Père Lachaise Cemetery
Encyclopedia
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France (44 hectares (108.7 acre)), though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.

Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of three World War I memorials.

The cemetery is on Boulevard de Ménilmontant. The Paris Métro
Paris Métro
The Paris Métro or Métropolitain is the rapid transit metro system in Paris, France. It has become a symbol of the city, noted for its density within the city limits and its uniform architecture influenced by Art Nouveau. The network's sixteen lines are mostly underground and run to 214 km ...

 station Philippe Auguste
Philippe Auguste (Paris Metro)
Philippe Auguste is a station on Paris Métro Line 2, on the border of the 11th and 20th arrondissements.The station was opened on 31 January 1903 as part of the extension of line 2 from Anvers to Bagnolet...

 on line 2
Paris Metro Line 2
Line 2 is one of the sixteen lines of the Paris Métro rapid transit system in Paris, France. Situated almost entirely above the former city walls , it runs in a semi-circle in the north of Paris....

 is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise
Père Lachaise (Paris Metro)
Père Lachaise is a station of the Paris Métro, serving line 2 and 3 on the border of the 11th and 20th arrondissements.The station was opened on 31 January 1903 as part of the extension of line 2 from Anvers to Bagnolet...

, on both lines 2 and 3
Paris Metro Line 3
Line 3 is one of the sixteen lines of the Paris Métro rapid transit system in Paris, France. Connecting Pont de Levallois - Bécon station in the near western suburbs to Gallieni in the east, the location of Paris' international bus station...

, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta
Gambetta (Paris Metro)
Gambetta is a station of the Paris Métro. It serves Line 3 and is the southern terminus of Line 3bis. It was opened on 25 January 1905 when the line was extended from Père Lachaise and was the eastern terminus of the line until 27 November 1921, when the line was extended to Porte des Lilas...

 station on line 3 as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 and then walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.

History and description

The cemetery takes its name from the confessor to 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...

, Père François de la Chaise
François de la Chaise
François de la Chaise was a French Jesuit priest, the father confessor of King Louis XIV of France.-Biography:...

 (1624–1709), who lived in the Jesuit
Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

 house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property, situated on the hillside from which the king during the Fronde
Fronde
The Fronde was a civil war in France, occurring in the midst of the Franco-Spanish War, which had begun in 1635. The word fronde means sling, which Parisian mobs used to smash the windows of supporters of Cardinal Mazarin....

, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne
Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne
Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne,often called simply Turenne was the most illustrious member of the La Tour d'Auvergne family. He achieved military fame and became a Marshal of France...

, was bought by the city in 1804. Established by Napoleon in this year, the cemetery was laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart
Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart
Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart was a prominent French architect.Born in Paris, France. A prominent member of Parisian society, in 1767 he married Anne-Louise d'Egremont...

, and later extended.

Père Lachaise Cemetery was opened on the 21st of May 1804. The first person buried there was a five-year old girl named Adélaïde Pailliard de Villeneuve, the daughter of a door-bell of the Faubourg St. Antoine.
Napoleon Bonaparte as a consul declared that “Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”.

Several new cemeteries replaced the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital: Montmartre Cemetery
Montmartre Cemetery
Montmartre Cemetery is a cemetery in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, France.-History:Cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the shutting down of the Cimetière des Innocents in 1786, as they presented health hazards...

 in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery
Montparnasse Cemetery
Montparnasse Cemetery is a cemetery in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, part of the city's 14th arrondissement.-History:Created from three farms in 1824, the cemetery at Montparnasse was originally known as Le Cimetière du Sud. Cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the closure, owing to...

 in the south. At the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower is a puddle iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris. Built in 1889, it has become both a global icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world...

, is Passy Cemetery
Passy Cemetery
The Passy Cemetery is a famous cemetery located at 2, rue du Commandant Schlœsing in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France.-History:...

.

At the time of its opening, the cemetery was considered to be situated too far from the city and attracted few funerals. Moreover, the Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

s refused to have their graves in a place that had not been blessed by the Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

. Consequently, the administrators devised a marketing strategy and in 1804, with great fanfare, organised the transfer of the remains of 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...

 and 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...

. Then, in another great spectacle in 1817, the purported* remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey
Abbey
An abbey is a Catholic monastery or convent, under the authority of an Abbot or an Abbess, who serves as the spiritual father or mother of the community.The term can also refer to an establishment which has long ceased to function as an abbey,...

 of Nogent-sur-Seine
Nogent-sur-Seine
Nogent-sur-Seine is a commune in the Aube department in north-central France.-Population:-Personalities:Camille Claudel lived in Nogent-sur-Seine with her family from 1876 to 1879....

 (by tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt
Crypt
In architecture, a crypt is a stone chamber or vault beneath the floor of a burial vault possibly containing sarcophagi, coffins or relics....

 in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love) (*see disputation).

This strategy achieved its desired effect when people began clamouring to be buried among the famous citizens. Records show that, within a few years, Père Lachaise went from containing a few dozen permanent residents to more than 33,000. Père Lachaise was expanded five times: in 1824, 1829, 1832, 1842 and 1850.
In 1804, the Père Lachaise had contained only 13 graves. The following year there were only 44 and 49 in 1806, 62 in 1807 and 833 in 1812. Today there are over 1 million bodies buried there, and many more in the columbarium
Columbarium
A columbarium is a place for the respectful and usually public storage of cinerary urns . The term comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons .The Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas is a particularly fine ancient Roman example, rich in...

, which holds the remains of those who had requested cremation
Cremation
Cremation is the process of reducing bodies to basic chemical compounds such as gasses and bone fragments. This is accomplished through high-temperature burning, vaporization and oxidation....

.

The Communards' Wall
Communards' Wall
The Communards’ Wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery is where, on May 28, 1871, one-hundred forty-seven fédérés, combatants of the Paris Commune, were shot and thrown in an open trench at the foot of the wall....

 (Mur des Fédérés) is also located in the cemetery. This is the site where 147 Communards, the last defenders of the workers' district of Belleville
Belleville, Paris
Belleville is a neighbourhood of Paris, France, parts of which lie in four different arrondissements. The major portion of Belleville straddles the borderline between the 20th arrondissement and the 19th along its main street, the Rue de Belleville...

, were shot on 28 May 1871 – the last day of the "Bloody Week" (Semaine Sanglante) in which the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

 was crushed.

The Crematory and Columbarium

A funerary chapel was erected in 1823 by Etienne-Hippolyte Godde at the exact place of the ancient Jesuit house. This same Neo-classical architect created the monumental entrance a few years later.

A columbarium
Columbarium
A columbarium is a place for the respectful and usually public storage of cinerary urns . The term comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons .The Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas is a particularly fine ancient Roman example, rich in...

 and a crematorium of a Neo-Byzantine style were designed in 1894 by Jean Camille Formigé.

Père Lachaise today

Père Lachaise is still an operating cemetery
Cemetery
A cemetery is a place in which dead bodies and cremated remains are buried. The term "cemetery" implies that the land is specifically designated as a burying ground. Cemeteries in the Western world are where the final ceremonies of death are observed...

 and accepting new burial
Burial
Burial is the act of placing a person or object into the ground. This is accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing an object in it, and covering it over.-History:...

s. However, the rules to be buried in a Paris cemetery are rather strict: people may be buried in one of these cemeteries if they die in the French capital city or if they lived there. Being buried in Père Lachaise is even more difficult nowadays as there is a waiting list: very few plots are available. The gravesites at Père Lachaise range from a simple, unadorned headstone to towering monuments and even elaborate mini chapels dedicated to the memory of a well-known person or family. A lot of the tombs are about the size and shape of a phone booth, with just enough space for a mourner to step inside, kneel to say a prayer, and leave some flowers.

The cemetery manages to squeeze an increasing number of bodies into a finite and already crowded space. One way it does this is by combining the remains of multiple family members in the same grave. In many parts of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

, such a custom is unheard of, as each body is presumed to have its own casket, vault, and plot of land. But at Père Lachaise, it is not uncommon to reopen a grave after a body has decomposed and inter another coffin. Some family mausoleums or multi-family tomb
Tomb
A tomb is a repository for the remains of the dead. It is generally any structurally enclosed interment space or burial chamber, of varying sizes...

s contain dozens of bodies, often in several separate but contiguous graves. Shelves are usually fitted out to accommodate them.

In relatively recent times, Père Lachaise has adopted a standard practice of issuing 30-year leases on gravesites, so that if a lease is not renewed by the family, the remains can be removed, space made for a new grave, and the overall deterioration of the cemetery minimized. Abandoned remains are boxed, tagged and moved to Aux Morts ossuary
Ossuary
An ossuary is a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary...

, in Père Lachaise cemetery.

Plots can be bought in perpetuity, for 50, 30 or 10 years, the latter being the least expensive option. Even in the case of mausoleums and chapels, coffins are most of the time below ground.

Burials

Among those interred here are:


A

  • Peter Abelard
    Peter Abelard
    Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...

     – French philosopher
  • Edmond François Valentin About
    Edmond François Valentin About
    Edmond François Valentin About was a French novelist, publicist and journalist.-Life:He was born at Dieuze, in the Moselle département in the Lorraine region of France. In 1848 he entered the École Normale, taking second place in the annual competition for admission in which Hippolyte Taine came...

     – French novelist and journalist
  • Marie d'Agoult
    Marie d'Agoult
    Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Vicomtesse de Flavigny , was a French author, known also by her married name and title, Marie, Comtesse d'Agoult, and by her pen name, Daniel Stern....

     – French author who wrote under the nom de plume of Daniel Stern
  • Jehan Alain
    Jehan Alain
    Jehan Ariste Alain was a French organist and composer.-Biography:Alain was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the western suburbs of Paris, into a family of musicians. His father, Albert Alain was an enthusiastic organist, composer and organ-builder who had studied with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis...

     – French composer and organist
  • Marietta Alboni
    Marietta Alboni
    Marietta Alboni was a renowned Italian contralto opera singer. Together with the charismatic Maria Malibran, she was considered the greatest deeper-voiced female singer of the nineteenth century.-Biography:...

     – Italian opera singer
  • Jean-Charles Alphand
    Jean-Charles Alphand
    Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, born in 1817 and died in 1891, interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery , was a French Engineer of the Corps of Bridges and Roads...

     – French civil engineer
  • Karel Appel
    Karel Appel
    Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s...

     – Dutch painter
  • Guillaume Apollinaire
    Guillaume Apollinaire
    Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

     – French poet and art critic
  • François Arago
    François Arago
    François Jean Dominique Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and politician.-Early life and work:...

     – French scientist and statesman
  • Armand Pierre Fernandez
    Arman
    Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes to using them as the painting itself...

     – French painter
  • Miguel Ángel Asturias
    Miguel Ángel Asturias
    Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and diplomat...

     – Guatemalan diplomat and author, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967
  • Daniel Auber
    Daniel Auber
    Daniel François Esprit Auber was a French composer.-Biography:The son of a Paris print-seller, Auber was born in Caen in Normandy. Though his father expected him to continue in the print-selling business, he also allowed his son to learn how to play several musical instruments...

     – French composer
  • Hubertine Auclert
    Hubertine Auclert
    Hubertine Auclert was a leading French feminist and a campaigner for women's suffrage.Born in the Allier département in the Auvergne area of France into a middle-class family, Hubertine Auclert's father died when she was thirteen years old and her mother sent her to live and study in a Roman...

     – French feminist and activist for women's suffrage
  • Pierre Augereau – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • Jean-Pierre Aumont
    Jean-Pierre Aumont
    -Early life:Aumont was born Jean-Pierre Philippe Salomons in Paris, the son of Suzanne and Alexandre Salomons, owner of La Maison du Blanc . His mother's uncle was well-known stage actor Georges Berr. His father was from a Dutch Jewish family and his mother's family were French Jews...

     – French actor, father of Tina Aumont
    Tina Aumont
    Maria Christina Aumont , best known as Tina Aumont, was an American actress.She was of French Jewish and Dominican descent....

     and husband of Maria Montez
    María Montez
    María Montez was a Dominican-born motion picture actress who gained fame and popularity in the 1940s as an exotic beauty starring in a series of filmed-in-Technicolor costume adventure films. Her screen image was that of a hot-blooded Latin seductress, dressed in fanciful costumes and sparkling...

  • Jane Avril
    Jane Avril
    Jane Avril was a French can-can dancer made famous by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec through his paintings. Extremely thin, 'given to jerky movements and sudden contortions', she was nicknamed La Mélinite, after an explosive. -Biography:...

     – French dancer

B

  • Salvador Bacarisse
    Salvador Bacarisse
    Salvador Bacarisse Chinoria was a Spanish composer.Bacarisse was born in Madrid and studied music at the Real Conservatorio de Música there, as a student of Manuel Fernández Alberdi and Conrado del Campo...

     – Spanish composer
  • 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....

     – French novelist of the 19th century
  • Joseph Barbanègre
    Joseph Barbanègre
    Joseph Barbanègre was a French General and a Baron of the First French Empire. He was entrenched in Huningue during the third siege of the city by the Habsburgs in 1815.-Biography:...

     - French general
  • Henri Barbusse
    Henri Barbusse
    Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.-Life:...

     – French novelist
  • Paul Barras – French statesman
  • Antoine-Louis Barye
    Antoine-Louis Barye
    Antoine-Louis Barye was a French sculptor most famous for his work as an animalier, a sculptor of animals.-Biography:Born in Paris, Barye began his career as a goldsmith, like many sculptors of the Romantic Period...

     – French sculptor
  • Alain Bashung
    Alain Bashung
    Alain Bashung was a French singer, songwriter and actor.- Youth :Alain Bashung was the son of a Breton factory worker and French Kabyle father, whom he never knew. His mother remarried, and at the age of one, Bashung was sent to Strasbourg to live with his new stepfather's parents...

     – French singer
  • Stiv Bators
    Stiv Bators
    Stiv Bators , was an American punk rockvocalist and guitarist from Youngstown, Ohio. He is best remembered for his bands, The Dead Boys and The Lords of the New Church.- Music and film career :...

     – ashes sprinkled on the grave of Jim Morrison
    Jim Morrison
    James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...

  • Jean-Dominique Bauby
    Jean-Dominique Bauby
    Jean-Dominique Bauby was a well-known French journalist, author and editor of the French fashion magazine ELLE.On 8 December 1995 at the age of 43, Bauby suffered a massive stroke. When he woke up twenty days later, he found he was entirely speechless; he could only blink his left eyelid...

     – French journalist
  • Jean-Louis Baudelocque
    Jean-Louis Baudelocque
    Jean-Louis Baudelocque was a French obstetrician who studied and practiced medicine in Paris. He was born in Heilly, in the region of Picardie.Baudelocque is known for making obstetrics a scientific discipline in France...

     – French obstetrician
  • 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"...

     – French singer
  • Pierre Augustin Béclard
    Pierre Augustin Béclard
    Pierre Augustin Béclard was a French anatomist who was a native of Angers. He was the father of physiologist Jules-Auguste Béclard....

     – French anatomist
  • Vincenzo Bellini
    Vincenzo Bellini
    Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...

     – Italian composer; remains later transferred to Italy
  • Judah P. Benjamin
    Judah P. Benjamin
    Judah Philip Benjamin was an American politician and lawyer. Born a British subject in the West Indies, he moved to the United States with his parents and became a citizen. He later became a citizen of the Confederate States of America. After the collapse of the Confederacy, Benjamin moved to...

     – American lawyer and statesman
  • Pierre-Jean de Béranger
    Pierre-Jean de Béranger
    Pierre-Jean de Béranger was a prolific French poet and chansonnier , who enjoyed great popularity and influence in France during his lifetime, but faded into obscurity in the decades following his death...

     – French lyricist
  • Claude Bernard
    Claude Bernard
    Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...

     – French physiologist, known for several advances in medicine, as the introduction of the scientific method to the study of medicine, and the study of the sympathetic nervous system.
  • Bernardin de Saint Pierre – French writer
  • Sarah Bernhardt
    Sarah Bernhardt
    Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...

     – French stage and film actress
  • Alphonse Bertillon
    Alphonse Bertillon
    Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified...

     – French anthropologist and father of anthropometry
    Anthropometry
    Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual...

  • Julien Bessières
    Julien Bessières
    Henri Géraud Julien, Chevalier Bessières et de l'Empire was a French scientist and diplomat. He was a cousin of marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessières and Bertrand Bessières.-Life:...

     – French scientist, diplomat and politician
  • Ramón Emeterio Betances
    Ramón Emeterio Betances
    Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán was a Puerto Rican nationalist. He was the primary instigator of the Grito de Lares revolution, and as such, is considered to be the father of the Puerto Rican independence movement...

     – Puerto Rican nationalist
  • Marie François Xavier Bichat
    Marie François Xavier Bichat
    Marie François Xavier Bichat , French anatomist and physiologist, was born at Thoirette .Bichat is best remembered as the father of modern histology and pathology. Despite the fact that he worked without a microscope he was able to advance greatly the understanding of the human body...

     – French anatomist and physiologist
  • Fulgence Bienvenüe
    Fulgence Bienvenüe
    Fulgence Bienvenüe was a French civil engineer, best known for his role in the construction of the Paris Métro....

     – French civil engineer remembered as the Father of the Paris Métro
    Paris Métro
    The Paris Métro or Métropolitain is the rapid transit metro system in Paris, France. It has become a symbol of the city, noted for its density within the city limits and its uniform architecture influenced by Art Nouveau. The network's sixteen lines are mostly underground and run to 214 km ...

  • Samuel Bing
    Samuel Bing
    Siegfried Bing , often referenced erroneously as "Samuel Bing", was a German art dealer who lived in Paris as an adult, and who helped introduce Japanese art and artworks to the West and was a factor in the development of the Art Nouveau style during the late nineteenth century.-Biography:Bing was...

     – German art dealer
  • Georges Bizet
    Georges Bizet
    Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...

     – French composer and conductor
  • Louis Blanc
    Louis Blanc
    Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French politician and historian. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor....

     – French historian and statesman
  • Sophie Blanchard
    Sophie Blanchard
    Sophie Blanchard was a French aeronaut and the wife of ballooning pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Blanchard was the first woman to work as a professional balloonist, and after her husband's death she continued ballooning, making more than 60 ascents...

     – first professional female balloon
    Balloon
    A balloon is an inflatable flexible bag filled with a gas, such as helium, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, oxygen, or air. Modern balloons can be made from materials such as rubber, latex, polychloroprene, or a nylon fabric, while some early balloons were made of dried animal bladders, such as the pig...

    ist and the first woman to die in an aviation accident
  • Auguste Blanqui – French statesman
  • Rosa Bonheur
    Rosa Bonheur
    Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, was a French animalière, realist artist, and sculptor. As a painter she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais , which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris depicts a team...

     – French painter
  • Ludwig Börne
    Ludwig Börne
    Karl Ludwig Börne was a German political writer and satirist.-Early life:Karl Ludwig Börne was born Loeb Baruch on May 6, 1786, at Frankfurt am Main, son of Jakob Baruch, a banker. His grandfather had been a government bureaucrat.-Education:Börne and his brothers were privately tutored by Jacob...

     – German political writer and satirist
  • Pierre Bourdieu
    Pierre Bourdieu
    Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

     – French sociologist
  • Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu
    Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu
    Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu was a French opera soprano. She was born in Cap-Haïtien, Haïti at a time when Haiti was a French colony...

     – French opera singer
  • Édouard Branly
    Edouard Branly
    Édouard Eugène Désiré Branly was a French inventor, physicist and professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He is primarily known for his early involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the Branly coherer around 1890.-Biography:The coherer was the first widely used detector for...

     – French scientist
  • Pierre Brasseur
    Pierre Brasseur
    Pierre Brasseur , born Pierre-Albert Espinasse, was a French actor.He was the son of actor Georges Espinasse and actress Germaine Brasseur while the latter was married to Albert Brasseur. His grandfather, Jules Brasseur, was an actor as well...

     – French comedian
  • Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
    Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
    Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer and politician, and gained fame as an epicure and gastronome: "Grimod and Brillat-Savarin...

     – French Lawyer, Politician, Epicure, and Gastronome
  • Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart
    Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart
    Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart was a prominent French architect.Born in Paris, France. A prominent member of Parisian society, in 1767 he married Anne-Louise d'Egremont...

     – French architect, best known for designing the layout of the Pėre Lachaise Cemetery
  • Pierre Brossolette
    Pierre Brossolette
    Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, left-wing politician, a top leader and major hero of French Resistance.-Education and journalism:...

     – French journalist, politician and Résistance leader
  • Jean de Brunhoff
    Jean de Brunhoff
    Jean de Brunhoff was a French writer and illustrator known for creating the Babar books, the first of which appeared in 1931. He was the fourth and youngest child of Maurice de Brunhoff, a publisher, and his wife Marguerite. He attended Protestant schools, including the prestigious Ecole Alsacienne...

     – French author of Babar the Elephant
    Babar the Elephant
    Babar the Elephant is a French children's fictional character who first appeared in Histoire de Babar by Jean de Brunhoff in 1931 and enjoyed immediate success. An English language version, entitled The Story of Babar, appeared in 1933 in Britain and also in the United States. The book is based on...

  • Auguste-Laurent Burdeau
    Auguste Burdeau
    Auguste-Laurent Burdeau was a French politician.He was the son of a laborer at Lyon. Forced from childhood to earn his own living, he was enabled to secure an education by bursarships at the Lycée at Lyon and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris.In 1870 he was at the École Normale Supérieure in...

     – French politician and plaintiff in the Drumont-Burdeau trial

C

  • Joseph Caillaux
    Joseph Caillaux
    Joseph-Marie–Auguste Caillaux was a major French politician of the Third Republic. The leader of the Radicals, he favored a policy of conciliation with Germany during his premiership from 1911 to 1912, which led to the maintenance of the peace during the Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911...

     – French statesman
  • Gustave Caillebotte
    Gustave Caillebotte
    Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter, member and patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group...

     – French Impressionist
    Impressionism
    Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

     painter
  • Maria Callas
    Maria Callas
    Maria Callas was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique, a wide-ranging voice and great dramatic gifts...

     – The opera singer's ashes were originally buried in the cemetery. After being stolen and later recovered, they were scattered into the Aegean Sea
    Aegean Sea
    The Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...

    , off the coast of Greece. The empty urn remains in Père Lachaise.
  • Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès
    Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès
    Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, 1st Duke of Parma was a French lawyer and statesman during the French Revolution and the First Empire, best remembered as the author of the Napoleonic code, which still forms the basis of French civil law.-Early career:Cambacérès was born in Montpellier, into a...

     – French lawyer and politician
  • Giulia Grisi
    Giulia Grisi
    Giulia Grisi, also known as Madame De Candia was an Italian opera singer...

     de Candia – Italian opera singer, well known as "Giulia Grisi", her grave is marked Giullia de Candia.
  • Jean-Joseph Carriès
    Jean-Joseph Carriès
    Jean-Joseph Marie Carriès was a French sculptor, ceramist, and miniaturist. Born in Lyon, Carriès was orphaned at age six and was raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage. He apprenticed with a local sculptor then in 1874 moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Augustin-Alexandre...

     – French sculptor, ceramist, and miniaturist
  • Pierre Cartellier
    Pierre Cartellier
    Pierre Cartellier was a French sculptor.Born in Paris, he studied at the École Gratuite de Dessin in Paris and then in the studio of Charles-Antoine Bridan before attending the Académie Royale. During the French Revolution Cartellier was part of a team of sculptors who worked on the church of Ste...

     – French sculptor
  • Jean-François Champollion
    Jean-François Champollion
    Jean-François Champollion was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs....

     – French decipherer of the hieroglyphs
    Egyptian hieroglyphs
    Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...

     and father of Egyptology
    Egyptology
    Egyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...

  • Claude Chappe – French pioneer of the telegraph
  • Ernest Chausson
    Ernest Chausson
    Amédée-Ernest Chausson was a French romantic composer who died just as his career was beginning to flourish.-Life:Ernest Chausson was born in Paris into a prosperous bourgeois family...

     – French composer
  • Richard Chenevix
    Richard Chenevix (chemist)
    Richard Chenevix FRS was an Irish chemist.Chenevix was a chemist who played a role in the discovery of the elemental nature of the metal palladium. Disbelieving this solid to be an element, in 1803 he published his opinions that it was a combination of mercury and platinum...

     – Irish chemist
  • Luigi Cherubini
    Luigi Cherubini
    Luigi Cherubini was an Italian composer who spent most of his working life in France. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest of his contemporaries....

     – Italian composer
  • Claude de Choiseul-Francières
    Claude de Choiseul-Francières
    Claude de Choiseul-Francières was count of Choiseul, marquis of Francières, seigneur d'Yroüerre, and a Marshal of France since 1693....

     – Marshal of France
  • Frédéric Chopin
    Frédéric Chopin
    Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

     – Polish composer. His heart is entombed within a pillar at the Holy Cross Church
    Holy Cross Church, Warsaw
    The Church of the Holy Cross is a Roman Catholic house of worship in downtown Warsaw, Poland. Located on Krakowskie Przedmieście opposite the main Warsaw University campus, it is one of the most notable Baroque churches in Poland's capital....

     in Warsaw.
  • Alain Clément – French journalist and writer
  • Jean-Baptiste Clément – French painter and activist
  • Auguste Clésinger
    Auguste Clésinger
    Auguste Clésinger was a 19th-century French sculptor and painter.- Life :...

     – French painter and sculptor
  • Émile Cohl
    Émile Cohl
    Émile Cohl , born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a French caricaturist of the largely forgotten Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".-Biography:Émile's father Elie was a rubber salesman, and his mother, Emilie...

     – French cartoonist
  • Colette
    Colette
    Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...

     – French litterateur
  • Count Alexandre Joseph Colonna-Walewski – French statesman, son of Napoleon I
    Napoleon I
    Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...

  • Auguste Comte
    Auguste Comte
    Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

     – French thinker; father of Positivism
    Positivism
    Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

  • Benjamin Constant
    Benjamin Constant
    Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was a Swiss-born French nobleman, thinker, writer and politician.-Biography:...

     – Swiss-born liberal philosopher
  • Bruno Coquatrix
    Bruno Coquatrix
    Bruno Coquatrix, was born in Ronchin, Nord on 5 August 1910 and died in Paris on 1 April 1979, buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery . He is mainly known as the owner and manager of the music hall Paris Olympia...

     – French lyricist and music impresario
  • Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
    Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
    Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century...

     – French painter
  • Ramón Corral
    Ramón Corral
    Ramón Corral was the Vice President of Mexico under Porfirio Díaz from 1904 until their deposition in 1911.-Early Years:...

     – Mexican Politician, Vice-president from 1904 until 1911 under President Porfirio Díaz
    Porfirio Díaz
    José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori was a Mexican-American War volunteer and French intervention hero, an accomplished general and the President of Mexico continuously from 1876 to 1911, with the exception of a brief term in 1876 when he left Juan N...

     administration
  • Jean-Pierre Cortot
    Jean-Pierre Cortot
    Jean-Pierre Cortot was a French sculptor.- Life :Cortot was born and died in Paris. He was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and took the Prix de Rome in 1809, residing in the Villa Medici in Rome from 1810 to 1813.Cortot worked in an austere, correct, academic neo-classical style,...

     – French sculptor
  • Benoît Costaz
    Benoît Costaz
    Benoît, baron Costaz was a French bishop.Entering holy orders before 1789, he refused to swear to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and took refuge in Savoy, Switzerland then Turin...

     – French bishop
  • Georges Courteline
    Georges Courteline
    Georges Courteline was a French dramatist and novelist.Born Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux, in Tours in the Indre-et-Loire département, his family moved to Paris shortly after his birth...

     – French playwright
  • Thomas Couture
    Thomas Couture
    Thomas Couture was an influential French history painter and teacher. Couture taught such later luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Karel Javůrek, and J-N Sylvestre.-Life:He was born at Senlis, Oise, France...

     – French painter
  • Rufino José Cuervo
    Rufino José Cuervo
    Rufino José Cuervo Urisarri , was a Colombian writer, linguist and philologist.He studied Latin and Greek, but the main part of his work was dedicated to the study of the dialectal variations of Spanish spoken in Colombia...

     – Colombian writer and philologue
  • Nancy Cunard
    Nancy Cunard
    Nancy Clara Cunard was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting much of her life to fighting racism and fascism...

     – English poet and activist
  • Henri Curiel
    Henri Curiel
    Henri Curiel was a left-wing political activist. Born in Egypt, Curiel led the communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation until he was expelled from the country in 1950. Settling in France, Curiel aided the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale and other national liberation causes...

     – Egyptian politician
  • Georges Cuvier
    Georges Cuvier
    Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...

     – the founder of paleontology

D

  • Jarosław Dąbrowski – exiled Polish revolutionary Nationalist and last Commander-in-Chief of the Paris Commune of 1871
    Paris Commune
    The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

    ; body never found, memory honored on Federated Wall in northeast corner of the Père Lachaise Cemetery and on monument erected outside the wall in the Square Samuel de Champlain
  • Pierre Dac
    Pierre Dac
    André Isaac , better known as Pierre Dac was a French humorist and Résistance activist.He was born in Châlons-sur-Marne and died in Paris....

     – French humorist
  • Édouard Daladier
    Édouard Daladier
    Édouard Daladier was a French Radical politician and the Prime Minister of France at the start of the Second World War.-Career:Daladier was born in Carpentras, Vaucluse. Later, he would become known to many as "the bull of Vaucluse" because of his thick neck and large shoulders and determined...

     – French Radical-Socialist politician of the 1930s, signatory of the Munich Agreement
    Munich Agreement
    The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...

     in 1938 and Prime Minister of France at the outbreak of the Second World War
  • Alexandre Darracq
    Alexandre Darracq
    Alexandre Darracq was a French automobile manufacturer.Born Pierre Alexandre Darracq in Bordeaux, France, of Basque parents, he trained as a draftsman at the Arsenal in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées département...

     – French automobile manufacturer
  • Alphonse Daudet
    Alphonse Daudet
    Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.- Early life :Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune...

     – Famous French author who is known for his literary works, such as, "Lettres de mon Moulin".
  • Honoré Daumier
    Honoré Daumier
    Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....

     – French caricaturist
  • Jacques-Louis David
    Jacques-Louis David
    Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...

