Le Plus Grand Français
Encyclopedia
Le Plus Grand Français de tous les temps (The Greatest Frenchman of all Time) was a France 2
France 2
France 2 is a French public national television channel. It is part of the state-owned France Télévisions group, along with France 3, France 4, France 5 and France Ô...

 show of early 2005, based on an original series of Great Britons on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

. The show asked the French viewers who they thought was the Greatest Frenchman or Frenchwoman. It was presented by Michel Drucker
Michel Drucker
Michel Drucker, CQ is a popular French journalist and TV host.Michel Drucker was born in Vire, Calvados, in Normandy. Jacques Drucker, a doctor, is Michel's younger brother, and Jean Drucker, a TV top executive, is Michel's older brother. He started a journalistic career in 1965 at the ORTF as...

 and Thierry Ardisson
Thierry Ardisson
Thierry Ardisson , is a French television producer and host.-Bibliography:*T. Ardisson & Alain Decaux, Cinemoi*T.Ardisson & Alain Decaux, Rive droite*T.Ardisson et Alain Decaux, Louis XX*T.Ardisson, Pondichéry...

, and the final episode was broadcast at the French Senate
French Senate
The Senate is the upper house of the Parliament of France, presided over by a president.The Senate enjoys less prominence than the lower house, the directly elected National Assembly; debates in the Senate tend to be less tense and generally enjoy less media coverage.-History:France's first...

.

The winner was the former president and leader of the Free French movement
Free French Forces
The Free French Forces were French partisans in World War II who decided to continue fighting against the forces of the Axis powers after the surrender of France and subsequent German occupation and, in the case of Vichy France, collaboration with the Germans.-Definition:In many sources, Free...

, Charles de Gaulle.

The show was criticized by some historians in that it focused only on personalities of recent French history. Key figures of French history who contributed to the founding of the French nation, such as the national heroine Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc
Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

, the kings Philip Augustus, Saint Louis
Louis IX of France
Louis IX , commonly Saint Louis, was King of France from 1226 until his death. He was also styled Louis II, Count of Artois from 1226 to 1237. Born at Poissy, near Paris, he was an eighth-generation descendant of Hugh Capet, and thus a member of the House of Capet, and the son of Louis VIII and...

, and Louis XIV
Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

 or French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were largely ignored.

The Greatest Frenchmen of All Time

  1. Charles de Gaulle
    Charles de Gaulle
    Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....

     – Political leader, French President and Statesman
  2. Louis Pasteur
    Louis Pasteur
    Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax. His experiments...

     – Scientist
  3. Abbé Pierre
    Abbé Pierre
    LAbbé Pierre, was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement . He founded in 1949 the Emmaus movement, which has the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees...

     – Priest and Humanitarian
  4. Marie Skłodowska Curie
    Marie Curie
    Marie Skłodowska-Curie was a physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry...

     – Scientist
  5. Coluche
    Coluche
    Michel Colucci , better known as Coluche, was a French comedian and actor, famous for his irreverent sense of humour....

     – Comic and Humanitarian
  6. Victor Hugo
    Victor Hugo
    Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

     – Author, Poet and Playwright
  7. Bourvil
    Bourvil
    André Bourvil, born André Robert Raimbourg was a French actor and singer best known for his roles in comedy, most notably in his collaboration with Louis de Funès in La Grande Vadrouille .-Biography:His father was killed in the First World War before Bourvil was born...

     - Actor and Comic
  8. Molière
    Molière
    Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

     – Playwright
  9. Jacques-Yves Cousteau
    Jacques-Yves Cousteau
    Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water...

     – Oceanologist
  10. Édith Piaf
    Édith Piaf
    Édith Piaf , born Édith Giovanna Gassion, was a French singer and cultural icon who became widely regarded as France's greatest popular singer. Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads...

     - Singer
  11. Marcel Pagnol
    Marcel Pagnol
    Marcel Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. In 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie Française.-Biography:...

     - Author and Filmmaker
  12. Georges Brassens
    Georges Brassens
    Georges Brassens , 22 October 1921 – 29 October 1981), was a French singer-songwriter and poet.Brassens was born in Sète, a town in southern France near Montpellier...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  13. Fernandel
    Fernandel
    Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin , better known as Fernandel, was a French actor and singer. Born in Marseille, France, he was a comedy star who first gained popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues...

     - Actor and Comic
  14. Jean de la Fontaine
    Jean de La Fontaine
    Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...

     - Poet and fabulist
  15. Jules Verne
    Jules Verne
    Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...

     – Science Fiction Author
  16. Napoleon Bonaparte – Military, political leader and Emperor
  17. Louis de Funès
    Louis de Funès
    Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza was a very popular French actor who is one of the giants of French comedy alongside André Bourvil and Fernandel...

     - Actor and Comic
  18. Jean Gabin
    Jean Gabin
    -Biography:Born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in Paris, he grew up in the village of Mériel in the Seine-et-Oise département, about 22 mi north of Paris. The son of cabaret entertainers, he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly...

     - Actor
  19. Daniel Balavoine
    Daniel Balavoine
    Daniel Balavoine was a French singer and songwriter. He was hugely popular in the French-speaking world, and inspired many singers in the 1980s, such as Jean-Jacques Goldman, and Michel Berger, his closest friend...

     - Singer, Songwriter and Musician
  20. 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...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  21. Zinedine Zidane
    Zinedine Zidane
    Zinedine Yazid Zidane is a retired French footballer. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. Zidane was a leading figure of a generation of French players that won the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship...

     - Footballer
  22. Charlemagne
    Charlemagne
    Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

     – Middle Ages Emperor
  23. Lino Ventura
    Lino Ventura
    Lino Ventura , was an Italian actor who starred in French movies.-Biography:Born as Angiolino Giuseppe Pasquale Ventura in Parma, Italy to Giovanni Ventura and Luisa Borrini, "Lino" dropped out of school at the age of eight and later took on a variety of jobs...

     - Actor
  24. François Mitterrand
    François Mitterrand
    François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was the 21st President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, serving from 1981 until 1995. He is the longest-serving President of France and, as leader of the Socialist Party, the only figure from the left so far elected President...

     – French President
  25. Gustave Eiffel
    Gustave Eiffel
    Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer from the École Centrale Paris, an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures...

     – Architect
  26. Émile Zola
    Émile Zola
    Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

     - Author
  27. Sœur Emmanuelle
    Sœur Emmanuelle
    Sœur Emmanuelle , born Madeleine Cinquin, was a Belgian and French nun .-Life:...

     - Nun and Humanitarian
  28. Jean Moulin
    Jean Moulin
    Jean Moulin was a high-profile member of the French Resistance during World War II. He is remembered today as an emblem of the Resistance primarily due to his role in unifying the French resistance under de Gaulle and his courage and death at the hands of the Germans.-Before the war:Moulin was...

     - Leader of French resistance to the occupying Nazis in France during WWII
  29. Charles Aznavour
    Charles Aznavour
    Charles Aznavour, OC is an Armenian-French singer, songwriter, actor, public activist and diplomat. Besides being one of France's most popular and enduring singers, he is also one of the best-known singers in the world...

     - Singer, Songwriter and Actor
  30. Yves Montand
    Yves Montand
    -Early life:Montand was born Ivo Livi in Monsummano Terme, Italy, the son of poor peasants Giuseppina and Giovanni Livi, a broommaker. Montand's mother was a devout Catholic, while his father held strong Communist beliefs. Because of the Fascist regime in Italy, Montand's family left for France in...

     - Actor and Singer
  31. Jeanne d’Arc
    Joan of Arc
    Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

     – Military leader, Saint
  32. Général Leclerc
    Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque
    Philippe François Marie, comte de Hauteclocque, then Leclerc de Hauteclocque, by a 1945 decree that incorporated his French Resistance alias Jacques-Philippe Leclerc to his name, , was a French general during World War II...

     - Military leader
  33. Voltaire
    Voltaire
    François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

     – Political author
  34. Johnny Hallyday
    Johnny Hallyday
    Johnny Hallyday is a French singer and actor. An icon in the French-speaking world since the beginning of his career, he was considered by some to have been the French Elvis Presley. He was married for 15 years to one of the most popular French female singers: Sylvie Vartan...

