French people of Flemish descent

Henri Philippe Bénoni Omer Joseph Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), commonly known as Philippe Pétain (, French: [filip petɛ̃]) or Marshal Pétain (French: Maréchal Pétain), was a general who commanded the French Army in World War I and became the head of the collaborationist regime of Vichy France, from 1940 to 1944, during World War II.
Pétain was admitted to the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1873 and pursued a career in the military, achieving the rank of colonel by the outbreak of World War I. He led the French Army to victory at the nine-month-long Battle of Verdun, for which he was called "the Lion of Verdun" (French: le lion de Verdun). After the failed Nivelle Offensive and subsequent mutinies, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief and succeeded in restoring control. Pétain remained in command for the rest of the war and emerged as a national hero. During the interwar period he was head of the peacetime French Army, commanded joint Franco-Spanish operations during the Rif War and served twice as a government minister. During this time he was known as le vieux Maréchal ("the Old Marshal").
On 17 June 1940, with the imminent Fall of France and the government desire for an armistice, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned, recommending to President Albert Lebrun that he appoint Pétain in his place, which he did that day, while the government was at Bordeaux. The government then resolved to sign armistice agreements with Germany and Italy. The entire government subsequently moved briefly to Clermont-Ferrand, then to the town of Vichy in central France. It voted to transform the French Third Republic into the French State, better known as Vichy France, an authoritarian puppet regime that was allowed to govern the southeast of France and which collaborated with the Axis powers. After Germany and Italy occupied all of France in November 1942, Pétain's government worked closely with the Nazi German military administration.
After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted for treason. He was originally sentenced to death, but due to his age and World War I service his sentence was commuted to life in prison. His journey from military obscurity, to hero of France during World War I, to collaborationist ruler during World War II, led his successor Charles de Gaulle to declare that Pétain's life was "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre".
Pétain, who was 84 years old when he became Prime Minister and later Chief of State, remains both the oldest person to become the head of government and the oldest person to become the head of state of France.

Renaud van Ruymbeke (born 19 August 1952) is an investigative magistrate, well known for specializing in political and financial corruption cases. He investigated the French-Taiwan Frigates Affair, which was related to the Clearstream, and the Urba Affair.

Paul-Henri Grauwin (1914–1989) was a medical doctor who served with the French Army. He most notably commanding the "Mobile Surgical Unit" during the prolonged Battle of Dien Bien Phu, after which he was taken prisoner and briefly held captive by the Viet Minh.
Of Flemish background, Grauwin served as a surgeon during the Second World War.
During the course of the First Indochina War, the French had established a base at Dien Bien Phu in late 1953. Grauwin, holding the rank of major, arrived in February 1954 to take charge of the 42-bed hospital unit there, conducting triage for evacuation and operating when necessary.After the Viet Minh siege began in early March, Grauwin was kept busy with large numbers of casualties that flooded his surgical bunker. While the airstrip at the base was still in use, he evacuated many of the injured back to Hanoi. Grauwin soon found his facilities overwhelmed with casualties who had to be put in the halls. In one night, he and another surgeon amputated twenty-three limbs, plastered fifteen fractures, and repaired numerous other wounds: ten abdominal, ten chest, and two cranial. At other times, shelling killed those waiting for medical attention.By the end of March Grauwin's hospital consisted of six shelters with 250 beds. Supplies dropped from the air included the contents of a United States field hospital with pyjamas, sheets, beds and vials of antibiotics. He also received two new aides: Private Fleury and Geneviève de Galard In the last week of April, with the airstrip no longer usable, Grauwin's hospital contained more than one thousand wounded, and he had begun using some of the women from the base's brothels as medical orderlies.By the end of the battle in May, Grauwin had more than 1,300 wounded in the makeshift wards of his hospital, and deprived by the shelling of electricity, was forced to operate by candlelight. With the fall of the base on 7 May, he was taken into captivity by the Viet Minh.
Grauwin remained in captivity until 1 June, when he and other French medical officers were exchanged for several hundred Vietnamese prisoners.In 1954, Grauwin published a memoir entitled J'étais médecin à Diên Biên Phu, which was translated into English in 1955 with the title Doctor at Dien Bien Phu.

Maurice de Vlaminck (4 April 1876 - 11 October 1958) was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense colour. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905.