Daniel Giraud (10 January 1946 – 6 October 2023) was a French essayist, translator, and poet. He was also a blues musician under the stage name Dan Giraud.
Giraud translated the poems of Oriental writers such as Li Bai, Hanshan, Ryōkan, and Sengcan. He also wrote works on Chan Buddhism, alchemy, and astrology.
Adrienne Bolland, born Boland, (25 November 1895 – 18 March 1975) was a French test pilot. She was the first woman to fly over the Andes between Chile and Argentina. She was later described as "France's most accomplished female aviator", setting a woman's record for loops done in an hour. The French government eventually recognized her with the Legion of Honor and other awards. Since her death, she has been commemorated with a postage stamp of Argentina.
Born into a large family outside Paris, she became a pilot in her twenties to pay off gambling debts. An early crossing of the English Channel led René Caudron, her employer, to send her to South America to demonstrate his planes, where she made her Andes crossing, assisted, she later said, by a tip relayed to her from a medium. Later in her life she became involved in leftist political causes, and eventually became part of the French Resistance.
Gérard d'Aboville (born 5 September 1945 in Paris) is the first man to row across two oceans solo: the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. He crossed the Atlantic in 1980, travelling from Cape Cod to Brittany. D'Aboville previously built boats and organized races before undertaking this 3,500 mile trip, which he completed in 72 days. In 1981, he was a recipient of the Silver Olympic Order.In 1991, at the age of 46 he spent 134 days crossing the Pacific Ocean, beginning in Japan and ending in Washington state. For this crossing, d'Aboville's twenty-six foot craft, nicknamed "Sector", had a pumping system to right the boat if it capsized, a sleeping place, and a canopy to protect him from inclement weather. The boat was made out of the light, sturdy composite material Kevlar, and had attached solar panels that charged the batteries of d'Aboville's radio. Items he brought included a video camera and stove. He faced forty foot waves and winds speeds reaching eighty miles per hour. In total, d'Aboville covered six thousand miles during his journey.
From 2010 to 2012 he skippered Tûranor PlanetSolar the first solar power yacht to circumnavigate the world.
He now skippers the yacht, renamed Race for Water from the name of the Foundation that now operates her. and they now work to protect the seas from plastic pollution.As a politician, d'Aboville served in Parliament from 1994 to 1999 and on the Committee on Fisheries. In 2008, he was elected a Council of Paris (UMP).
Marie Marvingt (20 February 1875 – 14 December 1963) was a French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements including those of swimming, cycling, mountain climbing, winter sports, ballooning, flying, riding, gymnastics, athletics, rifle shooting, and fencing. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. She was a record-breaking balloonist, an aviator, and during World War I she became the first female combat pilot. She was also a qualified surgical nurse, was the first trained and certified flight nurse in the world, and worked for the establishment of air ambulance services throughout the world. In 1903 M. Château de Thierry de Beaumanoir named her the fiancée of danger, which newspapers used to describe her for the rest of her life. It is also included on the commemorative plaque on the façade of the house where she lived at 8 Place de la Carrière, Nancy.
Alexandrine "Alexine" Pieternella Françoise Tinne (17 October 1835 – 1 August 1869) was a Dutch explorer in Africa who was the first European woman to attempt to cross the Sahara. She was an early photographer.
Pierre Antoine Muraccioli (born 4 June 1944), known professionally as Antoine, is a French pop singer, and also a sailor, adventurer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker.
As a musician, he was part of a new wave of mid-to-late 1960s French singer-songwriters, comparable in some ways to Bob Dylan or Donovan, but also evidencing some of the harder-edged garage rock style similar to The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and Them, and achieving some measure of pop stardom.
Beginning in the 1970s, he de-emphasized his musical endeavors (although he still writes and performs on occasion) in favor of a second career as a solo sailor and adventurer, which he has documented with many books and films.
Charles Bozon Jr. (15 December 1932 – 7 July 1964) was an alpine ski racer and world champion from France.Born in Chamonix, Haute-Savoie, Bozon won a gold medal in the slalom at the 1962 World Championships, held at his hometown of Chamonix in a snowstorm. Earlier, he had won a bronze medal in the slalom at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, and two world championship silver medals in the combined in 1956 and 1960.
Bozon suffered fractured vertebra in the giant slalom at the world championships in 1958 and vowed not to compete again. He did not compete in the Olympics in 1964.Bozon died in 1964 at age 31 in a mountain climbing accident near Mont Blanc. He and 13 climbing companions were killed in an avalanche on the Aiguille Verte, a 4,122-metre (13,524 ft) mountain in the Mont Blanc massif. The climbing party had reached an elevation of about 2,700 m (9,000 ft) when the avalanche occurred. Bozon's father, Charles, Sr., had died on the same slope in an avalanche in 1938.Less than three months earlier, an avalanche in Switzerland claimed the lives of two noted alpine racers, Buddy Werner of the U.S. and Barbi Henneberger of West Germany.
Stanley Davis Jones (June 5, 1914 – December 13, 1963) was an American songwriter and actor, primarily writing Western music. He is best remembered for writing "Ghost Riders in the Sky".
