Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Christian Dubois-Millot, pen name Christian Millau (French pronunciation: [kʁistjɑ̃ mijo], 30 December 1928 – 5 August 2017), was a French food critic and author.
Born in Paris, he began his career as a journalist in the "interior policy" department of Le Monde newspaper. In 1965 he founded the Gault Millau restaurant guide Le Nouveau Guide with Henri Gault and André Gayot. He launched the famed Gault & Millau guide in 1969 with Henri Gault, which helped galvanise the movement of young French chefs developing lighter, more inventive and beautiful looking dishes. Some 100,000 copies of the guide were sold that year. He was originally slated to be one of the judges at the historic Judgment of Paris wine tasting event of 1976 but was replaced by his brother Claude Dubois-Millot.His friends announced his death on 7 August 2017 at the age of 88.

Jean-David Levitte (born 14 June 1946) is a French diplomat who was France's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2000 to 2002 and Ambassador to the United States from 2002 to 2007. He was also a diplomatic advisor and sherpa to presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Levitte was born in Moissac, in the south of France. He is a graduate of Sciences Po and of the French National School of Oriental Languages, where he studied Chinese and Indonesian. He is married to Marie-Cécile Jonas and has two daughters.

Dominique Frémy (5 May 1931 – 2 October 2008) was the creator of the Quid encyclopedia. His spouse Michèle and son Fabrice participated in writing it as well.
Frémy attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. He was a diplomaed student of the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (English: Paris Institute of Political Studies) and of the Faculté des lettres de Paris. He was employed by Shell in London, but quit his job to produce a new encyclopedia with his wife, Dominique. It began in 1963, named Quid.

Jacques Dumesnil (born Marie Émile Eugène André Joly; 9 November 1903 – 8 May 1998) was a French film and television actor.

Marcel Conche (French: [maʁsɛl kɔ̃ʃ]; 27 March 1922 – 27 February 2022) was a French philosopher and emeritus professor at the Sorbonne University (Paris).

Jean-Philippe Henri Collard (born 27 January 1948) is a French pianist known for his interpretations of the works of Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns.

Jean-Philippe Douin (8 April 1940 – 19 January 2016) was a French Air Force general. He was the Chief of Staff of the French Air Force from 1994 to 1995 and Chief of the Defence Staff from 1995 to 1998. There was some controversy surrounding his appointment since, as a Conscript between 1958 and 1959, he had served in a French Marine Light Cavalry/Light Armored Reconnaissance Regiment (Régiment d'infanterie-chars de marine) in Algeria that was accused of committing war crimes during the Algerian War; later, as a young Air Force Lieutenant and Dassault Mirage III fighter pilot in 1961, his unit had taken part in the Algiers Putsch under the command of Air Vice Marashal Jouhaud. For most of his flying career, Douin piloted the Dassault Mirage III and the Dassault Mirage 5, commanding a squadron, wing and fighter group, before becoming the French Air Attache to Pakistan and Chile. After entering the General Ranks he served variously as a doctrinal specialist in the Air Force Staff & Training Command, the chief of Aerial Intelligence for a Fighter Division, and Commander of a Fighter Division.

Monique Loudières (born 15 April 1956) is a French ballet dancer and teacher. A member of the Paris Opera Ballet from 1967, she received the status of principal dancer in 1982. After retiring from the stage in 1996, she continued to accept invitations until 2010. From 2001 to 2008, she was artistic director at the École supérieure de danse de Cannes Rosella Hightower.

