Georges Simenon was actually Belgian ( born in Liege ) but ,of course, his greatest creation was that great Frenchman Inspector Maigret.
Well, right off the top of my head there’s:
Charles Boyer
Yves Montand
Honoré de Balzac
Pierre Boulle
Gustave Flaubert
Andre Gide
Èmile Zola
Jean-Marie Arouet dit Voltaire
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Louis Blériot
Roger Vadim
François Truffaut
Edith Piaf
Paul Gauguin
René Descartes
Michel Foucault
Jean-Paul Sartre
Auguste Rodin
Louis Agassiz
Antoine Lavoisier
Henri Poincaré
Alfred Dreyfus
Come on. Pepe Le Pew is every bit as real as Hercule Poirot.
Louis Braille
Juliette Binoche
Victor Hugo
Mon ami who provides content for a website I manage and who is unfailingly polite, friendly, and efficient
A lot of the above, and:
Juliette Binoche
Catherine Deneuve
Brigitte Bardot
Edith Piaf
Louis de Funes
Francois Lyotard
Not to be a spoiler in my first post, but wasn’t Eleanor of Aquitaine english?
This is a true statement.
Is Poirot supposed to be French, though?
Sorry, Geneviéve Bujold is Québecoise.
Well, Quebec is mostly French, right? Right?
Yes, Québec is about 80 % francophone. The simple fact that we speak French (the kanguage) doesn’t make us French (the people).
Nope. He’s from Belgium.
Eleanor married an English king (so sad that I can’t recall which one right now, he was one of the big-deal ones), but she herself was, as the name implies, from Aquitaine, which is part of Modern-day France.
I nominate Jacques-Louis David (painter), although he was buds with Robespierre during the Terror so maybe “admire” isn’t the right word.
Jacques Cartier, famous sea explorer. I grew up at the intersection of a street named for him and another named for Jeanne d’Arc. He landed in the Gaspé (in eastern Québec) planted a cross, and established fishing colonies. Jeanne was a woman who stirred up a lot of controversy in France a few centuries ago for, among other things, claiming to have been spoken to by God.
Samuel de Champlain who roamed across the wilds of what is now Canada, using nautical tools like a sextant to measure his position, traveling with Iroquois hunting parties, and going where no european yet had. He’s also the originator of the culinary tradition known as the ‘Order of Good Cheer’, that saved his fledgeling colony in the Gaspé from the bitter Canadian winter of 1622-1623.
Radisson & Groseillers, who traded, explored, and overall had a good time in the lands Champlain had been to.
General Montcalm, who wouldn’t acquiesce to British demands that he surrender Québec and served excellently during the seven years war. He died during the 1759 siege of Québec that ended in the battle lof the Plains of Abraham.
Georges Guynemer, famous WWI flying ace, 53 vicories. The pride of France in sad times.
Didn’t the Lumière Brothers more-or-less invent practical cinematography?
Some of may favourites, Sartre, Saint-Exupéry and DesCartes, ahve already been mentioned.
Right, Eleanor was French. though queen of England (she married Louis VII of France and after that Henri II of England). Makes her even more cool.
Eugene Delacroix (painter)
Virginie Ledoyen (actress)
René Guénon (1886-1951), the great metaphysician, who brought together in his studies the essential esoterisms of Hindu Vedanta, Sufi Islam, and Taoism. He was also a mathematician, as shown in his books The Principles of Infinitesmical Calculus and The Multiple States of Being. Guénon had an incalculable effect on esoteric studies in the 20th century and is still considered a pathbreaking exponent of traditional metaphysics, the first one to bring together what the different esoteric traditions shared in common. He was born at Blois in France and died at Cairo where he spent the last 20 years of his life as a Sufi.
Chirac
I admire Maurice Ravel the absolute most. He wasn’t as prolific as many of the other composers out there but everything that he published was a true masterpiece other than Bolero which was simply a training exercise that somehow gained popularity.
I second Chirac… and give a vote for the UN ambassador from France too… and also the whole damn country, for that matter
Emilie du Chatelet, eighteenth-century mathematician. She garnered a certain notoriety for being Voltaire’s mistress, but she deserves her own mention as a scholar in a time when women were not usually well-educated.
Although they’ve been mentioned, I am also terribly fond of Matisse and Renoir. I have prints from both of them on my walls.
I’d say Jean Moulin, a hero of the French resistance, a minor bureaucrat who allowed himself to be tortured to death rather than reveal information to the Nazis; and Pierre Seel, a gay man who survived deportation and torture by the Nazis, lived through shame, fear, and silence for forty years after the war, and finally as an old man came out, published his story (as I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual) and became an advocate for gay rights and the memory of the men with the pink triangle.
I stand corrected. Still, Bujold is hot.