Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life.
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is sometimes referred to as d'Alembert's equation, and the fundamental theorem of algebra is named after d'Alembert in French.
Édith Piaf was a French singer noted as France's national chanteuse and one of the country's most widely known international stars.
Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian, and duelist.
Michel Gérard Joseph Colucci, better known under his stage name Coluche, was a French stage comedian and cinema actor. He adopted Coluche as a stage name at age 26, when he began his entertainment career. He became known for his irreverent attitude towards politics and the establishment, and he incorporated this into much of his material. He was one of the first major comedians to regularly use profanities as a source of humor on French television. He also founded the charity "Les Restaurants du Coeur" which still provides free meals and other products to people in need.
Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French writer. His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century into nearly 200 films.
Albert Auguste Gabriel Hanotaux, known as Gabriel Hanotaux was a French statesman and historian.
Jacques Pierre Brissot, who assumed the name of de Warville, was a leading member of the Girondins during the French Revolution and founder of the abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Some sources give his name as Jean Pierre Brissot.
Édouard Adolphe Drumont was a French journalist and writer. He initiated the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole. After spending years of research, he synthesised three major types of antisemitism. The first type was traditional Catholic attitudes toward the alien "Christ killers" augmented by vehement antipathy toward the French Revolution. The second type was hostility toward capitalism. The third type was so-called scientific racism, based on the argument that races have fixed characteristics, and asserting that Jews have negative characteristics. Drumont's biographer, Grégoire Kauffmann, places Drumont within the counter-revolutionary tradition of Louis Veuillot, Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, and anti-modern Catholicism. Socialist leader Jean Jaurès stated that "all the ideas and arguments of Drumont were taken from certain clerical opponents of the French Revolution.
Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer, teacher and music critic. A prolific composer for the theatre, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle (1841) and Le corsaire (1856), his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836) and Si j'étais roi (1852) and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!".
Jean Baptiste Alphonse Déchauffour de Boisduval was a French lepidopterist, botanist, and physician.
René Clair born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960. Clair's best known films include Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).
Marcel Albert Carné was a French film director. A key figure in the poetic realism movement, Carné's best known films include Port of Shadows (1938), Le Jour Se Lève (1939), The Devil's Envoys (1942) and Children of Paradise (1945), the last of which has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time.
Marc Lucien Lavoine is a French singer and actor. In 1985, his hit single "Elle a les yeux revolver..." reached number four on the French Singles chart and marked the beginning of his successful singing career. He starred in the television series Crossing Lines as Louis Daniel, head of an International Criminal Court police team that investigates crimes that 'cross' European borders.
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought", and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. As he explains: He holds two bachelors: one in history and geography and one in law. He never did a Ph.D. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Europe, and Latin America.
Georges Sadoul was a French film critic, journalist and cinema writer. He is known for writing encyclopedias of film and filmmakers, many of which have been translated into English.
Marc Minkowski is a French conductor of classical music, especially known for his interpretations of French Baroque works, and is the current general director of Opéra national de Bordeaux. His mother, Mary Anne (Wade), is American, and his father was Alexandre Minkowski, a Polish-French professor of pediatrics and one of the founders of neonatology. Marc Minkowski is a Chevalier du Mérite.
Marcel L'Herbier was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC).
Daniel Guérin was a French libertarian-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War. His revolutionary defense of free love and homosexuality influenced the development of queer anarchism.
Henri Beau was a French-Canadian Impressionist painter. He is noted for Chemin en été, La dispersion des Acadiens, L'arrivée de Champlain à Québec, and Les Noces de Cana. Beau is a largely forgotten artist due to his long absence from Canada. His widow Marie Beau worked towards establishing his reputation as an artist in Canada after his death. He was only recognized as a notable artist decades later, with major retrospectives of his paintings celebrating his career by the Galerie Bernard Desroches in Montréal in 1974, and at the Musée du Québec in Québec City in 1987.