Claude Parent (26 February 1923 – 27 February 2016), born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, was a French architect.
Architect, polemicist and theoretician, Claude Parent was the first person in France to make a sharp epistemological break with modernism, beginning in the mid 1950s. Through articles, books, magnificent manifesto-drawings and built projects, his work has enabled us to rethink our understanding and evolve our grasp of space. From the Maison Drusch (1963) all the way to his project for the Musée du Prado (1995), he has sought to create discontinuity by shifting and tipping volumes and by fracturing of the plan. Essentially self-taught, he began his career with Ionel Schein, with whom he worked until 1955. He also participated in the Espace group, founded in 1951 by the artists André Bloc and Félix del Marle. The Architecture Principe group (1963–68) was born out of his encounter with Paul Virilio. As was the adventure of the oblique function, their innovation through the continuity of the inclined plane, which led to the construction of the l’Eglise Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay in Nevers (1966).
After the 1968 split with Virilio, Claude Parent continued to experiment, develop and build the oblique function into his projects (Claude Parent's own house in Neuilly, painter Andrée Bellaguet's apartment) as well as in temporary installations in several Maisons de la Culture (Culture centers in France in the late 60s). In 1970, he curates and designs the French Pavilion at the 35th Venice Art Biennale, Italy, inviting artists such as Gérard Mannoni, Gilles Ehrmann, Samuel Buri; François Morellet, Andrée Bellaguet, Jean-Pierre Cousin and Charles Maussion. Claude Parent's space design (called "The Line of the Greatest Slope") is the first successful attempt to construct an oblique space. Imagined alone, but elaborated collectively, the French pavilion is considered by Parent as "a collective act [...] a creative action." With this event, Claude Parent transforms the viewer into works of art. This experiment becomes his working material and the reactions, positive as well as negative, will form the basis of the architect's study.Parent also designed several superstores in “béton brut” or “raw concrete” in Ris Orangis (1969) and Sens (1970), among others. In 1974, a few months after the oil crisis, EDF (France's production and distribution power company), Parent, 47, is entrusted with the coordination of a group of architects including, among others Paul Andreu, Jean Willerval and Roger Taillibert. For the next 10 years he leads the group to redesign nuclear power plants and find ways to better integrate them in the landscape. Commissions from the public sector for the French Education Department, the Regional Council of Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur in Marseille (1991), the Charles de Gaulle airport exchange center (1995) and the French Pavilion facade at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (1996) are all expressions of his quest for disequilibrium, movement and fluidity in architecture. Demanding, critical, provocative and fiercely obstinate, Claude Parent has continuously proposed places of contradiction generating doubt and disquiet and excluding any sort of passiveness with regard to architecture.
Though destined for a career as an engineer in the field of aeronautics, Claude Parent enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Toulouse in 1943 in the architecture studio, and then in 1946 in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. He left before obtaining his diploma in architecture, and later founded his own firm in 1956, but was only recognized by and admitted to the Order of Architects in 1966, based on his experience. An Academician, Claude Parent is a Commander of the French Legion of Honor, a Commander of Arts and Letters, Officer of the Palmes Académiques and a Commander of the National Order of Merit. Prizes stand as milestones marking his entire career: National Grand Prize of Architecture (1979), the silver medal of the Academy of Architecture, the medal of the Central Union of the Decorative Arts, the gold medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Progress and the medal of the U.I.A for his work in criticism. In 1994, Architecture critic and curator Fréderic Migayrou celebrates Claude Parent's essential contribution and unique place in post WWII architecture, and many leading architects such as Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid recognize him as both a precursor and an influence. In 2010, a retrospective exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine was dedicated to this major figure in the history of 20th-century architecture.

Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine (French pronunciation: [ybɛʁ feliks tjefɛn]) is a French pop-rock singer and songwriter. He was born on 21 July 1948 in the town of Dole in the Jura département.
Mostly shunned by television and radio, he has built over the years – through word of mouth and frequent touring – a considerable following which allowed him to fill the 17,000-seater Palais omnisports de Paris-Bercy for an anniversary concert in 1998. In recent years he has been increasingly name-dropped as an influence by the latest generation of performers in France, and was the subject of a tribute album of covers in 2002. He has been performing since the late 1960s and releasing records since 1978.
Musically, Thiéfaine draws mostly from classic rock, with rare nods to the latest musical trends, and generally leaves the arranging to a collaborator. His songs are most notable for instantly recognisable lyrics, with their trademark streams of consciousness, surreal and often extreme or dark imagery, often tinged with comedy, cynicism, literary references, neologisms and liberal use of scientific, long or foreign words. The lyrical mayhem sometimes spreads into comically long song titles, such as Enfermé dans les cabinets (avec la fille mineure des 80 chasseurs), or Exercice de simple provocation avec 33 fois le mot "coupable". His education in a Catholic boarding school has also left deep traces which surface in his lyrics in the form of biblical quotations and cheerfully blasphemous lyrics.
His avowed influences include Léo Ferré, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and many French, Anglophone and German novelists and poets, with a preference for romantic literature.