud was a French politician and lawyer prominent in the interwar period, noted for his stances on economic liberalism and militant opposition to Germany. He was the penultimate Prime Minister of the Third Republic and vice-president of the Democratic Republican Alliance center-right...

     (1878–1966), lawyer and statesman
  • 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...

     (1920–2002), actor, director
  • Yves Rocard
    Yves Rocard
    Yves-André Rocard was a French physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb for France.After obtaining a double doctorate in mathematics and physics he was awarded the professorship in electronic physics at the École normale supérieure in Paris.As a member of a Resistance group during the Second...

     (1903–1992), physicist
  • Eric Rohmer
    Éric Rohmer
    Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....

     (1920–2010), Film Director
  • Frédéric Rossif
    Frédéric Rossif
    Frédéric Rossif was a French film and television director who specialized primarily on documentaries, frequently using archive footage. Rossif's common themes included wildlife, 20th century history and contemporary artists...

     (1922–1990), filmmaker
  • Gustave Roussy
    Gustave Roussy
    Gustave Roussy was a Swiss-French neuropathologist who was born in Vevey, Switzerland.-Career:As interne des hôpitaux in Paris, Roussy worked under neurologists Pierre Marie and Joseph Jules Dejerine, and in 1907 earned his doctorate from the University of Paris...

     (1874–1948), Swiss-born neuropathologist and oncologist
  • François 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...

     (1784–1855), sculptor
  • Julio Ruelas
    Julio Ruelas
    Julio Ruelas was a Mexican graphic artist, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Ruelas was the principal illustrator of the Revista Moderna magazine and is most associated with Mexican symbolism. A number of his works are on display at the Museum of the City of Mexico and in the Zacatecas museum...

     (1870–1907), Mexican painter
  • Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff
    Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff
    250px|right|thumb|Ruhmkorff inductor250px|right|thumb|Tombstone of Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff on the [[Montparnasse Cemetery]] in [[Paris]]Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff was a German instrument maker who commercialised the induction coil Ruhmkorff was born in Hanover...

     (1803–1877), German inventor

S

  • 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...

     (1906–1994), singer
  • 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:...

     (1804–1869), literary critic, author
  • 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...

     (1835–1921), composer & performer of Romantic
    Romantic music
    Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....

     classical music
  • Jules Sandeau
    Jules Sandeau
    Leonard Sylvain Julien Sandeau was a French novelist.He was born at Aubusson , and was sent to Paris to study law, but spent much of his time in unruly behaviour with other students. He met George Sand, then Madame Dudevant, at Le Coudray in the house of a friend, and when she came to Paris in...

     (1811–1883), novelist
  • 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...

     (1905–1980), French philosopher & novelist
  • 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...

     (1924–2000), film director
  • Georges Schehadé
    Georges Schehadé
    Georges Schehadé was a Lebanese playwright and poet writing in French.-Life and career:Georges Schehadé was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in a Greek orthodox family but spent most of his life in Beirut, Lebanon...

     (1905–1989), Lebanese poet and playwright
  • Jean Seberg
    Jean Seberg
    Jean Dorothy Seberg was an American actress. She starred in 37 films in Hollywood and in France, including Breathless , the musical Paint Your Wagon and the disaster film Airport ....

     (1938–1979), American actress & civil rights activist
  • Pierre Seghers
    Pierre Seghers
    Pierre Seghers was a French poet and editor. During the Second World War he took part in the French Resistance movement....

     (1906–1987), poet and editor
  • Delphine Seyrig
    Delphine Seyrig
    Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig was a stage and film actress and a film director.-Early life:...

     (1932–1990), actress
  • Susan Sontag
    Susan Sontag
    Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...

     (1933–2004), American author & philosopher
  • Jesús Rafael Soto
    Jesús Rafael Soto
    Jesús Rafael Soto was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist, a sculptor and a painter.He was born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. He began his artistic career as a boy painting cinema posters in his native city...

     (1923–2005), Venezuelan kinetic sculptor and painter
  • Chaim Soutine
    Chaim Soutine
    Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....

     (1893–1943), painter of the School of Paris
    School of Paris
    School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...


T

  • Christophe Tarkos (1963–2004), poet
  • Boris Taslitzky (1911–2005), painter
  • Augustin Thierry
    Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry
    Augustin Thierry was a French historian.He was born in Blois, Loir-et-Cher, the elder brother of Amédée Simon Dominique Thierry. He had no advantages of birth or fortune, but was distinguished at the Blois Grammar School, and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1811...

     (1795–1856), historian
  • Roland Topor
    Roland Topor
    Roland Topor , was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal nature of his work...

     (1938–1997), writer, illustrator
  • Henri Troyat
    Henri Troyat
    Henri Troyat was a Russian born French author, biographer, historian and novelist.-Biography:Troyat was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov, in Moscow to parents of mixed heritage, including Armenian, Russian, German and Georgian...

     (1911–2007), author
  • Tristan Tzara
    Tristan Tzara
    Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...

     (1896–1963), Romanian Dadaist poet and essayist

V

  • Carlos Valenti (1888–1912), painter
  • César Vallejo
    César Vallejo
    César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...

     (1892–1938), Peru
    Peru
    Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

    vian poet
  • Louis Veuillot
    Louis Veuillot
    Louis Veuillot was a French journalist and author who helped to popularize ultramontanism ....

     (1813–1883), journalist
  • Paul Vidal de la Blache
    Paul Vidal de la Blache
    Paul Vidal de la Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of the modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics...

     (1845–1918), geographer
  • Louis Vierne
    Louis Vierne
    Louis Victor Jules Vierne was a French organist and composer.-Life:Louis Vierne was born in Poitiers, Vienne, nearly blind due to congenital cataracts, but at an early age was discovered to have an unusual gift for music. Louis Victor Jules Vierne (8 October 1870 – 2 June 1937) was a French...

     (1870–1937), composer, organist

W

  • Henri Wallon (1812–1904), historian, statesman
  • Adolphe Willette
    Adolphe Willette
    Adolphe-Léon Willette was a French painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and lithographer. Willette ran as an "anti-semitic" candidate in the 19th arrondisement of Paris for the 1889 elections.-Biography:...

     (1857–1926), painter

Z

  • Ossip Zadkine
    Ossip Zadkine
    Ossip Zadkine was a Belarusian-born artist who lived in France. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.-Early years and career:...

     (1890–1967), Russian-born sculptor & artist
  • Sabine Zlatin
    Sabine Zlatin
    Sabine Zlatin was a Polish-born French woman who hid Jewish children during World War II.Zlatin was born Sabine Chwast in a Jewish family in Warsaw. As a young woman she moved to France, where she married Miron Zlatin. With him she ran a poultry farm in Landas in the north of France...

    (1907–1996), Polish-born humanitarian who hid Jewish children during the Holocaust

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK