Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher (1865–1952), was a French scholar, who identified the Buddha image as having Greek origins. He has been called the "father of Gandhara studies", and is a much cited scholar on ancient Buddhism in northwest Indian subcontinent and the Hindu Kush region.
Jean Filliozat was a French author. He studied medicine and was a physician between 1930 and 1947. He learned Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Tamil. He wrote some important works on the history of Indian medicine. He taught at Collège de France from 1952 to 1978.
Sylvain Lévi was an influential orientalist and indologist who taught Sanskrit and Indian religion at the École pratique des hautes études.
George Cœdès was a 20th-century French scholar of southeast Asian archaeology and history.
Louis Renou was the pre-eminent French Indologist of the twentieth century.
Gérard Fussman is a French indologist. He is a professor at the Collège de France.
Rolf Alfred Stein was a German-born French Sinologist and Tibetologist. He contributed in particular to the study of the Epic of King Gesar, on which he wrote two books, and the use of Chinese sources in Tibetan history. He was the first scholar to correctly identify the Minyag of Tibetan sources with the Xixia of Chinese sources.
Louis Robert was a professor of Greek history and Epigraphy at the Collège de France, and author of many volumes and articles on Greek epigraphy, numismatics, and the historical geography of Greek lands. Robert studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924-1927, was a member of the École française d'Athènes from 1927-1932, and taught at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris from 1932. He was made full professor at the Collège de France in 1939, where he remained until his retirement in 1974. He continued to publish on Greek epigraphy with his wife, Jeanne Robert, as co-author, as he had done since their marriage and until his death in 1985.
Louis Étienne Joseph Marie de La Vallée-Poussin was a Belgian Indologist and scholar of Buddhist Studies.
Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson is an indologist and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford.
Louis Finot was a French archeologist and researcher, specialising in the cultures of Southeast Asia. A former director of the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, his contribution to the study of Khmer history, architecture and epigraphy is widely recognised.
Pierre Batiffol – was a French Catholic priest and prominent theologian, specialising in Church history. He had also a particular interest in the history of dogma.
Denys Lombard was a leading Asian expert with contributions to Southeast Asian studies, Sinology, and the history of maritime Asia. He was famous for efforts to compare insular Southeast Asia and the Asian Seas to the Mediterranean area.
Maurice M. Durand was a French-Vietnamese linguist born in Hanoi.
Pierre Marsone is a French sinologist. He is Directeur d'études (Professor) at the Department of Historical Sciences and Philology of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris, France. His principal fields of research are the political and religious history of China, including the Khitan Liao Dynasty, the Jurchen Jin dynasty and Mongolian Yuan Dynasty; the Quanzhen School of Taoism, Japanese Zen Buddhism, and the semantic analysis of Chinese.
Geneviève Hasenohr is a French philologist and prolific scholar of medieval and Renaissance French literature. She has authored or contributed to more than forty books, written at least fifty academic articles and reviews, and prepared numerous scholarly editions.
Gérard Moussay (16 August 1932, Brecé was a French Catholic missionary. He was also a specialist on Cam and Minangkabau languages.
Saveros Pou, also known around 1970 under the name Saveros Lewitz, was a French linguist of Cambodian origin. A retired research director of the CNRS in Paris, a specialist of the Khmer language and civilization, she carried out extensive work of Khmer epigraphy, started as a young researcher with her teacher George Cœdès.
Pierre-Yves Lambert is a French linguist and scholar of Celtic studies. He is a researcher at the CNRS and a lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Celtic linguistics and philology. Lambert is the director of the journal Études Celtiques.
Jacques Pierre Leider is a French and Luxembourgian historian, teacher and former diplomat.
