Articles needing additional references from May 2017

Laurence_Chirac#Family.2C_early_life.2C_education.2C_and_early_career

Jacques René Chirac (French: [ʒak ʁəne ʃiʁak] ; UK: , US: ,; 29 November 1932 – 26 September 2019) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and 1986 to 1988, as well as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
After attending the École nationale d'administration, Chirac began his career as a high-level civil servant, entering politics shortly thereafter. Chirac occupied various senior positions, including minister of agriculture and minister of the interior. In 1981 and 1988, he unsuccessfully ran for president as the standard-bearer for the conservative Gaullist party Rally for the Republic (RPR). Chirac's internal policies initially included lower tax rates, the removal of price controls, strong punishment for crime and terrorism, and business privatisation. After pursuing these policies in his second term as prime minister, he changed his views. He argued for different economic policies and was elected president in 1995, with 52.6% of the vote in the second round, beating Socialist Lionel Jospin, after campaigning on a platform of healing the "social rift" (fracture sociale). Chirac's economic policies, based on dirigisme, allowing for state-directed investment, stood in opposition to the laissez-faire policies of the United Kingdom under the ministries of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, which Chirac described as "Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism".He was also known for his stand against the American-led invasion of Iraq, his recognition of the collaborationist French government's role in deporting Jews, and his reduction of the presidential term from seven years to five through a referendum in 2000. At the 2002 presidential election, he won 82.2% of the vote in the second round against the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was the last president to be re-elected until 2022.
In 2011, the Paris court declared Chirac guilty of diverting public funds and abusing public confidence, giving him a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Albrecht_Durer

Albrecht Dürer (; German: [ˈʔalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.

Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are more Gothic than the rest of his work. His well-known engravings include the three Meisterstiche (master prints) Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his woodcuts revolutionised the potential of that medium.
Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective, and ideal proportions.

Francois_Mitterand

François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand (26 October 1916 – 8 January 1996) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1981 to 1995, the longest holder of that position in the history of France. As a former Socialist Party First Secretary, he was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.
Due to family influences, Mitterrand started his political life on the Catholic nationalist right. He served under the Vichy regime during its earlier years. Subsequently he joined the Resistance, moved to the left, and held ministerial office several times under the Fourth Republic. Mitterrand opposed Charles de Gaulle's establishment of the Fifth Republic. Although at times a politically isolated figure, he outmanoeuvered rivals to become the left's standard bearer in the 1965 and 1974 presidential elections, before being elected president in the 1981 presidential election. He was re-elected in 1988 and remained in office until 1995.
Mitterrand invited the Communist Party into his first government, which was a controversial decision at the time. In the event, the Communists were boxed in as junior partners and, rather than taking advantage, saw their support erode. They left the cabinet in 1984. Early in his first term, he followed a radical left-wing economic agenda, including nationalisation of key firms and the introduction of the 39-hour work week, but after two years, with the economy in crisis, he somewhat reversed course. He instead pushed a socially liberal agenda with reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, and the end of a government monopoly in radio and television broadcasting. He faced major controversy in 1985 after ordering the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace vessel docked in Auckland. Mitterrand’s foreign and defense policies built on those of his Gaullist predecessors, except as regards their reluctance to support European integration, which he reversed. His partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, and he reluctantly accepted German reunification. During his time in office, he was a strong promoter of culture and implemented a range of costly "Grands Projets". He was the first French President to appoint a female Prime Minister, Édith Cresson, in 1991. Mitterrand was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into "cohabitation governments" with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac (1986–1988), and Édouard Balladur (1993–1995). Less than eight months after leaving office, he died from the prostate cancer he had successfully concealed for most of his presidency.
Beyond making the French Left electable, Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-mighty Communist Party. (As a share of the popular vote in the first presidential round, the Communists shrank from a peak of 21.27% in 1969 to 8.66% in 1995, at the end of Mitterrand's second term.)

Charles-Emile_Reynaud

Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the praxinoscope (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the zoetrope) and was responsible for the first projected animated films. His Pantomimes Lumineuses
premiered on 28 October 1892 in Paris. His Théâtre Optique film system, patented in 1888, is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used. The performances predated Auguste and Louis Lumière's first paid public screening of the cinematographe on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema.

José_María_García_Lahiguera

José María García Lahiguera (9 March 1903 – 14 July 1989) was a Spanish Roman Catholic who served as the Archbishop of Valencia from 1969 until his resignation came into effect in 1978. He established the Oblate Sisters of Christ the Priest.
Pope Benedict XVI approved his life of heroic virtue and conferred upon him the title of Venerable on 27 June 2011.

Mino_Doro

Mino Doro (6 May 1903 – 13 April 1992) was an Italian actor who appeared in more than a hundred films between 1932 and 1970. Doro generally played supporting and character roles. He appeared as a blackshirt in the 1934 Fascist propaganda film The Old Guard.In popular magazines of the 1930s, Doro was portrayed as the Italian equivalent of the American actor Clark Gable.

Samuel_Pozzi

Samuel Jean Pozzi (3 October 1846 – 13 June 1918) was a French surgeon and gynecologist. He was also interested in anthropology and neurology. He is remembered today for John Singer Sargent's portrait of him.
After studying medicine in Paris, Pozzi volunteered as a medic during the Franco-Prussian War. He later specialized in gynecological and abdominal surgery, establishing the first Chair of Gynecology in Paris in 1884, and performing the first gastroenterostomy in France. Pozzi was elected to the French Academy of Medicine in 1896, and co-founded the Revue de gynécologie et de chirurgie abdominale in 1897.
His personal life was marked by a tumultuous marriage, multiple affairs, and cultural interests, including friendships with notable figures such as Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust. In the political arena, Pozzi served as a senator for his hometown, Bergerac, and supported the controversial Alfred Dreyfus during his trial. He died in 1918, when a disgruntled patient fatally shot him.

Jacques_François

Henri Jacques Daniel Paul François (16 May 1920 – 25 November 2003), known as Jacques François was a French actor. During a sixty-year career (1942–2002) he appeared in more than 120 films and over 30 stage productions. In 1948 he went to Hollywood with a view to playing the lead in Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) but the part went to Louis Jourdan. After appearing alongside Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the playwright Jacques Pierre Barredout in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) he returned to France.François regularly dubbed Gregory Peck into French.
During World War II, he served as a captain in the French First Army under General de Lattre.

Patrick_Haemers

Patrick Haemers (2 November 1952, Schaerbeek – 14 May 1993) was a Belgian criminal who was member of a gang which carried out robberies of security vans and kidnapped former Belgian prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants.