Members of the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise

Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier (15 August 1823 – 20 November 1908), French classical scholar, and secretary of the Académie française, was born at Nîmes.
The Roman monuments of his native town very early attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history. He made epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a professor of rhetoric at the University of Angoulême, where he lived and worked for ten years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was called to Paris to be professor at the Lycée Charlemagne.
He began his literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the life and work of Marcus Terentius Varro (1861). In 1861 he was made professor of Latin oratory at the Collège de France, and he became an active contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. In 1865 he published Cicéron et ses amis (Eng. trans. by AD Jones, 1897), which has enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome, Boissier had learned to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with exquisite vivacity.
In 1874 he published La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity. In L'Opposition sous les Césars (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus. By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of scholars and men of letters, and on the death of HJG Patin, the author of Études sur les tragiques grecs, in 1876, he was elected a member of the Académie française, of which he was appointed perpetual secretary in 1895.
His later works include Promenades archéologiques: Rome et Pompei (1880; second series, 1886); L'Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques (1901); La Fin du paganisme (2 vols, 1891); La Conjuration de Catilina (1905); Tacite (1903, Eng, trans. by WG Hutchison, 1906). He was a representative example of the French talent for lucidity and elegance applied with entire seriousness to weighty matters of literature. Though he devoted himself mainly to his great theme, the reconstruction of the elements of Roman society, he also wrote monographs on Madame de Sévigné (1887) and Saint-Simon (1892). He died in June 1908.

Georges Goyau (31 May 1869 – 25 October 1939) was a French historian and essayist specializing in religious history.

Henri Léon Emile Lavedan (9 April 1859 – 4 September 1940), French dramatist and man of letters, was born at Orléans, the son of Hubert Lavedan, a well-known Catholic and liberal journalist.
Lavedan contributed to various Parisian papers a series of witty tales and dialogues of Parisian life, many of which were collected in volume form. In 1891 he produced at the Théâtre Français Une Famille, followed at the Vaudeville in 1894 by Le Prince d'Aurec, a satire on the nobility, afterward renamed Les Descendants.He had a great success with Le Duel (Comédie-Française 1905), a powerful psychological study of the relations of two brothers, which was turned into a movie—The Duel—on which he was a co-writer. It was translated into English by Louis N. Parker and performed in New York in 1906 at the Hudson Theatre.Lavedan was admitted to the Académie française in 1898.

André Siegfried (April 21, 1875 – March 28, 1959) was a French academic, geographer and political writer best known to English speakers for his commentaries on American, Canadian, and British politics.
He was born in Le Havre, France, to Jules Siegfried, the French minister of commerce, and Julie Siegfried, the president of the National Council of French Women. An active member of the Democratic Republican Alliance like his father, André Siegfried was several times a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, but never won an election. On 23 January 1941, he was made a member of the National Council of Vichy France. A few months after the liberation of France in mid-1944, he was elected to the Académie française, taking the vacant seat of Gabriel Hanotaux (who had been elected in 1897). He died in Paris in March 1959.

Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris (French pronunciation: [ɡastɔ̃ paʁis]; 9 August 1839 – 5 March 1903) was a French literary historian, philologist, and scholar specialized in Romance studies and medieval French literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902, and 1903.

Henri-François-Joseph de Régnier (28 December 1864 – 23 May 1936) was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century.

Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé (pronounced [ɡabʁijɛl ʒɑ̃ batist ɛʁnɛst wilfʁid ləɡuve]; 14 February 1807 – 14 March 1903) was a French dramatist.

Octave Gréard (18 April 1828 – 25 April 1904) was a noted French educator.
Gréard was born in Vire, Calvados, educated at the École Normale Supérieure, and had a long career in education. He was largely responsible for the establishment of schools for girls and played a significant role in reforming the baccalauréat.
Gréard was elected member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1875 and the Académie française in 1886. A college bearing his name is located in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

Gabriel Paul Othenin de Cléron, comte d'Haussonville (21 September 1843 – 1 September 1924) was a French politician and author.

Albert Sorel (13 August 1842 – 29 June 1906) was a French historian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times.