- Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced:), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy.
- Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a lifelong member and sometimes strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of the communist project.
- Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (October 18, 1859-January 4, 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century.
- Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 - October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon continental philosophy, French philosophy, and literary theory.
- Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 - June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France, giving it the title "History of Systems of Thought," and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Michel Foucault is best known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as his work on the history of sexuality.
- Henri Cartan
Henri Cartan is a son of Élie Cartan, and is, as his father was, a distinguished and influential French mathematician. Cartan studied at the Lycée Hoche in Versailles, then at the ENS. He held academic positions at a number of French universities, spending the bulk of his working life in Paris. Henri Cartan is known for work in algebraic topology, in particular on cohomology operations, killing homotopy groups and group cohomology.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and influenced by Martin Heidegger, but his philosophy tended to focus on the phenomenological and corporeal foundations of perception.
- Raymond Aron
Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (March 14, 1905 - October 17, 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist. He was known for his skepticism of French leftist ideology.
- Jean-Pierre Serre
Jean-Pierre Serre (born September 15, 1926) is one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century, active in algebraic geometry, number theory and topology. He has received numerous awards and honors for his mathematical research and exposition, including the Fields Medal in 1954 and the Abel Prize in 2003.
- Jean Jaurès
Jean Léon Jaurès-full name Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. He was one of the first social democrats: within the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), he opposed Jules Guesde's refusal of socialist participation in bourgeois governments.
- André Weil
André Weil was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, whether measured by his research work, its influence on future work, exposition or breadth. He is known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member, and "de facto" the early leader, of the influential Bourbaki group. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister.
- Léopold Sédar Senghor
Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who served as the first president of Senegal (1960-1980). Senghor was the first African to sit as a member of the Académie française. He was also the founder of the political party called the Senegalese Democratic Bloc. He is regarded by many as one of the most important African intellectuals of the 20th Century.
- Georges Pompidou
Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou (5 July 1911 - 2 April 1974) was President of France from 1969 until his death in 1974.
- Alain Connes
Alain Connes was born in Draguignan, a town near Cannes in the Provence- Alpes-Cote-d'Azur region of southeast France. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1966, graduating in 1970. After graduating, Connes became a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. His thesis A classification of factors of type III was on operator algebras, in particular on von Neumann algebras, and the work was supervised by Jacque Dixmier.
- René Thom
René 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 celebrated for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory (later developed by Christopher Zeeman). He received the Fields Medal in 1958.
- Georges Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem (June 4, 1904, Castelnaudary - September 11, 1995, Marly-le-Roi) was a French philosopher who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science (in particular, biology).
- Léon Blum
Léon Blum, French politician, was the Prime Minister of France three times: from 1936 to 1937, for one month in 1938, and from December 1946 to January 1947.
- Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a prominent French Left-wing philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).
- Laurent Schwartz
Laurent-Moïse Schwartz was a French mathematician. Among other teaching positions, he taught at École Polytechnique from 1959 to 1980. His considerable mathematical work, including the theory of distributions, won him the Fields Medal in 1950. Apart from his scientific work, he was a well-known outspoken intellectual. Leaning towards communism, he refused Stalin's totalitarianism. He campaigned against France's colonial war in Algeria.
- Jean Hyppolite
Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. Hyppolite was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure at roughly the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1939 he published the first French translation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". After the war he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, …
- Étienne Balibar
Étienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher. After the death of his teacher Louis Althusser, Balibar quickly became the leading exponent of French Marxist philosophy.
- Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. He is best known for his book "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste", in which he tried to connect aesthetic judgments to positions in social space. The most notable aspect of Bourdieu's theory is the development of methodologies, …
- Alain Juppé
Alain Marie Juppé is a French politician, who was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997. In December 2004 Juppé was convicted of mishandling public funds; since then, his political career was suspended until he was re-elected mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006. He was most recently the French minister of State, as well as Energy, Ecology and Sustainable Development.
- Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French intellectual and businessman
- Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology (L'Année Sociologique) helped establish sociology within the academy as an accepted social science. During his lifetime, Durkheim gave many lectures, and published numerous sociological studies on subjects such as education, crime, religion, suicide, and many other aspects of society.
- Laurent Fabius
Laurent Fabius (born 20 August 1946) is a former Socialist Prime Minister of France. He led the government from 17 July 1984 to 20 March 1986. He was 37 years old when he was appointed and is, so far, the youngest Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic.
- Alfred Kastler
Alfred Kastler was a French (German-born) physicist, born in Guebwiller, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1966. Kastler went to the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Alsace, and then went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1921. After his studies, in 1926 he began teaching physics at the Lycée of Mulhouse, and then taught at the University of Bordeaux, where he was a university professor until 1941.
- Laurent Lafforgue
Laurent Lafforgue is a French mathematician. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1986. In 1994 he received his Ph.D. in the Arithmetic and Algebraic Geometry team at the Université de Paris-Sud. Currently he is a research director of CNRS, detached as permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (I.H.E.S.) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. In 2002 at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, …
- Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (October 24, 1932 in Paris - May 18, 2007 in Orsay) was a French physicist and the Nobel laureate in 1991.
- Pierre-Louis Lions
Pierre-Louis Lions is a French mathematician. His parents were Jacques-Louis Lions, a mathematician and professor at the University of Nancy, and Andrée Olivier, his wife. He received his doctorate from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in 1979. He studies the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, and received the Fields Medal for his work in 1994 while working at the University of Paris-Dauphine.
- Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (born May 29, 1957) is a French mathematician. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994, for his work on dynamical systems.
- Simone Weil
Simone Weil (February 3, 1909 - August 24, 1943) was a French philosopher and mystic.
- Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society. He is considered one of the major contributors to mythography, in particular for his creation of the trifunctional hypothesis of social class.
- Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur (December 27 1822 - September 28 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour - this process came to be called "pasteurization".
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist working at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Cohen-Tannoudji was born in Constantine to Algerian Jewish parents, when Algeria was still part of France. After primary and secondary studies in Algiers, Cohen-Tannoudji left Algeria for Paris to attend the École normale supérieure. Lectures were given by Henri Cartan, Laurent Schwartz or Alfred Kastler. In 1958 he married Jacqueline, a high school teacher, …
- Charles Péguy
Charles Péguy was a noted French poet, essayist and editor. His two main inspirations were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, he had become a devout but non-practicing Roman Catholic From then on, Catholicism had a major influence on his works.
- Benny Lévy
Professor Benny Lévy was, as a young Maoist, an active participant in the May 1968. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre, he helped found the French newspaper "Libération", and later studied philosophy under Sartre, of whom he was personal secretary from 1974 to 1981. After having encountered the Jewish philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in 1978, he operated a return to tradition, learnt Hebrew starting in 1978.
- Pierre Macherey
Pierre Macherey (b. 1938) is a French Marxist literary critic. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume "Reading "Capital", Macherey is a central figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism. His work is influential in literary theory and Continental philosophy in Europe (including Britain) though it is generally little read in the United States.
- Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin (November 28, 1792 - January 13, 1867) was a French philosopher.
- 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 Fields Medal. He is currently professor at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay and part-time at the École Normale Supérieure. Werner became a French national in 1977.