     – Napoleon's court painter was exiled as a revolutionary after the Bourbons
    House of Bourbon
    The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...

     returned to the throne of France. His body was not allowed into the country even in death, so the tomb contains only his heart.
  • David d'Angers – French sculptor
  • Louis-Nicolas Davout – Napoleon's "Iron Marshal"
  • Gérard Debreu
    Gerard Debreu
    Gérard Debreu was a French economist and mathematician, who also came to have United States citizenship. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.-Biography:His father was the...

     – French economist, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1983
  • Jean-Gaspard Deburau
    Jean-Gaspard Deburau
    Jean-Gaspard Deburau, sometimes Debureau —born Jan Kašpar Dvořák—was a celebrated Bohemian-French mime...

     – Czech-born French actor and mime
  • Denis Decrès
    Denis Decrès
    Denis Decrès, , was an officer of the French Navy and count, later duke of the First Empire.-Early career:...

     – French admiral and Naval Minister under Napoleon
  • Cino Del Duca
    Cino Del Duca
    Cino Del Duca was an Italian-born businessman film producer and philanthropist who moved to France in 1923 where he made a fortune in the French publishing business.-Biography:...

     – Italian-born French publishing magnate, film producer and philanthropist
  • Simone Del Duca
    Simone Del Duca
    Simone Del Duca was a French businesswoman, a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and major philanthropist. Married to French publishing magnate Cino Del Duca, on his death in 1967 she was left with a considerable fortune...

     – French businesswoman and philanthropist, wife of Cino Del Duca
  • Eugène Delacroix
    Eugène Delacroix
    Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...

     – French Romantic
    Romanticism
    Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

     artist
  • Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre – French mathematician
  • Pierre Desproges
    Pierre Desproges
    Pierre Desproges was a French humorist. He was famous for his elaborate, eloquent and above all, virulent diatribes criticizing anything and everything....

     – French humorist
  • Gustave Doré
    Gustave Doré
    Paul Gustave Doré was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving and steel engraving.-Biography:...

     – French artist and engraver
  • Michel Drach
    Michel Drach
    Michel Drach was a French film director, writer, producer and actor. His fims include Le Passé simple , which he directed and scripted.-Selected filmography:...

     – French film director
  • Marie Dubas
    Marie Dubas
    Marie Dubas was a music-hall singer, diseuse and comedienne.Born in Paris, France, Marie Dubas began her career as a stage actress but became famous as a singer. Using the great Yvette Guilbert as her model, Dubas started singing in the small cabarets of Montmartre mixing comedy into her routine...

     – French singer
  • Kavasjee Hormasjee Dubash – Indian ship chandler magnat
  • Jacques Duclos
    Jacques Duclos
    Jacques Duclos was a French Communist politician who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly after defeating Paul Reynaud, until 1969, when he won a substantial portion of the vote in the presidential elections.During World War I, Duclos fought...

     – French politician
  • Léon Dufourny – French architect
  • Paul Dukas
    Paul Dukas
    Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...

     – French composer
  • Isadora Duncan
    Isadora Duncan
    Isadora Duncan was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life...

     – American dancer
  • Henri Duparc – French composer
  • Éléonore Duplay
    Éléonore Duplay
    Éléonore Duplay , called Cornélie, after Cornelia Africana of Ancient Rome, was the daughter of Maurice Duplay, a master carpenter, and Françoise-Éléonore Vaugeois. She was the eldest of five children and was born in 1768, two years after her parents' marriage, in Paris, where she would live all...

     – Friend of French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre
    Maximilien Robespierre
    Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre is one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. He largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended with his...

  • Guillaume Dupuytren
    Guillaume Dupuytren
    Guillaume Dupuytren, Baron was a French anatomist and military surgeon. Although he gained much esteem for treating Napoleon Bonaparte's hemorrhoids, he is best known today for Dupuytren's contracture which is named after him and which he described in 1831.- Birth and education :Guillaume...

     – French surgeon

E

  • Paul Éluard
    Paul Éluard
    Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...

     – French surrealist
    Surrealism
    Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

     poet
  • George Enescu
    George Enescu
    George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...

     – Romania
    Romania
    Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

    n composer, pianist, violinist and conductor
  • Camille Erlanger
    Camille Erlanger
    Camille Erlanger was a Parisian-born French opera composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatory under Léo Delibes and Émile Durand, and in 1888 won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Velléda...

     – French composer
  • Max Ernst
    Max Ernst
    Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...

     – German artist

F

  • Alexandre Falguière
    Alexandre Falguière
    Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière was a French sculptor and painter.He was born in Toulouse...

     – French sculptor
  • Félix Faure
    Félix Faure
    Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...

     – former President of France
  • Robert de Flers
    Robert de Flers
    Robert de Flers was a French playwright, opera librettist, and journalist....

     – French playwright and journalist
  • Suzanne Flon
    Suzanne Flon
    Suzanne Flon was a French film actress and comedienne.-Early life:Her father was a railway worker and her mother crafted jewelry....

     – actress
  • Pierre François Léonard Fontaine
    Pierre François Léonard Fontaine
    Pierre François Léonard Fontaine was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer.Starting from 1794 Fontaine worked in such close partnership with Charles Percier, originally his friend from student days, that it is difficult to distinguish their work...

     French Neo-classical Architect
  • 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...

     – French litterateur best known for fairy tales
  • Joseph Fourier
    Joseph Fourier
    Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's Law are also named in his honour...

     – French mathematician and physicist
  • Jean Françaix
    Jean Françaix
    Jean René Désiré Françaix was a French neoclassical composer, pianist, and orchestrator, known for his prolific output and vibrant style.-Life:...

     – French composer
  • Pierre Frank
    Pierre Frank
    Pierre Frank was a French Trotskyist leader. He served on the secretariat of the Fourth International from 1948 to 1979....

     – French Trotskyist politician
  • William Temple Franklin
    William Temple Franklin
    William Temple Franklin was a British-born American diplomat and real estate speculator. He is best known for his involvement with the American diplomatic mission in France during the American Revolutionary War serving as secretary to his grandfather Benjamin Franklin that agreed the...

     – grandson of Benjamin Franklin
    Benjamin Franklin
    Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...

  • Augustin-Jean Fresnel
    Augustin-Jean Fresnel
    Augustin-Jean Fresnel , was a French engineer who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally....

     – French inventor of Fresnel Lens
    Fresnel lens
    A Fresnel lens is a type of lens originally developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel for lighthouses.The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design...

  • Loie Fuller
    Loie Fuller
    Loie Fuller Loie Fuller Loie Fuller (also Loïe Fuller; (January 15, 1862 – January 1, 1928) was a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques.-Career:...

     – French dancer
  • Laurent Fignon
    Laurent Fignon
    Laurent Patrick Fignon was a French professional road bicycle racer. He won the Tour de France in 1983 and in 1984. He missed winning it a third time, in 1989, by 8 seconds, the closest margin ever to decide the tour. He also won the Giro d'Italia in 1989, after having been the runner-up in 1984,...

     – French cyclist
  • Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
    Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
    Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the leader of the French Resistance network "Alliance," after the arrest of its former leader Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, during the occupation of France in the Second World War,...

     – also known as Madeline of the Resistance, leader of the French Resistance network "Alliance" during WWII

G

  • Antonio de La Gandara
    Antonio de La Gandara
    Antonio de la Gándara was a French painter, pastellist and draughtsman.-Biography:He was born in Paris, France, but his father was of Spanish ancestry, born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and his mother was from England. La Gandara's talent was strongly influenced by both cultures...

     – French painter
  • Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès
    Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès
    Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès , French politician, fought on the barricades during the revolution of July....

     – French statesman
  • Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
    Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
    - External links :* from the American Chemical Society* from the Encyclopædia Britannica, 10th Edition * , Paris...

     – French chemist and physicist
  • Pierre Georges
    Pierre Georges
    Pierre Georges , better known as Colonel Fabien, was one of the two members of the French Communist Party who perpetrated the first assassinations of German personnel during the Occupation of France during the Second World War....

     – French Resistance leader better known as Colonel Fabien
  • Théodore Géricault
    Théodore Géricault
    Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings...

     – French Romantic painter, whose major work The Raft of the Medusa is reproduced on his tomb by sculptor Antoine Étex
    Antoine Étex
    Antoine Étex was a French sculptor, painter and architect. He was born in Paris.He first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1833, his work including a reproduction in marble of his "Death of Hyacinthus", and the plaster cast of his "Cain and his race cursed by God"...

    .
  • Sophie Germain
    Sophie Germain
    Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by a gender-biased society, she gained education from books in her father's library and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as...

     – Early French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher
  • Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou
    Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou
    Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou was a Kurdish political leader.Ghassemlou was the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran from 1973 to 1989, when he was assassinated by perpetrators thought to be agents of the Islamic...

     – leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan
  • André Gill
    André Gill
    André Gill was a French caricaturist. Born Louis-Alexandre Gosset de Guînes at Paris, the son of the Comte de Guînes and Sylvie-Adeline Gosset, he studied at this city's Academy of Fine Arts. He adopted the pseudonym André Gill in homage to his hero, James Gillray. Gill began illustrating for...

     – French caricaturist
  • Manuel de Godoy
    Manuel de Godoy
    Don Manuel Francisco Domingo de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, de los Ríos y Sánchez-Zarzosa, also Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria de los Ríos Sánchez Zarzosa , was Prime Minister of Spain from 1792 to 1797 and from 1801 to 1808...

     – Spanish prime minister and court favorite
  • Yvan Goll
    Yvan Goll
    Yvan Goll, born Isaac Lange , was a French-German poet who was perfectly bilingual and wrote in both French and German...

     – French-German poet and his wife Claire Goll
    Claire Goll
    Claire Goll was a German-French writer and journalist. She was the spouse of Yvan Goll....

  • Enrique Gómez Carrillo
    Enrique Gómez Carrillo
    Enrique Gómez Carrillo was a Guatemalan literary critic, writer, journalist and diplomat...

     – Guatemalan novelist, journalist, war correspondent, chronicler and diplomat, lived most of his life in Europe; he was the correspondent to important newspapers in Spain and Argentina; published 86 books between novels and chronicles of his journeys to faraway places.
  • Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • Zénobe Gramme
    Zénobe Gramme
    Zénobe Théophile Gramme was a Belgian electrical engineer. He invented the Gramme machine, a type of direct current dynamo capable of generating smoother and much higher voltages than the dynamos known to that point.In 1873 he and Hippolyte Fontaine accidentally discovered that the device was...

