Lyc\u00e9e Janson-de-Sailly alumni

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing (UK: ZHIH-skar dess-TÃ(N), US: zhih-SKAR-, French: [valeʁi ʁəne maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ʒiskaʁ dɛstɛ̃] ; 2 February 1926 – 2 December 2020), also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981.After serving as Minister of Finance under prime ministers Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Pierre Messmer, Giscard d'Estaing won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party. His tenure was marked by a more liberal attitude on social issues—such as divorce, contraception and abortion—and by attempts to modernise the country and the office of the presidency, notably overseeing such far-reaching infrastructure projects as the TGV and the turn towards reliance on nuclear power as France's main energy source. Giscard d'Estaing launched the Grande Arche, Musée d'Orsay, Arab World Institute and Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie projects in the Paris region, later included in the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand. He promoted liberalisation of trade. However, his popularity suffered from the economic downturn that followed the 1973 energy crisis, marking the end of the "Trente Glorieuses" (thirty "glorious" years of prosperity after 1945). He imposed austerity budgets, and allowed unemployment to rise in order to avoid deficits. Giscard d'Estaing in the centre faced political opposition from both sides of the spectrum: from the newly unified left under Mitterrand and a rising Jacques Chirac, who resurrected Gaullism on a right-wing opposition line. In 1981, despite a high approval rating, he was defeated in a runoff against Mitterrand, with 48.2% of the vote.
As president, Giscard d'Estaing promoted cooperation among the European nations, especially in tandem with West Germany. As a former president, he was a member of the Constitutional Council. He also served as president of the Regional Council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004. Involved with the process of European integration, he notably presided over the Convention on the Future of Europe that drafted the ill-fated Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. In 2003, he was elected to the Académie Française, taking the seat that his friend and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor had held. He died at the age of 94, and is the longest-lived French president in history.

Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros (French pronunciation: [ʁɔlɑ̃ ɡaʁos]; 6 October 1888 – 5 October 1918) was a French aviation pioneer and fighter pilot. Garros began a career in aviation in 1909 and performed many early feats before joining the French army and becoming one of the earliest fighter pilots during World War I. Garros was shot down on 5 October 1918. In 1928, the Roland Garros tennis stadium was named in his memory; the French Open tennis tournament takes the name of Roland Garros, which is held in this stadium.

Claude Perdriel (born 25 October 1926) is owner-manager of the Perdriel Group that publishes Sciences et Avenir, Challenges, Rue89 and during 1970–1980, the Paris daily Le Matin de Paris. It also published Le Nouvel Observateur from its foundation in 1964 to 2014 when it was sold to a group of investors that already published Le Monde.

Christian Dubois-Millot, pen name Christian Millau (French pronunciation: [kʁistjɑ̃ mijo], 30 December 1928 – 5 August 2017), was a French food critic and author.
Born in Paris, he began his career as a journalist in the "interior policy" department of Le Monde newspaper. In 1965 he founded the Gault Millau restaurant guide Le Nouveau Guide with Henri Gault and André Gayot. He launched the famed Gault & Millau guide in 1969 with Henri Gault, which helped galvanise the movement of young French chefs developing lighter, more inventive and beautiful looking dishes. Some 100,000 copies of the guide were sold that year. He was originally slated to be one of the judges at the historic Judgment of Paris wine tasting event of 1976 but was replaced by his brother Claude Dubois-Millot.His friends announced his death on 7 August 2017 at the age of 88.

Pierre Assouline (born 17 April 1953) is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco to a Jewish family. He has published several novels and biographies, and also contributes articles for the print media and broadcasts for radio.
As a biographer, he has covered a diverse and eclectic range of subjects, including:

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photographer
Marcel Dassault, the aeronautics pioneer
Gaston Gallimard, the publisher
Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the art dealer
Georges Simenon, the detective novelist and creator of Inspector MaigretSeveral of these books have been translated into English and the Henri Cartier-Bresson biography has been translated into Chinese.
As a journalist, Assouline has worked for the leading French publications Lire and Le Nouvel Observateur. He also publishes a blog, "La république des livres".

WikipediaAssouline was the editor of La Révolution Wikipédia, a collection of essays by postgraduate journalism students under his supervision. Assouline contributed the preface.On 7 January 2007, Assouline published a blog post criticizing the Wikipedia entry on the Dreyfus Affair.

Jacques José Mardoché Attali (French pronunciation: [ʒak atali]; born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant.
A very prolific writer, Attali published 86 books in 54 years, between 1969 and 2023.
Attali served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991, and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1991 to 1993. In 1997, upon the request of education minister Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the higher education degrees system. From 2008 to 2010, he led the government committee on how to ignite the growth of the French economy, under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Attali co-founded the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the development of new technologies. He also founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, now called Positive Planet, and is the head of Attali & Associates (A&A), an international consultancy firm on strategy, corporate finance and venture capital. Interested in the arts, he has been nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has published more than fifty books, including Verbatim (1981), Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom (1999), and A Brief History of the Future (2006).
In 2009, Foreign Policy called him as one of the top 100 "global thinkers" in the world.

Alain Decaux (23 July 1925 − 27 March 2016) was a French historian. He was elected to the Académie française on 15 February 1979.
In 2005, he was, with others authors as Frédéric Beigbeder, Mohamed Kacimi, Richard Millet and Jean-Pierre Thiollet, among the Beirut Book Fair's main guests in the Beirut International Exhibition & Leisure Center, commonly (BIEL).

François Furet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa fyʁɛ]; 27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University of Chicago.
Furet was elected to the Académie française in March 1997, just three months before he died in July.

Philippe Ariès (French: [filip aʁjɛs]; 21 July 1914 – 8 February 1984) was a French medievalist and historian of the family and childhood, in the style of Georges Duby. He wrote many books on the common daily life. His most prominent works regarded the change in the western attitudes towards death.

François d'Astier de La Vigerie (7 March 1886 – 9 October 1956) was a French military leader during two World Wars.His family were from Vivarais, and were ennobled in 1829 under the French Restoration. His father, le baron Raoul d'Astier de La Vigerie, was an artillery officer, and his mother, Jeanne, née Masson-Bachasson de Montalivet, was the granddaughter of Camille, comte de Montalivet, who had been Minister of the Interior under Louis-Philippe I of France. François d’Astier was brought up partly in Paris and partly at the Château de Rançay at Niherne.