     - Singer
  35. Antoine de Saint Exupéry - Aviator, Author and Poet
  36. Claude Francois
    Claude François
    Claude François was a French pop singer, songwriter and dancer. He wrote "Comme d'habitude," the original version of "My Way."-Early life:...

     - Singer
  37. Christian Cabrol - Cardiologist and surgeon
  38. Jean-Paul Belmondo
    Jean-Paul Belmondo
    Jean-Paul Belmondo is a French actor initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s.-Career:Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris, Belmondo did not perform well in school, but developed a passion for boxing and football."Did you box professionally very long?" "Not very long...

     - Actor
  39. Jules Ferry
    Jules Ferry
    Jules François Camille Ferry was a French statesman and republican. He was a promoter of laicism and colonial expansion.- Early life :Born in Saint-Dié, in the Vosges département, France, he studied law, and was called to the bar at Paris in 1854, but soon went into politics, contributing to...

     - Politician
  40. Louis Lumière - Cinema inventor
  41. Michel Platini
    Michel Platini
    Michel François Platini is a former French football player, manager and current president of UEFA. Platini was a member of the French national team that won the 1984 European Championship, a tournament in which he was the top goalscorer and voted the best player. He participated in the 1978, 1982...

     - Footballer
  42. Jacques Chirac
    Jacques Chirac
    Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 , and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.After completing his studies of the DEA's degree at the...

     – French President and Prime Minister
  43. Charles Trenet
    Charles Trenet
    Charles Trenet was a French singer and songwriter, most famous for his recordings from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s, though his career continued through the 1990s...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  44. Georges Pompidou
    Georges Pompidou
    Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou was a French politician. He was Prime Minister of France from 1962 to 1968, holding the longest tenure in this position, and later President of the French Republic from 1969 until his death in 1974.-Biography:...

     – French President
  45. Michel Sardou
    Michel Sardou
    Michel Sardou is a French singer.He was born in Paris, the son of Fernand Sardou and Jackie Rollin . Contrary to claims common towards the beginning of his career, he is not the grandson of the dramatist Victorien Sardou...

     - Singer
  46. Simone Signoret
    Simone Signoret
    Simone Signoret was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top...

     - Actress
  47. Haroun Tazieff
    Haroun Tazieff
    Haroun Tazieff was a French volcanologist and geologist. He was a famous cinematographer of volcanic eruptions and lava flows, and the author of several books about volcanoes....

     - Vulcanologist
  48. Jacques Prévert
    Jacques Prévert
    Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...

     - Poet
  49. Éric Tabarly
    Éric Tabarly
    Éric Tabarly was a notable French yachtsman.A former officer in the French navy who is often considered the father of French yachting....

     - Sailor
  50. Louis XIV
    Louis XIV of France
    Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

     – French King
  51. David Douillet
    David Douillet
    David Douillet is a French judoka and politician.Douillet was born in the city of Rouen. Standing at 1.90 meters and weighing 125 kilograms , he won the judo heavyweight gold medals in the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games in Atlanta and Sydney. He also gained four world titles and a European crown...

     - Judoka
  52. Henri Salvador
    Henri Salvador
    Henri Salvador was a French Caribbean singer.-Biography:Salvador was born in Cayenne, French Guiana. His father, Clovis, and his mother, Antonine Paterne, daughter of a native Indian from the Caribbean, were both from Guadeloupe, French West Indies...

     - Singer and Comic
  53. Jean-Jacques Goldman
    Jean-Jacques Goldman
    Jean-Jacques Goldman is a Grammy Awards-winning French singer-songwriter. He is hugely popular in the French-speaking world, and since 2003 was the second-highest-grossing French living pop singer, after Johnny Hallyday.- Biography :...

     - Singer, Songwriter and Musician
  54. Jean Jaurès
    Jean Jaurès
    Jean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in...

     - Politician
  55. Jean Marais
    Jean Marais
    -Biography:A native of Cherbourg, France, Marais starred in several movies directed by Jean Cocteau, for a time his lover, most famously Beauty and the Beast and Orphée ....

