- Charles de Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (November 22, 1890 – November 9, 1970), in France commonly referred to as "Général de Gaulle", was a French military leader and statesman. Prior to World War II, he was primarily known as an armoured warfare tactician and an advocate of the concentrated use of armoured and aviation forces. - Jean-Marie Le Pen
Jean-Marie Le Pen is a French far-right nationalist politician, founder and president of the Front National (National Front) party. Le Pen has run for the French presidency 5 times, including in 2002, when in a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than the main left candidate, Lionel Jospin. Le Pen lost in the second round to president Jacques Chirac. Le Pen again ran in the 2007 French presidential election and finished fourth. - Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim. - George Sand
Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant (July 1, 1804 - June 8, 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a French novelist and feminist. - Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven volumes from 1913 to 1927. - Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 - April 14, 1986) was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including "She Came to Stay" and "The Mandarins", and for her 1949 treatise "The Second Sex", a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. - 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. - Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade (pronounced) was a French aristocrat and writer of philosophy-laden and often violent pornography. He was a philosopher of extreme freedom (or at least licentiousness), unrestrained by morality, religion or law, with the pursuit of personal pleasure being the highest principle. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life (a year in Paris, 10 years in the Bastille, … - Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 - November 10, 1891) was a French poet, born in Charleville. His influence on modern literature, music and art has been pervasive. - Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 - March 25, 1980) (pronounced) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism. - Jean Genet
Jean Genet (–), was a prominent, controversial French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including "Querelle de Brest", "The Thief's Journal", "Our Lady of the Flowers", "The Balcony", "The Blacks" and "The Maids". - André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in between the two World Wars. Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straightlaced education and a narrow social moralism. - 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. - Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon, French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. - Amélie Mauresmo
Amélie Simone Mauresmo (born on 5 July 1979) is a French professional tennis player and is a former World No. 1. She is currently the sixth ranked player in the world. She has won two Grand Slam singles titles. Mauresmo first attained the top ranking on September 13, 2004, holding it for five weeks on that occasion. She was the fourteenth World No. 1 in women's tennis since the computer rankings began. - Brice Hortefeux
Brice Hortefeux is a French politician and Minister-Delegate for Local Government at the Ministry of the Interior. He was formerly Member of the European Parliament for central France. He is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, which is part of the European People's Party, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on International Trade. - Laure Manaudou
Laure Manaudou (born October 9, 1986 in Villeurbanne) is an Olympic, World and European French champion swimmer. - Michel Rocard
Michel Rocard is a French politician, member of the Socialist Party (PS). He served as Prime Minister under François Mitterrand from 1988 to 1991, during which he created the "Revenu minimum d'insertion" (RMI), a social minimum welfare program for indigents. He is currently a member of the European Parliament. - Paul Masson
Paul Masson was a French cyclist. He competed at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens. Masson competed in three different events, winning each one. His first event was the 2 kilometre sprint. Masson's winning time was 4:58.2. The next event he competed in was the 10 kilometre race. This turned out to be a very close contest, with Masson barely beating out his countryman Léon Flameng. Both had times of 17:54.2. Masson's final event of the Games was the 333 metres race. - Colette
Colette was the pen name of the French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (January 28, 1873 - August 3, 1954); she is most famous for having written Gigi. - Frédéric Lepied
Frédéric Lepied is a French computer engineer, and was the CTO of Mandriva until January 2006. Lepied is a graduate of the ESIEE engineering school in France. Frédéric Lepied joined the Mandrakesoft Research and Development team in 1999. He is the author of rpmlint, an RPM packages checker (similar to Debian's lintian program). Lepied was the maintainer of several core packages, including XFree86 and the initscripts. - Jacques Anquetil
Jacques Anquetil (January 8, 1934 - November 18, 1987), was a French cyclist and the first cyclist to win the Tour de France five times, in 1957 and from 1961 to 1964. He stated before the 1961 Tour de France that he would gain the yellow jersey on day one and wear it all through the tour, a tall order with 2 previous winners in the field - Gaul and Bahamontes - but he did just that. - Roselyne Bachelot
Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, generally known as Roselyne Bachelot (born 24 December 1946 in Nevers), is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the west of France. She currently is the French Minister of Health, Youth Affairs and Sport. She is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, which is part of the European People's Party, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on Employment and Social Affairs. - Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun (25 October, 1894 - 8 December, 1954) was a French photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality. - Suzanne Lenglen
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (24 May 1899 - 4 July, 1938) was a French tennis player who won 31 Grand Slam titles from 1914 through 1926. A flamboyant, trendsetting athlete, she was the first female tennis celebrity and one of the first international female sport stars, named "La Divine" (the divine one) by the French press. - Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry (September 8, 1873 - November 1, 1907) was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side. Best known for his play "Ubu Roi" (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the theatre of the absurd, Jarry wrote in a variety of genres and styles. He wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. - Max Jacob
Max Jacob (July 12, 1876 - March 5, 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. Born in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. On the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Pablo Picasso, who introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced him to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, … - Paul Winter
Paul Winter (February 6, 1906 - February 23, 1992) was a French athlete who competed mainly in the discus throw. He competed for a France in the 1932 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles, California, in the discus throw where he won the bronze medal. - Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen (born Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, on August 5, 1968 at Neuilly-sur-Seine) is a French National Front (FN) politician; a lawyer by profession, she is mainly known for being Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter. - Jean-Claude Killy
Jean-Claude Killy is a French alpine skier and a triple Olympic champion. Killy was born in Saint-Cloud, but brought up in Val d'Isère. Following his international success, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1969. Killy was a World Cup champion in 1967 and would repeat in 1968. Killy won the Triple Crown of Alpine Skiing with a sweep of all three gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, in the slalom, giant slalom and downhill events. - Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French-born author of Spanish, Cuban, and Danish descent who became famous for her published journals, which span more than sixty years, beginning when she was eleven years old and ending shortly before her death. Anais is also famous for her erotica, which not only proves sensual, but also acts as a study of human sexuality in its perfection and flaws. - D. Robinson
D. Robinson was a member of the silver medal winning French cricket team at the 1900 Summer Olympics, the only time to date that cricket has featured in the Olympics. In the only match against Great Britain, he took two wickets in Great Britain's first innings, and was dismissed for a duck in both French innings. - Clovis Cornillac
Clovis Cornillac is a French theater, television and cinema actor. - Pierre Moscovici
Pierre Moscovici (born September 16, 1957) is a French politician, a member of the Departmental Council of Doubs and a Member of the European Parliament for the East of France. He is a member of the French Socialist Party (PS); part of the Party of European Socialists. He has been National Secretary of his party since 1995. - Jeannie Longo
- Nicole Fontaine
Nicole Fontaine is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the Île-de-France. She is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, part of the European People's Party. Fontaine was the President of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2001, and was then replaced by Pat Cox, from the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party, in accordance with an agreement between the two groups at the start of the term. - Miguel Martinez
Miguel Martinez (born on January 17, in Fourchambault) is a French cyclist specializing in competitive mountain biking. He won the gold medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia after having finished in fourth place in the inaugural event at the 1996 Summer Olympics. - Jacques Lefèvre
Jacques Lefèvre was a French fencer. At the 1952 Summer Olympics, Lefèvre won a team bronze medal for fencing, as a member of the French Men's Sabre team. He also competed for France in the Individual Men's Sabre event at the 1964 Summer Olympics. - Arnaud Tournant
Arnaud Tournant (born 5 April 1978) is a French track cyclist born in Roubaix. He is a twelve time World Champion and won a gold, a silver and a bronze medal at the Summer Olympics. - Jacques Toubon
Jacques Toubon (born 29 June 1941 in Nice, France) is a right-wing French politician who held several major national and Parisian offices.
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