     – Inventor of the Direct Current
    Direct current
    Direct current is the unidirectional flow of electric charge. Direct current is produced by such sources as batteries, thermocouples, solar cells, and commutator-type electric machines of the dynamo type. Direct current may flow in a conductor such as a wire, but can also flow through...

     (DC) Dynamo. There is a statue on the grave of Zénobe sitting and looking at a dynamo rotor.
  • Stéphane Grappelli
    Stéphane Grappelli
    Stéphane Grappelli was a French jazz violinist who founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands....

     – French jazz violinist and member of the Quintette du Hot Club de France
  • André Grétry – Belgian-born French composer
  • Maurice Grimaud
    Maurice Grimaud
    Maurice Grimaud was the French Prefect of Police, or police chief, of the city of Paris during the May 1968 general strikes and student uprisings. He is credited with avoiding an escalation of violence and bloodshed during May 1968 unrest.Grimaud was born in Annonay, Ardèche, on November 11, 1913...

     – French Prefecture of Police
    Prefecture of Police
    The Prefecture of Police , headed by the Prefect of Police , is an agency of the Government of France which provides the police force for the city of Paris and the surrounding three suburban départements of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, and Val-de-Marne...

     during May 1968
  • Giulia Grisi
    Giulia Grisi
    Giulia Grisi, also known as Madame De Candia was an Italian opera singer...

     – Italian opera singer. Her grave is marked under her married name Giulia de Candia.
  • Félix Guattari
    Félix Guattari
    Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...

     – French militant, institutional psychotherapist and philosopher
  • Jules Guesde
    Jules Guesde
    Jules Basile Guesde was a French socialist journalist and politician.Guesde was the inspiration for a famous quotation by Karl Marx. Shortly before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a letter to Guesde and Paul Lafargue, both of whom already claimed to represent "Marxist" principles...

     – French statesman
  • Yvette Guilbert
    Yvette Guilbert
    Yvette Guilbert was a French cabaret singer and actress of the Belle Époque.-Biography:...

     – actress and singer
  • Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
    Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
    Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a French physician who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it...

     – proposed the guillotine as the official method of execution in France
  • Yılmaz Güney
    Yilmaz Güney
    Yılmaz Güney, was a Kurdish film director, scenarist, novelist and actor from Turkey. Many of his works are devoted to the plight of ordinary, working class people in Turkey.- Biography :...

     – Kurdish
    Kurdish people
    The Kurdish people, or Kurds , are an Iranian people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey...

    /Turkish
    Turkish people
    Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

     actor, film director, scenarist and novelist

H

  • Melanie Hahnemann
    Melanie Hahnemann
    Marie Melanie d'Hervilly Gohier Hahnemann , was a French physician in homeopathy, married in 1835 to Samuel Hahnemann. She was the first female doctor in homeopathy....

     – French homeopathist, the first female doctor in homeopathy
  • Samuel Hahnemann
    Samuel Hahnemann
    Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician, known for creating an alternative form of medicine called homeopathy.- Early life :Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born in Meissen, Saxony near Dresden...

     – German physician, founder of homeopathy
    Homeopathy
    Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine in which practitioners claim to treat patients using highly diluted preparations that are believed to cause healthy people to exhibit symptoms that are similar to those exhibited by the patient...

  • Georges Haussmann – French civil engineer and town planner
  • Jeanne Hébuterne
    Jeanne Hébuterne
    Jeanne Hébuterne was a French artist, best known as the frequent subject and common-law wife of the artist Amedeo Modigliani.- Early life :...

     – French artist and common-law wife of the artist Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

  • Sadeq Hedayat – Iran
    Iran
    Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

    's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories
  • Heloïse – French abbess and scholar, best known for her love affair with Peter Abelard
    Peter Abelard
    Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...

  • Ticky Holgado
    Ticky Holgado
    Ticky Holgado , pseudonym of Joseph Holgado, was a French actor and a frequent collaborator with Jean-Pierre Jeunet....

     – French actor
  • Jean-Nicolas Huyot
    Jean-Nicolas Huyot
    Jean-Nicholas Huyot was a French architect, best known for his 1823 continuation of work on the Arc de Triomphe from the plans of Jean Chalgrin....

     – French architect best known for his work on the Arc de Triomphe
    Arc de Triomphe
    -The design:The astylar design is by Jean Chalgrin , in the Neoclassical version of ancient Roman architecture . Major academic sculptors of France are represented in the sculpture of the Arc de Triomphe: Jean-Pierre Cortot; François Rude; Antoine Étex; James Pradier and Philippe Joseph Henri Lemaire...


I

  • Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
    Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
    Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...

     – French painter
  • Jean-Baptiste Isabey
    Jean-Baptiste Isabey
    Jean-Baptiste Isabey was a French painter born at Nancy.At nineteen, after some lessons from Dumont, miniature painter to Marie Antoinette, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David...

     – French painter

J

  • Claude Jade
    Claude Jade
    Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade , was a French actress, known for starring as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses , Bed and Board and Love on the Run . Jade acted in theatre, film and television...

     – French actress
  • Léon Jouhaux
    Léon Jouhaux
    Léon Jouhaux was a French trade union leader who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.Jouhaux's father worked in a match factory in Aubervilliers. His secondary schooling ended when his father's earnings were stopped by a strike. He gained employment at the factory at age sixteen and immediately...

     – French trade union leader, won the Nobel Peace Prize
    Nobel Peace Prize
    The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.-Background:According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who...

     in 1951

K

  • Allan Kardec
    Allan Kardec
    Allan Kardec is the pen name of the French teacher and educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail . He is known today as the systematizer of Spiritism for which he laid the foundation with the five books of the Spiritist Codification.-Early life:Rivail was born in Lyon in 1804...

     – born Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, founder of Spiritism
    Spiritism
    Spiritism is a loose corpus of religious faiths having in common the general belief in the survival of a spirit after death. In a stricter sense, it is the religion, beliefs and practices of the people affiliated to the International Spiritist Union, based on the works of Allan Kardec and others...

  • Ahmet Kaya
    Ahmet Kaya
    Ahmet Kaya was a celebrated Turkish-Kurdish singer who died on November 16, 2000 in exile in Paris. He formerly sang in Turkish...

     – Turkish/Kurdish singer and songwriter and political exile
  • François Christophe de Kellermann
    François Christophe de Kellermann
    François Christophe Kellermann or de Kellermann, 1st Duc de Valmy was a French military commander, later the Général d'Armée, and a Marshal of France...

     – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • Thomas Read Kemp
    Thomas Read Kemp
    Thomas Read Kemp was an English property developer and politician. He was the son of Sussex landowner Thomas Kemp, whose farmhouse in Brighton was rented by the Prince of Wales in 1786.-Biography:...

     – English property developer and statesman
  • Henri Krasucki
    Henri Krasucki
    Henri Krasucki was a French trade-unionist, former secretary general of the Confédération générale du travail from 1982 to 1992.-Early life :...

     – French trade unionist
  • Rodolphe Kreutzer
    Rodolphe Kreutzer
    Rodolphe Kreutzer was a German violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer of forty French operas.-Biography:...

     – French violinist and composer

L

  • Jérôme Lalande
    Jérôme Lalande
    Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande was a French astronomer and writer.-Biography:Lalande was born at Bourg-en-Bresse...

     – French astronomer and writer
  • René Lalique
    René Lalique
    René Jules Lalique was a French glass designer known for his creations of perfume bottles, vases, jewellery, chandeliers, clocks and automobile hood ornaments. He was born in the French village of Ay on 6 April 1860 and died 5 May 1945...

     – French glass designer
    Glass art
    Studio glass or glass sculpture is the modern use of glass as an artistic medium to produce sculptures or three-dimensional artworks. Specific approaches include working glass at room temperature cold working, stained glass, working glass in a torch flame , glass beadmaking, glass casting, glass...

  • Édouard Lalo
    Édouard Lalo
    Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer.-Biography:Lalo was born in Lille , in northernmost France. He attended that city's music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berlioz's old enemy François Antoine Habeneck...

     – French composer
  • Theophanis Lamboukas
    Theophanis Lamboukas
    Theophanis Lamboukas, known as Théo Sarapo , was the last husband of the French singer Édith Piaf. Formerly a hairdresser, he was 26 years old when he married the 46-year-old Piaf...

     – French actor and singer, husband of 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...

  • Francisco Largo Caballero
    Francisco Largo Caballero
    Francisco Largo Caballero was a Spanish politician and trade unionist. He was one of the historic leaders of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and of the Workers' General Union...

     – Former president of the Spanish II Republic.
  • Dominique Jean Larrey
    Dominique Jean Larrey
    Dominique Jean Larrey was a French surgeon in Napoleon's army and an important innovator in battlefield medicine.-Biography:...

     – French military surgeon
  • Clarence John Laughlin
    Clarence John Laughlin
    Clarence John Laughlin was a United States photographer best known for his surrealist photographs of the U.S. South.Laughlin was born in to a middle class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His rocky childhood, southern heritage, and interest in literature influenced his work greatly...

     – American Surrealist
    Surrealism
    Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

     photographer from New Orleans, Louisiana. His most famous published work was Ghosts Along the Mississippi.
  • Marie Laurencin
    Marie Laurencin
    Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. -Biography:Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres...

     – French painter
  • Charles-François Lebrun – French statesman
  • Alexandre Ledru-Rollin – French politician
  • Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély
    Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wely
    Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wely was a French organist and composer.-Short Biography:Lefébure-Wely played a major role in the development of the French symphonic organ style and was a close friend of the organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, inaugurating many new Cavaillé-Coll organs.He began to...

     – French organist and composer
  • François Joseph Lefebvre
    François Joseph Lefebvre
    François Joseph Lefebvre, First Duc de Dantzig was a French military commander during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and one of the original eighteen Marshals of the Empire created by Napoleon....

     – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • Ferdinand de Lesseps
    Ferdinand de Lesseps
    Ferdinand Marie, Vicomte de Lesseps, GCSI was the French developer of the Suez Canal, which joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas in 1869, and substantially reduced sailing distances and times between the West and the East.He attempted to repeat this success with an effort to build a sea-level...

