French archaeologists

François Lenormant (17 January 1837 – 9 December 1883) was a 19th-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist and archaeologist.

Colonel Marie Augstin Gaston Cros (known as Gaston Cros) (6 October 1861 – 10 May 1915) was a French army officer and archaeologist. He was born in Alsace and was displaced when that territory was incorporated into the German Empire. He joined the French Army as a lieutenant and saw action in Tonkin before spending several years surveying in Tunisia, receiving the honours of membership of Vietnamese and Tunisian orders and appointment as a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1901 Cros was appointed head of the French archaeological expedition to Girsu, Iraq to continue the work of Ernest de Sarzec. His work over the next five years included the tracing of the 32.5 feet (9.9 m) thick city wall and for his work there received a letter of commendation from Gaston Doumergue, the Minister of Fine Arts, and the award of the Golden Palms of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel, Cros served in the French protectorate of Morocco from 1913, seeing action in the Zaian War.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War Cros was recalled to metropolitan France and fought in defence of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne, leading an ad hoc unit of zouaves and tirailleurs. He was wounded and spent two days directing his troops from a horse-drawn carriage before he was forced to leave his command. On 15 September 1914 he was promoted to colonel and subsequently received command of the 2nd Moroccan Brigade which he led at the Battle of the Yser and the Second Battle of Artois. It was at Artois that he was killed in a German counter-attack. Cros' name is recorded alongside that of Colonel Pein, who commanded the 1st Moroccan Brigade at Artois, on the Moroccan Division Memorial at Vimy.

Louis Charles Émile Lortet (22 August 1836 – 26 December 1909) was a French physician, botanist, zoologist and Egyptologist who was a native of Oullins.
He earned his medical doctorate in 1861, and his degree in natural sciences in 1867. He served as premier doyen at the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon from 1877 until 1906. Also, from 1868 to 1909, he was director of the natural history museum in Lyon.
Lortet is remembered for his scientific and zoological expeditions to the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon and Egypt). He performed studies of mummified animals from the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and in 1880 took part in an excavation of a Phoenician necropolis.
Lortet was a member of numerous scientific societies, such as the Société de géographie de Lyon, being a founding member in 1858. Species with the epithet of lorteti are named in his honor; an example being the pufferfish species Carinotetraodon lorteti.

André Laronde (19 June 1940, in Grenoble – 1 February 2011, in Paris) was a French historian and archaeologist. He was a specialist of Greek settlements in Cyrenaica (now Libya).

Henry de Lumley (born 1934 in Marseille) is a French archeologist, geologist and prehistorian. He is director of the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, and Professor Emeritus at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is also a corresponding member of the Academy of Humanities of the Institute of France and former director of the French National Museum of Natural History. He is best known for his work on archeological sites in France and Spain, notably Arago cave in Tautavel, Southern France, Terra Amata in Nice and Grotte du Lazaret near Nice, and Baume Bonne at Quinson, where some of the earliest evidence of man in Europe were found.

Benjamin Fillon (15 March 1819 – 23 May 1881) was a French numismatist and archaeologist. Much of his lifetime's work was devoted to researching the French mathematician, Franciscus Vieta, a key figure in developing new algebra.

Claude Sosthene Grasset d'Orcet (6 June 1828 at Aurillac – 2 December 1900 at Cusset) was a French archaeologist, writer, exponent of the esoteric and founder of the study of French mythology.

Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien (French: [ʁavɛsɔ̃ mɔljɛ̃]; 23 October 1813 – 18 May 1900) was a French philosopher, 'perhaps France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century'. He was originally and remains more commonly known as Félix Ravaisson.His 'seminal' 'key' work was De l’habitude (1838), translated in English as Of Habit. Ravaisson's philosophy is in the tradition of French Spiritualism, which was initiated by Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) with the essay "The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking" (1802). However, Ravaisson developed his doctrine as what he called 'spiritualist realism' and 'spiritualist positivism', and – according to Ravaisson scholar Mark Sinclair – can be thought of as founding 'the school of contingency'. His most well known and influential successor was Henri Bergson, with whom the tradition can be seen to end during the 1930s; although the 'lineage' of this 'philosophy of life' can be seen to return in the late twentieth century with Gilles Deleuze. Ravaisson never worked in the French state university system, in his late 20s declining a position at the University of Rennes. In 1838 he was employed as the principle private secretary to the Minister of Public Instruction, going on to secure high-ranking positions such as Inspector General of Libraries, and then the Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Louvre. Later in his life he was appointed as the President of the Jury of the Aggregation of philosophy in France, 'a position of considerable influence'. Ravaisson, was not only a philosopher, classicist, archivist, and educational administrator, but also a painter exhibiting under the name Laché.

Charles-Jean-Melchior de Vogüé (18 October 1829 – 10 November 1916) was a French archaeologist, diplomat, and member of the Académie française in seat 18.