Paul-Louis Simond (30 July 1858 – 3 March 1947) was a French physician, chief medical officer and biologist whose major contribution to science was his demonstration that the intermediates in the transmission of bubonic plague from rats to humans are the fleas Xenopsylla cheopis that dwell on infected rats.
Nelson Monfort (born March 12, 1953) is a French sports journalist, linguist and television host.
Berty Albrecht (15 February 1893 – 31 May 1943) was a French feminist and French Resistance martyr of the Second World War.
Théodore André Monod (9 April 1902 – 22 November 2000) was a French naturalist, humanist, scholar and explorer.
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.
Renaud Pierre Manuel Séchan (French pronunciation: [ʁəno pjɛʁ manɥɛl seʃɑ̃]; born 11 May 1952 in Paris), known as Renaud, is a French singer-songwriter.
With twenty-six albums to his credit, selling nearly twenty million copies, he is one of France's most popular singers. Several of his songs are popular classics in France, including the sea tale "Dès que le vent soufflera", the irreverent "Laisse béton", the ballad "Morgane de toi" and the nostalgic "Mistral gagnant". His songs, with their slang lyrics and idiosyncratic Parisian phrasing, deal with both light and serious themes, alternating humor, emotion, and social criticism.
Although he enjoyed great success in France in the 70s, 80s and 90s, his career took a roller-coaster ride thereafter, with the singer regularly falling victim to depression and alcoholism, ailments he recounts in various songs. His work remains little known outside the French-speaking world.
He also appeared in several films, including Claude Berri's adaptation of Germinal in 1993.
Although his political stance has provoked controversy, he has nicknamed himself "le chanteur énervant" (the irritating singer), due to his many commitments to causes such as human rights, ecology, and anti-militarism, which are frequently reflected in his songs.
Olivier Metzner (22 November 1949 – 17 March 2013) was a French criminal lawyer.
Jacques Perret was a French architect in the service of the Catholic King Henry IV of France. He was a Huguenot, from the Savoie.
In July 1601, he published a sequence of 22 plates, engraved by Thomas de Leu, and a textual commentary, Des Fortifications et Artifices Architecture et Perspective. Perret offered his work, a series of ideal city plans with fortifications, to the service of the king.
The plans themselves are unremarkable as descendants of the Italian Renaissance penchant for radially symmetrical city design (e.g. Filarete's Sforzinda); what makes Perret's work noteworthy is the compulsive ornamentation of the city walls with biblical quotes, particularly from the psalms. His closest French Protestant predecessor was Bernard Palissy, better known for his work in ceramics, who includes a similar city in an appendix to his 1563 Recette véritable, a garden based on the psalms. Perret's choice of texts also favors the psalms, reinforcing his identity as a Protestant. One statement that shows up repeatedly is, "In God alone is there repose and true happiness," implying that worldly fortifications are useless even against worldly dangers. Several inscriptions carry variations on the theme of the king as God's delegated punisher of evil and protector of the good, an idea with a personal stake for the Calvinist Perret in a Catholic and often hostile France.
René Maurice Fréchet (French: [ʁəne mɔʁis fʁeʃɛ, moʁ-]; 2 September 1878 – 4 June 1973) was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionals on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.