     – French architect, designed the Suez Canal
  • Pierre Levegh
    Pierre Levegh
    Pierre Eugène Alfred Bouillin was a French sportsman and racing driver. He took the racing name Pierre Levegh in memory of his uncle, a pioneering driver who died in 1904...

     – French racing driver killed in the 1955 Le Mans disaster
    1955 Le Mans disaster
    The 1955 Le Mans disaster occurred during the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans motor race, when a crash caused large parts of racing car debris to fly into the crowd. The driver was killed, as were 83 spectators. A further 120 people were injured...

  • Jean-François Lyotard
    Jean-François Lyotard
    Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...

     – French philosopher

M

  • Jacques MacDonald – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • William Madocks
    William Madocks
    William Alexander Madocks was a landowner and Member of Parliament for the town of Boston in Lincolnshire from 1802 to 1820, and then for Chippenham in Wiltshire from 1820 to 1826...

     – English landowner and statesman
  • Milosz Magin
    Milosz Magin
    Miłosz Magin was a Polish composer and pianist.Born in Lodz, Poland, Milosz Magin showed considerable musical abilities from early childhood. He was a student of piano with Margerita Trombini-Kazuro and composition with both Kazimierz Sikorski and Jan Maklakiewicz; the latter he considered his...

     – Polish composer
  • Nestor Makhno
    Nestor Makhno
    Nestor Ivanovych Makhno or simply Daddy Makhno was a Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader turned army commander who led an independent anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War....

     – Ukrainian Anarchist revolutionary
  • Jacques-Antoine Manuel
    Jacques-Antoine Manuel
    Jacques-Antoine Manuel was a French lawyer, politician, and noted orator.-Biography:Jacques-Antoine Manuel was born in the hamlet of La Conchette, in Enchastrayes , near Barcelonette. His family included judges and attorneys who had established careers in the Ubaye Valley...

     – French lawyer and statesman
  • Auguste Maquet
    Auguste Maquet
    Auguste Maquet was a French author, best known as the chief collaborator of French novelist Alexandre Dumas, père, co-writing such works as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers....

     – French author
  • Marcel Marceau
    Marcel Marceau
    Marcel Marceau was an internationally acclaimed French actor and mime most famous for his persona as Bip the Clown.-Early years:...

     – French mime artist
  • Angelo Mariani – French chemist
  • Célestine Marié – French opera singer
  • André Masséna
    André Masséna
    André Masséna 1st Duc de Rivoli, 1st Prince d'Essling was a French military commander during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars....

     – French military commander and Marshal of France
  • Georges Méliès
    Georges Méliès
    Georges Méliès , full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects...

     – French filmmaker; produced A Trip to the Moon
  • Émile-Justin Menier
    Emile-Justin Menier
    Émile-Justin Menier French pharmaceutical manufacturer, chocolatier, and politician, was born in Paris. In 1853, on the death of his father, Antoine, Émile-Justin Menier inherited a large and successful Parisian company that manufactured a range of medicinal powders.His father's company also...

     – French chocolatier
  • Henri Menier
    Henri Menier
    Henri Emile Anatole Menier was a French businessman and adventurer and a member of the Menier family of chocolatiers. Born in Paris, he was the son of Emile-Justin Menier and grandson to Antoine Brutus Menier who founded the Menier Chocolate company...

     – French chocolatier
  • Antoine Brutus Menier
    Antoine Brutus Menier
    Jean-Antoine Brutus Menier was a French entrepreneur and founder of the Menier family of chocolatiers. Born in Germain-de-Bourgeuil, Indre-et-Loire, he was the third child in a family of merchants. In 1811 Antoine Brutus Menier was enrolled in the La Flèche Military Academy where he studied the...

     – French chocolatier
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...

     – French philosopher
  • Cléo de Mérode
    Cléo de Mérode
    Cléo de Mérode was a French dancer of the Belle Époque.-Biography:Cléopatra Diane de Mérode was born in Paris, France, the daughter of the Austrian landscape painter, Karl von Merode . The painter belonged to a famous Belgian noble family 'de Mérode'...

     – French dancer
  • Stuart Merrill
    Stuart Merrill
    Stuart Fitzrandolph Merrill was an American poet, born in Hempstead, New York, who wrote mostly in the French language. He belonged to the Symbolist school. His principal books of poetry were Les Gammes . Les Fastes , and Petits Poèmes d'Automne .-Life:Merrill was the product of a conservative,...

     – American symbolist poet
  • Charles Messier
    Charles Messier
    Charles Messier was a French astronomer most notable for publishing an astronomical catalogue consisting of deep sky objects such as nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 110 "Messier objects"...

     – French astronomer, publisher of Messier's catalogue
  • Jules Michelet
    Jules Michelet
    Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...

     – French historian
  • Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

     – Italian painter and sculptor. Famous for his intense rivalry with Pablo Picasso.
  • 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...

     – French playwright
  • Gustave de Molinari
    Gustave de Molinari
    Gustave de Molinari was an economist born in Belgium associated with French laissez-faire liberal economists such as Frédéric Bastiat and Hippolyte Castille. Living in Paris, in the 1840s, he took part in the "Ligue pour la Liberté des Échanges" , animated by Frédéric Bastiat...

     – Belgian-born economist associated with French laissez-faire liberal economists.
  • Silvia Monfort
    Silvia Monfort
    Silvia Monfort was a French actress and theatre director. Daughter of the sculptor Charles Favre-Bertin and wife of Pierre Gruneberg....

     – French comedienne
  • Gaspard Monge
    Gaspard Monge
    Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, revolutionary, and was inventor of descriptive geometry. During the French Revolution, he was involved in the complete reorganization of the educational system, founding the École Polytechnique...

     – French mathematician; remains later moved to the Panthéon
    Panthéon, Paris
    The Panthéon is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens...

  • 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...

     – film actor
  • Jim Morrison
    Jim Morrison
    James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...

     – American singer and songwriter with The Doors
    The Doors
    The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger...

    , author, and poet. Permanent crowds and occasional vandalism surrounding this tomb have caused tensions with the families of other, less famous, interred individuals. Contrary to rumor, the lease of the gravesite was upgraded from 30 year to perpetual by Morrison's parents; the site is regularly guarded (due to graffiti
    Graffiti
    Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

     and other nuisances).
  • 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 the French Resistance
    French Resistance
    The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

     during World War II who went missing after his arrest with several other Resistants at Caluire, Lyon in June 1943. Understood to have died on a train not far from Metz station in July that year, ashes 'presumed' to be his were interred at Père Lachaise after the war and then transferred to the Panthéon
    Panthéon, Paris
    The Panthéon is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens...

     in December 1964.
  • Marcel Mouloudji – French singer
  • Joachim Murat
    Joachim Murat
    Joachim-Napoléon Murat , Marshal of France and Grand Admiral or Admiral of France, 1st Prince Murat, was Grand Duke of Berg from 1806 to 1808 and then King of Naples from 1808 to 1815...

     – French Napoleonic general and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

    .
  • Alfred de Musset
    Alfred de Musset
    Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...

     – French poet, novelist, dramatist; love affair with George Sand
    George Sand
    Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...

     is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle

N

  • Félix Nadar
    Nadar (photographer)
    Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon , a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. Some photographs by Nadar are marked "P. Nadar" for "Photographie Nadar" .-Life: born in April 1820 in Paris...

     – a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist
  • Étienne de Nansouty
    Étienne Marie Antoine Champion de Nansouty
    Count Étienne-Marie-Antoine-Champion de Nansouty was a French cavalry commander during the French Revolutionary Wars who rose to the rank of General of Division in 1803 and subsequently held important military commands during the Napoleonic Wars. Of noble Burgundian descent, he was a student at...

     – General of Division, commander of the Guard cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars
    Napoleonic Wars
    The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

    .
  • Francine Navarro – crown princess of Montenegro
    Montenegro
    Montenegro Montenegrin: Crna Gora Црна Гора , meaning "Black Mountain") is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast and Albania to the...

    , wife of prince Nikola II. Petrović-Njegoš
  • Gérard de Nerval
    Gérard de Nerval
    Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...

     – French poet
  • Michel Ney
    Michel Ney
    Michel Ney , 1st Duc d'Elchingen, 1st Prince de la Moskowa was a French soldier and military commander during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He was one of the original 18 Marshals of France created by Napoleon I...

     – Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

    , Prince of the Moskowa
    Battle of Borodino
    The Battle of Borodino , fought on September 7, 1812, was the largest and bloodiest single-day action of the French invasion of Russia and all Napoleonic Wars, involving more than 250,000 troops and resulting in at least 70,000 casualties...

    , who fought in the French Revolutionary Wars
    French Revolutionary Wars
    The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...

     and the Napoleonic Wars
    Napoleonic Wars
    The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

  • Alwin Nikolais
    Alwin Nikolais
    Alwin Nikolais was an American choreographer.Nikolais studied piano at an early age and began his performing career as an organist accompanying silent films. As a young artist, he gained skills in scenic design, acting, puppetry and music composition...

     – American choreographer
  • Anna de Noailles – French poetess
  • Charles Nodier
    Charles Nodier
    Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier , was a French author who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, vampire tales, and the importance of dreams as part of literary creation, and whose career as a librarian is often underestimated by literary...

     – French writer
  • Victor Noir
    Victor Noir
    Victor Noir, , was a French journalist who is famous for the manner of his death and its political consequences...

     – journalist killed by Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte
    Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte
    Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte was born in Rome, Italy, the son of Lucien Bonaparte and his second wife Alexandrine de Bleschamp....

     in a dispute over a duel with Paschal Grousset
    Paschal Grousset
    Jean François Paschal Grousset was a French politician, journalist, translator and science fiction writer. Grousset published under the pseudonyms of André Laurie, Philippe Daryl, Tiburce Moray and Léopold Virey.Grousset was born in Corte, Corsica, and studied medicine before commencing a...

    . The tomb, designed by Jules Dalou
    Jules Dalou
    Aimé-Jules Dalou was a French sculptor, recognized as one of the most brilliant virtuosos of nineteenth-century France, admired for his perceptiveness, execution, and unpretentious realism.-Life:...

    , is notable for the realistic portrayal of the dead Noir.
  • Cyprian Norwid
    Cyprian Norwid
    Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a.k.a. Cyprian Konstanty Norwid is a nationally esteemed Polish poet, dramatist, painter, and sculptor. He was born in the Masovian village of Laskowo-Głuchy near Warsaw. One of his maternal ancestors was Polish King John III Sobieski.Norwid is regarded as one of the second...