     - Actor and Comedian
  56. Yannick Noah
    Yannick Noah
    Yannick Noah is a former professional tennis player from France. He is best remembered for being the last French man to win the French Open in 1983, and as a highly-successful captain of France's Davis Cup and Fed Cup teams...

     - Tennis player
  57. Albert Camus
    Albert Camus
    Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...

     – Author
  58. Dalida
    Dalida
    Dalida , born with Italian name of Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a world-famous singer and actress born in Egypt with Italian origins but naturalised French with the name Yolanda Gigliotti. She spent her early years in Egypt amongst the Italian Egyptian community, but she lived most of her adult...

     - Singer
  59. Léon Zitrone
    Léon Zitrone
    Léon Zitrone was a Russian-born French journalist and television presenter.- Biography :Léon Zitrone was born in Petrograd, Russia on 25 November 1914. He died on 25 November 1995, in Levallois-Perret ....

     - Journalist
  60. Nicolas Hulot
    Nicolas Hulot
    Nicolas Hulot is the founder and president of the Fondation Nicolas-Hulot, an environmental group first created in 1990....

     - Journalist
  61. Simone Veil
    Simone Veil
    Simone Veil, DBE is a French lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Health under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of the European Parliament and member of the Constitutional Council of France....

     - Politician
  62. Alain Delon
    Alain Delon
    Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon is a French actor. He rose quickly to stardom, and by the age of 23 was already being compared to French actors such as Gérard Philipe and Jean Marais, as well as American actor James Dean. He was even called the male Brigitte Bardot...

     - Actor
  63. Patrick Poivre d'Arvor
    Patrick Poivre d'Arvor
    Patrick Poivre d'Arvor is a French TV journalist and writer. He is a household name in France, and nicknamed PPDA. With over 30 years and in excess of 4,500 editions of television news to his credit, he was one of the longest serving newsreaders in the world until he was fired in 2008...

     - Journalist
  64. Aimé Jacquet
    Aimé Jacquet
    Aimé Étienne Jacquet is a French football coach and former player, and manager of the France national football team when they won the 1998 FIFA World Cup.-Biography:...

     - Footballer
  65. Francis Cabrel
    Francis Cabrel
    Francis Cabrel is a well-known French singer-songwriter and guitarist. Inspired heavily by Bob Dylan, he has released a number of albums falling mostly within the realm of folk, with occasional forays into blues or country. Several of his songs, such as "L'encre de tes yeux" and "Petite Marie"...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  66. Brigitte Bardot
    Brigitte Bardot
    Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...

     - Actress
  67. 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....

     - Author
  68. Alexandre Dumas, père
    Alexandre Dumas, père
    Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...

     – Author and Playwright
  69. Honoré de Balzac
    Honoré de Balzac
    Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

     – Author
  70. Paul Verlaine
    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.-Early life:...

     - Poet
  71. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

     – Political author
  72. Robespierre – Political leader
  73. Renaud
    Renaud
    Renaud, born Renaud Séchan, is a French singer, songwriter and actor.Renaud may also refer to:* Renaud , a male French given name* Renaud , a 1783 opera by Antonio Sacchini* Renaud, Quebec, part of Laval, Quebec...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  74. Bernard Kouchner
    Bernard Kouchner
    Bernard Kouchner is a French politician, diplomat, and doctor. He is co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde...

     - Politician and humanitarian
  75. Claude Monet
    Claude Monet
    Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

     – Artist
  76. Michel Serrault
    Michel Serrault
    Michel Serrault was a celebrated French actor who appeared in over 150 films.-Biography :...

     - Actor
  77. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
    Pierre-Auguste Renoir
    Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...

     – Artist
  78. Michel Drucker
    Michel Drucker
    Michel Drucker, CQ is a popular French journalist and TV host.Michel Drucker was born in Vire, Calvados, in Normandy. Jacques Drucker, a doctor, is Michel's younger brother, and Jean Drucker, a TV top executive, is Michel's older brother. He started a journalistic career in 1965 at the ORTF as...

