French military personnel of World War II

André Maurois (French: [mɔʁwa]; born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog; 26 July 1885 – 9 October 1967) was a French author.

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.

Émile Allais (25 February 1912 – 17 October 2012) was a champion alpine ski racer from France; he won all three events at the 1937 world championships in Chamonix and the gold in the combined in 1938. Born in Megève, he was a dominant racer in the late 1930s and is considered to have been the first great French alpine skier.
Allais won the bronze medal in the combined (downhill and slalom), the only alpine medal event at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch, Germany. These Olympics were the first to award medals in alpine skiing. The previous year, he had won the silver medal in the downhill and combined at the 1935 world championships. In 1937 he was a triple world champion at Chamonix, France, winning all three events (downhill, slalom, and combined). The following year at Engelberg, Switzerland, he won the combined, and took silver in the downhill and slalom. He created the École Française de Ski which taught innovative methods of Anton Seelos (who was his trainer and instructor), characterised by parallel turns, controlling the speed by sideslipping, and turning by ruade (French: kick, back kick), i.e. kicking the backs of the skis up and pivoting on the tips while rotating the body in the direction of the turn. The École du Ski Français (ESF) is now the biggest Ski school in the world in terms of numbers of ski teachers, and is present in every single French ski resort, and even abroad.
After a spell in North and South America (Squaw Valley, California and Portillo, Chile) Allais held the post of technical director at Courchevel from 1954 to 1964, where he introduced many ideas from the U.S. regarding slope preparation and piste security. He later worked as a technical consultant for other resorts, notably La Plagne and Flaine. One of the Saulire couloirs at Courchevel is named after Allais.
As a consultant to Skis Rossignol, Allais helped to design the laminated-wood Olympic 41 ski (1941), and the first aluminum skis to win major ski races, the Métallais (1959) and Allais 60 (1960). The Olympic 41 later served as the basis of Rossignol's very successful Strato (1964).
In December 2005, 93-year-old Allais made the trip to the French Senate in Paris where he was honoured, along with a number of other ski instructors. His life has been all about skiing; he learned his skiing early, raced all over Europe, then coached the French Olympic ski team for seven years. Allais fought in World War II on skis, and even courted his wife at a ski meet. He turned 100 in February 2012.Allais died after an illness in a hospital in Sallanches in the French Alps on 17 October 2012.

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.)

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also UK: , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.
Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004 (when Fahrenheit 9/11 received the award). It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957.
From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.

Pierre Isaac Isidore Mendès France (French: [pjɛʁ mɑ̃dɛs fʁɑ̃s]; 11 January 1907 – 18 October 1982) was a French politician who served as prime minister of France for eight months from 1954 to 1955. As a member of the Radical Party, he headed a government supported by a coalition of Gaullists (RPF), moderate socialists (UDSR), Christian democrats (MRP) and liberal-conservatives (CNIP). His main priority was ending the Indochina War, which had already cost 92,000 lives, with 114,000 wounded and 28,000 captured on the French side. Public opinion polls showed that, in February 1954, only 7% of the French people wanted to continue the fight to regain Indochina out of the hands of the Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Mendès France negotiated a deal that gave the Viet Minh control of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, and allowed him to pull out all French forces. He is considered one of the most prominent statesmen of the French Fourth Republic.

Charles Paul Émile Hugot (1904–1993), known as Émile Hugot was a sugar technologist, manager of sugar factories and he wrote the standard text on engineering in sugar factories.

Édouard-Jean Réquin (13 July 1879, in Rouen – 1953) was a French military officer.Through 1900 to 1911 he was part of an expedition to North Africa. Then in 1916-1918 a member of the General Staff of Marshals Joseph Joffre and Ferdinand Foch. It is at this time that a portrait of Réquin in military uniform was made by Kees van Dongen in 1916. From 1917-1918, as a Lieutenant Colonel, he was part of the French military delegation to Washington, D. C. In the summer of 1918 he promoted the French Army's policy of racial integration. American military officials were impressed by Réquin's depiction of the situation in the French Army where whites and blacks served side by side and were cared for in the same hospitals and by the same personnel; they had his report La Course de l'Amérique à la Victoire published in English as America's race to victory (1919). In 1919 he was a technical counsellor at Versailles Peace Conference, and later author of Projet de Traité d'Assistance Mutuelle (1924). From 1930 he was French Military Representative at the League of Nations, and 1930-1932 Chief of Cabinet of Ministry of War.
In 1938 he became a member of France's Supreme War Council, then In World War II he was a general, from 2 September 1939 to 6 July 1940 he commanded the 4th French Army against the German invasion of France.
In 1941 he retired, and in 1945 became President of the Société de la Légion d'Honneur. He published three further works: Combats pour l'Honneur, a study on General Louis Archinard in the Sudan, Archinard et le Soudan (both 1946) and his memoirs D'une guerre à l'autre 1919-1939 (1949).

Rear Admiral André Jubelin (28 July 1906, Toulon – 7 May 1986, Sanary-sur-mer) was a French naval aviator who served with distinction in the French navy and the Fleet Air Arm during World War II. He was a pioneer of aircraft carrier operations, and after the war commanded the French aircraft carrier Arromanches.

Counter-admiral Gabriel Paul Auphan (November 4, 1894, Alès – April 6, 1982) was a French naval officer who became the State Secretary of the Navy (secrétaire d'État à la Marine) of the Vichy government from April to November 1942.