     – Polish poet

O

  • Pascale Ogier
    Pascale Ogier
    Pascale Ogier was a French actress.Born Pascale Marguerite Cécile Claude Colette Nicolas in Paris, she was the daughter of a musician father and actress Bulle Ogier. Pascale also chose an acting career, first with appearances on stage...

     – French actress
  • Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione
    Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione
    Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione , better known as La Castiglione, was an Italian aristocrat who achieved notoriety as a mistress of Emperor Napoleon III of France...

     – famous Italian courtesan
  • Max Ophüls
    Max Ophüls
    Maximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...

     – German film director
  • Louis-Guillaume Otto
    Louis-Guillaume Otto
    Louis-Guillaume Otto was a French diplomat.-Life:...

     – French diplomat
  • Gholam Ali Oveissi – Iranian military commander and statesman
  • Andranik Ozanian – Armenian military commander and statesman

P

  • Émile Henry Fauré Le Page
    Fauré Le Page
    Fauré Le Page is a French firearms manufacturer established in Paris in 1717.This renowned house, founded by Louis Pigny remained in the same family until 1913...

     – French small-arms manufacturer
  • Jean Le Page
    Fauré Le Page
    Fauré Le Page is a French firearms manufacturer established in Paris in 1717.This renowned house, founded by Louis Pigny remained in the same family until 1913...

     – arquebusier et fourbisseur du Roi et de l'Empereur
  • Antoine Parmentier – French agronomist known for enunciating the dietary value of potatoes
  • Alexandre Ferdinand Parseval-Deschenes
    Alexandre Ferdinand Parseval-Deschenes
    Alexandre Ferdinand Parseval-Deschenes was a French admiral and senator.- Life :Born into an aristocratic family, Alexandre was the nephew of the mathematician Marc-Antoine Parseval and the Académicien François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison...

     – French admiral
  • François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison
    François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison
    François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison was a French poet. He was the eleventh occupant of the Académie française seat 1 in 1811. He is buried in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.- References :*...

     – French poet, uncle of the above
  • Christine Pascal
    Christine Pascal
    Christine Pascal was a French actress, writer and director.-Biography:Born in Lyon, Rhône, Pascal made her film debut at 21 in Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre , and began an association with Bertrand Tavernier with her next film, L'Horloger de Saint-Paul...

     – French actress
  • Adelina Patti
    Adelina Patti
    Adelina Patti was a highly acclaimed 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851 and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914...

     – Spanish-born opera singer
  • Robert Herbert, 12th Earl of Pembroke
    Robert Herbert, 12th Earl of Pembroke
    Robert Henry Herbert, 12th Earl of Pembroke and 9th Earl of Montgomery was a British nobleman in line for great estates and position as head of the distinguished Herbert family and heir to the earldom of Pembroke, but lived an irregular life in exile after a dissolute youth.-Early years:Herbert...

     – English aristocrat
  • Charles Percier
    Charles Percier
    Charles Percier was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer, who worked in a close partnership with Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, originally his friend from student days...

     – French Neo-classical architect
  • Georges Perec
    Georges Perec
    Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...

     – French author
  • Casimir Pierre Périer
    Casimir Pierre Perier
    Casimir Pierre Perier was a French statesman, President of the Council during the July Monarchy, when he headed the conservative Parti de la résistance .-Life:...

     – French statesman
  • Michel Petrucciani
    Michel Petrucciani
    Michel Petrucciani was a French jazz pianist.-Biography:...

     – French Jazz pianist
  • 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...

     – French singer
  • Christian Pineau
    Christian Pineau
    Christian Pineau was a noted French Resistance fighter.He was born in Chaumont-en-Bassigny, Haute-Marne, France and died in Paris.His father-in-law was the writer Jean Giraudoux, who was married to Pineau's mother...

     – French statesman
  • Roland Piquepaille
    Roland Piquepaille
    Roland Piquepaille was a technology writer, both for ZDNet and for his own blog, Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends, and a former software engineer at Silicon Graphics and Cray Research. Piquepaille was also a frequent contributor to Slashdot, and well known for his focus on how new...

     – French technology writer
  • Camille Pissarro
    Camille Pissarro
    Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...

     – French Impressionist painter
  • Ignace Pleyel – pianist
  • Elvira Popescu
    Elvira Popescu
    Elvira Popescu was a Romanian-born French stage and movie actress and theatre director.-Life and career:Born in Bucharest, Popescu studied drama at the Conservatorul de Artă Dramatică, under the guidance of Constantin Nottara and Aristizza Romanescu. She made her debut at the National Theatre...

     – Romanian actress
  • Francis Poulenc
    Francis Poulenc
    Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...

     – French composer
  • Antoine-Augustin Préault
    Antoine-Augustin Préault
    Antoine-Augustin Préault was a French sculptor of the Romanticism movement. Born in the Marais district of Paris, his name is often recorded as Auguste Préault by which he was known during his lifetime....

     – French sculptor
  • Marcel Proust
    Marcel Proust
    Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

     – French novelist, essayist and critic
  • Pierre-Paul Prud'hon – French painter


R

  • Mademoiselle Rachel
    Rachel (actress)
    Elisabeth "Eliza, or Élisa" Rachel Félix , better known only as Mademoiselle Rachel , was a French actress....

     – French actress
  • François-Vincent Raspail
    François-Vincent Raspail
    François-Vincent Raspail was a French chemist, naturalist, physiologist, and socialist politician.-Biography:...

     – French scientist and statesman; remains later moved to the Panthéon
    Panthéon, Paris
    The Panthéon is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens...

  • Pierre-Joseph Redouté
    Pierre-Joseph Redouté
    Pierre-Joseph Redouté , was a Belgian painter and botanist, known for his watercolours of roses, lilies and other flowers at Malmaison. He was nicknamed "The Raphael of flowers"....

     – Belgian botanic illustrator
  • Henri de Régnier
    Henri de Régnier
    Henri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....

     – French poet
  • Norbert Rillieux
    Norbert Rillieux
    Norbert Rillieux , an American inventor and engineer, is most noted for his invention of the multiple-effect evaporator, an energy-efficient means of evaporating water. This invention was an important development in the growth of the sugar industry...

     – American engineer, invented the multiple-effect evaporator
    Multiple-effect evaporator
    A multiple-effect evaporator, as defined in chemical engineering, is an apparatus for efficiently using the heat from steam to evaporate water. In a multiple-effect evaporator, water is boiled in a sequence of vessels, each held at a lower pressure than the last...

  • Étienne-Gaspard Robert
    Étienne-Gaspard Robert
    Étienne-Gaspard Robert , often known by the stage name of "Robertson", was a prominent Belgian stage magician and influential developer of phantasmagoria. He was described by Charles Dickens as "an honourable and well-educated showman"...

     – Belgian magician who performed under the stage name of Robertson
  • Jacob Roblès – Famous grave for the medallion Silence (1842) by Antoine-Augustin Préault
    Antoine-Augustin Préault
    Antoine-Augustin Préault was a French sculptor of the Romanticism movement. Born in the Marais district of Paris, his name is often recorded as Auguste Préault by which he was known during his lifetime....

  • Georges Rodenbach
    Georges Rodenbach
    Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...

     – Belgian poet
  • Jean Rollin
    Jean Rollin
    Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil was a French film director, actor, and novelist best known for his films in the fantastique genre such as the vampire film Le Viol du Vampire and the first French gore film Les Raisins de la Mort .-Early life:Jean Rollin was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine , France to...

     – French director and novelist
  • Jules Romains
    Jules Romains
    Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule , was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement...

     – French writer
  • Gioachino Rossini – Italian composer. In 1887, Rossini's remains were moved back to Florence
    Florence
    Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

    , but the crypt that once housed them (now dedicated to his memory) still stands in Perè Lachaise.
  • Edmond James de Rothschild
    Edmond James de Rothschild
    Baron Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild was a French member of the Rothschild banking family. A strong supporter of Zionism, his generous donations lent significant support to the movement during its early years, which helped lead to the establishment of the State of Israel.- Early years :A...

     – Baron of the Rothschild family
  • Salomon James de Rothschild
    Salomon James de Rothschild
    Salomon James de Rothschild was the fourth child of James Mayer de Rothschild, head of the Paris branch of the prominent Rothschild family of bankers.- Misspent Youth :...

     – son of James de Rothschild
  • Raymond Roussel
    Raymond Roussel
    Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau...

     – writer
  • Alphonse Royer
    Alphonse Royer
    Alphonse Royer, was a French author, dramatist and theatre manager, most remembered today for having written the librettos for Gaetano Donizetti's opera La favorite and Giuseppe Verdi's Jérusalem...

     – French poet and dramatist

S

  • Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi
    Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi
    Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi MD was an Iranian writer. He has published over forty books, representing his talents in the fiction genres of drama , the novel, the screenplay, and the short story in addition to the non-fiction genres of cultural...

     – Iran
    Iran
    Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

    ian socialist novelist and playwright
  • Countess Consuelo de Saint Exupéry – Salvadoran
    El Salvador
    El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...

     writer, wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry , was a French writer, poet and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of France's highest literary awards, and in 1939 was the winner of the U.S. National Book Award...

  • Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
    Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
    Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories...

     – French naturalist
  • Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
    Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
    Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology...

     – French sociologist
    Sociology
    Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

     who founded the "Saint-Simonian" movement
  • 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...

     – French singer
  • Yuliya Samoylova
    Yuliya Samoylova
    Countess Yuliya Pavlovna Samoylova was a granddaughter of Count Martyn Skavronskiy and the last scion of Skavronskiy family. She was born to Pavel von der Pahlen and Mariya Skavronskaya, but grew up in the house of Count Yuliy Litta due to early death of her mother...

     – Russian aristocrat
  • Jean-Baptiste Say
    Jean-Baptiste Say
    Jean-Baptiste Say was a French economist and businessman. He had classically liberal views and argued in favor of competition, free trade, and lifting restraints on business...

     – French economist
  • Victor Schoelcher
    Victor Schoelcher
    Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist writer in the 19th century and the main spokesman for a group from Paris who worked for the abolition of slavery, and formed an abolition society in 1834...

     – French statesman known for the abolition of slavery
  • Raymond Adolphe Séré de Rivières
    Raymond Adolphe Séré de Rivières
    Raymond Adolphe Séré de Rivières was a French military engineer and general whose ideas revolutionized the design of fortifications in France. He gave his name to the Séré de Rivières system of fortifications constructed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870...

     – French general and military engineer
  • Georges-Pierre Seurat
    Georges-Pierre Seurat
    Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising a technique of painting known as pointillism...

     – French painter of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and father of neo-impressionism
    Neo-impressionism
    Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition...

  • Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès – French clergyman, philosopher and statesman
  • 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...

     – Academy-award winning French actress.
  • William Sidney Smith – British admiral, of whom Napoleon Bonaparte said "That man made me miss my destiny".
  • Paul Signac
    Paul Signac
    Paul Signac was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style.-Biography:Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863...

     – French painter
  • Albert Soboul
    Albert Soboul
    Albert Marius Soboul was a French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was Chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation.-Early life and education:Albert Marius Soboul...

     – French historian
  • Eugène Spuller
    Eugène Spuller
    Eugène Spuller was a French politician and writer.He was born at Seurre , his father being a German who had married and settled in France. After studying law at Dijon, he went to Paris, where he was called to the bar, and became close to Léon Gambetta, collaborating with him in 1868 in the...

     – French politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Education
  • Serge Alexandre Stavisky – French financier
  • Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

     – American author
  • Elisabeta Alexandrovna Stroganova
    Elisabeta Alexandrovna Stroganova
    Baroness Elisabeta Alexandrovna Stroganova was a Russian aristocrat of the Stroganov family....

     – Francophile Russian aristocrat
  • Louis Gabriel Suchet
    Louis Gabriel Suchet
    Louis Gabriel Suchet, 1st Duc d'Albufera was a Marshal of France and one of Napoleon's most brilliant generals.-Early career:...

     – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...


T

  • Eugenia Tadolini
    Eugenia Tadolini
    Eugenia Tadolini was an Italian operatic soprano. Admired for the beauty of her voice and stage presence, she was one of Donizetti's favourite singers. During her career she created over 20 leading roles, including the title roles in Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix and Maria di Rohan and Verdi's...

     – Italian opera singer
  • François-Joseph Talma
    François-Joseph Talma
    François Joseph Talma was a French actor.He was born in Paris. His father, a dentist, moved to London, gave him a good English education. He returned to Paris, where for a year and a half he practised dentistry...

     – French actor
  • Pierre Alexandre Tardieu
    Pierre Alexandre Tardieu
    Pierre Alexandre Tardieu was a French engraver. He was a member of the Institut de France, the Saint Petersburg Academy and the Academy of Milan. His students included Auguste Gaspard Louis Desnoyers...

     – French engraver
  • Gerda Taro
    Gerda Taro
    Gerda Taro was born into a Polish Jewish family living in Germany. She became a war photographer, and the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa...

     – German war photographer and the great love of Robert Capa
    Robert Capa
    Robert Capa was a Hungarian combat photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War...

    , also one of the iconographers of the Spanish Civil War. The monument is by Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...

    .
  • J. R. D. Tata
    J. R. D. Tata
    Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata was a pioneer aviator and important businessman of India. He was awarded India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna in 1992 and the Legion of Honour from the French government in 1954.-Early life and education:J. R. D...

     – Indian aviation pioneer and former head of Tata Group
    Tata Group
    Tata Group is an Indian multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Tata Group is one of the largest companies in India by market capitalization and revenue. It has interests in communications and information technology, engineering, materials, services, energy,...

    ; Bharat Ratna
    Bharat Ratna
    Bharat Ratna is the Republic of India's highest civilian award, awarded for the highest degrees of national service. This service includes artistic, literary, and scientific achievements, as well as "recognition of public service of the highest order." Unlike knights, holders of the Bharat Ratna...

     and Legion of Honour
  • Tapa Tchermoeff
    Tapa Tchermoeff
    Abdul "Tapa" Midgit Bey Ortsa Tchermoeff was the first and last Prime Minister of the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus. He was in office from May 11, 1918 until the entire government was forced into exile by the advancing Bolsheviks in 1921...

     – First Prime Minister of the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus
    Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus
    The Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus was a short-lived state situated in the Northern Caucasus...

  • Thomas Tellefsen
    Thomas Tellefsen
    Thomas Dyke Acland Tellefsen was a Norwegian pianist and composer.Thomas Tellefsen was born in Trondheim, Norway, where he studied with his father, the organist Johan Christian Tellefsen, and with Ole Andreas Lindeman. Thomas gave his first public concert in his home town at age 18...

     – Norwegian pianist and composer
  • Ruben Ter-Minasian
    Ruben Ter-Minasian
    Ruben Ter Minassian was born in 1882 in Akhalkalak to Armenian parents who had migrated from Erzerum. Higher education at Gevorgian seminary, Echmiadzin and Lazarian Institute, Moscow. Returned to the Caucasus in 1903. He was an Armenian Revolutionary and later, a politician...

     – Armenia
    Armenia
    Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...

    n politician and a revolutionary, member of Armenian Revolutionary Federation
    Armenian Revolutionary Federation
    The Armenian Revolutionary Federation is an Armenian political party founded in Tiflis in 1890 by Christapor Mikaelian, Stepan Zorian, and Simon Zavarian...

     ARF Tashnag
  • Adolphe Thiers
    Adolphe Thiers
    Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French politician and historian. was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871...

     – French historian and statesman
  • Maurice Thorez
    Maurice Thorez
    thumb|A Soviet stamp depicting Maurice Thorez.Maurice Thorez was a French politician and longtime leader of the French Communist Party from 1930 until his death. He also served as vice premier of France from 1946 to 1947....

     – French Communist politician
  • Isaac Titsingh
    Isaac Titsingh
    Isaac Titsingh FRS was a Dutch surgeon, scholar, merchant-trader and ambassador.During a long career in East Asia, Titsingh was a senior official of the Dutch East India Company . He represented the European trading company in exclusive official contact with Tokugawa Japan...

     – Dutch surgeon, scholar, VOC
    Dutch East India Company
    The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

     trader, ambassador to Qing China
    Qing Dynasty
    The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....

     and Tokugawa Japan
    Edo period
    The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

  • Alice B. Toklas
    Alice B. Toklas
    Alice B. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century.-Early life, relationship with Gertrude Stein:...

     – American author, partner of Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

    , Toklas' name and information is etched on the other side of Stein's gravestone in the same sparse style and font.
  • Marie Trintignant
    Marie Trintignant
    -Early life:She was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, the daughter of actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and his second wife Nadine Marquand. She first appeared on screen aged 4 in her mother's film, My Love, My Love. When Marie's baby sister Pauline died when Marie was 8, she became withdrawn and virtually...

     – French actress
  • Maurice Tourneur
    Maurice Tourneur
    Maurice Tourneur was an important international film director and screenwriter.-Life:Born Maurice Thomas in the Belleville district of Paris, France, his father was a jeweler. As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator but was soon drawn to the...

     – French film director
  • Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
    Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
    Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina , nicknamed El Jefe , ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, otherwise ruling as an unelected military strongman...

     – former dictator of the Dominican Republic



V

  • Paul Vaillant-Couturier
    Paul Vaillant-Couturier
    Paul Vaillant-Couturier was a French author, journalist and politician. He studied history and law but very early, in 1912, he began writing...

     – French political journalist
  • Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
    Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
    Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was a French painter.Valenciennes worked in Rome from 1778 to 1782, where he made a number of landscape studies directly from nature, sometimes painting the same set of trees or house at different times of day...

     – French painter
  • Jules Vallès
    Jules Vallès
    Jules Vallès was a French journalist and author.-Early life:Vallès was born in Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire. His father was a supervisor of studies , later a teacher, and unfaithful to Jules' mother. Jules was a brilliant student...

     – French writer
  • Louis Verneuil
    Louis Verneuil
    Louis Jacques Marie Collin du Bocage , better known by the pen name Louis Verneuil, was a French playwright, screenwriter, and actor....

     – French playwright
  • Claude Victor-Perrin – French military commander and Marshal of France
    Marshal of France
    The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...

  • Louis Visconti – French architect best known for designing the modern Louvre
    Louvre
    The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

     and Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides
    Les Invalides
    Les Invalides , officially known as L'Hôtel national des Invalides , is a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's...

  • Dominique Vivant
    Dominique Vivant
    Dominique Vivant, Baron de Denon was a French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist. He was appointed first director of the Louvre Museum by Napoleon after the Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801.-Biography:...

    , Baron de Denon – French artist, writer, diplomat and archaeologist. Located close to Chopin's grave.

W

  • Countess Marie Walewska – Napoleon's mistress, credited for pressing Napoleon to take important pro-Polish decisions during the Napoleonic Wars. Only her heart is entombed here; her other remains were returned to her native Poland.
  • Sir Richard Wallace – English art collector and philanthropist
  • Eduard Wiiralt
    Eduard Wiiralt
    Eduard Wiiralt was an Estonian artist.Eduard Wiiralt was born near St. Petersburg as the son of Estonian parents who worked on a Russian country estate...

     – Estonia
    Estonia
    Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

    n artist
  • Oscar Wilde
    Oscar Wilde
    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

     – Irish novelist, poet and playwright. By tradition, Wilde's admirers kiss the Art Deco
    Art Deco
    Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

     monument while wearing red lipstick, though this practice will no longer be allowed due to the damage it has caused to his tomb, which had to be repaired and encased in glass. Wilde died in 1900 and was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux
    Cimetière de Bagneux
    Located to the southwest of the city of Paris, France, the Cimetière de Bagneux is located at 44, avenue Marx-Dormoy, in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine....

    . His remains were transferred in 1909 to Père Lachaise. The tomb is also the resting place of the ashes of Robert Ross, who commissioned the monument.
  • Jeanette Wohl
    Jeanette Wohl
    Jeanette Wohl was a longtime friend and correspondent of Ludwig Börne. She inherited the rights to his literary works after his death and edited his works...

     – French literary editor, longtime friend and correspondent of Ludwig Börne
  • Richard Wright
    Richard Wright (author)
    Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

     – American author, wrote Native Son
    Native Son
    Native Son is a novel by American author Richard Wright. The novel tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in Chicago's South Side ghetto in the 1930s...

    and other American classics


External links

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