     - Journalist
  79. Raimu
    Raimu
    Raimu was the stage name for the French actor Jules Auguste Muraire .-Biography:Born in Toulon in the Var département, he made his stage debut there in 1899. After coming to the attention of the then great music hall star Félix Mayol who was also from Toulon, in 1908 he was given a chance to work...

     - Actor and Comedian
  80. Vercingetorix
    Vercingetorix
    Vercingetorix was the chieftain of the Arverni tribe, who united the Gauls in an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against Roman forces during the last phase of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars....

     - Gallic leader
  81. Raymond Poulidor
    Raymond Poulidor
    Raymond Poulidor , is a former professional bicycle racer. He was known as the eternal second, because he finished the Tour de France in second place three times, and in third place five times, including his final Tour at the age of 40...

     - Racing cyclist
  82. 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...

     – Poet
  83. Pierre Corneille
    Pierre Corneille
    Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...

     - Playwright
  84. Arthur Rimbaud
    Arthur Rimbaud
    Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

     - Poet
  85. Georges Clemenceau
    Georges Clemenceau
    Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the...

     – Political leader, Chief of the French Governmemt and Journalist
  86. Gilbert Bécaud
    Gilbert Bécaud
    Gilbert Bécaud was a French singer, composer and actor, known as "Monsieur 100,000 Volts" for his energetic performances. His best-known hits are "Nathalie" and "Et Maintenant", a 1961 release that became an English language hit as "What Now My Love"...

     - Singer, Songwriter and Musician
  87. José Bové
    José Bové
    Joseph Bové is a French farmer and syndicalist, member of the alter-globalization movement, and spokesman for Via Campesina. He was one of the twelve official candidates in the 2007 French presidential election...

     - Syndicalist
  88. Jean Ferrat
    Jean Ferrat
    Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.-Biography:...

     - Singer and Songwriter
  89. Lionel Jospin
    Lionel Jospin
    Lionel Jospin is a French politician, who served as Prime Minister of France from 1997 to 2002.Jospin was the Socialist Party candidate for President of France in the elections of 1995 and 2002. He was narrowly defeated in the final runoff election by Jacques Chirac in 1995...

     - Politician and French Prime Minister
  90. Jean Cocteau
    Jean Cocteau
    Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

     - Dramatist, Poet, Playwright and Filmmaker
  91. Luc Besson
    Luc Besson
    Luc Besson is a French film director, writer, and producer. He is the creator of EuropaCorp film company. He has been involved with over 50 films, spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer.-Early life:...

     - Filmmaker
  92. Tino Rossi
    Tino Rossi
    Tino Rossi was a singer and film actor.Born Constantino Rossi in Ajaccio, Corsica, France, he became a tenor of French cabaret and one of the great romantic idols of his time. Gifted with an operatic voice, a "Latin Lover" persona made him a movie star as well...

     - Singer
  93. Pierre de Coubertin
    Pierre de Coubertin
    Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin was a French educationalist and historian, founder of the International Olympic Committee, and is considered the father of the modern Olympic Games...

     - Pedagogue and founder of the modern Olympic Games.
  94. Jean Renoir
    Jean Renoir
    Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...

     – Film director
  95. Gérard Philipe
    Gérard Philipe
    Gérard Philipe was a prominent French actor, who had appeared in 34 films between 1944 and 1959.-Career:...

     - Actor and Comedian
  96. 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...

     – Author
  97. Catherine Deneuve
    Catherine Deneuve
    Catherine Deneuve is a French actress. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof and mysterious beauties in films such as Repulsion and Belle de jour . Deneuve was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1993 for her performance in Indochine; she also won César Awards for that...

     - Actress
  98. 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...

     - Actor, Singer and Comedian
  99. Gérard Depardieu
    Gérard Depardieu
    Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor and filmmaker. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite and has twice won the César Award for Best Actor...

     - Actor
  100. Françoise Dolto
    Françoise Dolto
    Françoise Dolto , was a French doctor and psychoanalyst, famous for her research on babies and childhood. Dolto revolutionized the field of psycho-therapeutic work with babies and with the mother baby dyad....

    - Psychoanalyst
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