Claude Guéant (born 17 January 1945) is a French civil servant. The former chief of staff to Nicolas Sarkozy, he served as Minister of the Interior from 27 February 2011 until 15 May 2012. He is a member of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).
Anne Sinclair (French pronunciation: [an sɛ̃ˈklɛʁ], born Anne-Élise Schwartz; 15 July 1948) is a French-American television and radio interviewer. She hosted one of the most popular political shows for more than thirteen years on TF1, the largest European private TV channel. She is heiress to much of the fortune of her maternal grandfather, art dealer Paul Rosenberg. She covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and the French TV channel Canal+. She married French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 1991 and divorced him in 2013 in the aftermath of the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. She was portrayed in the 2014 feature film Welcome to New York.
Henri Guaino (born 11 March 1957) is a French speechwriter and politician who served as the member of the National Assembly for the 3rd constituency of Yvelines from 2012 to 2017. A member of The Republicans (LR), he previously was a special advisor to President Nicolas Sarkozy from 2007 until his retirement from politics following the 2012 election.
Richard Descoings (French: [ʁiʃaʁ dekwɛ̃]; June 23, 1958 – April 3, 2012) was a French civil servant. He was serving as the Director of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (French: Institut d'études politiques de Paris or Sciences Po Paris), and as such as the Chief Administrator of the National Foundation of Political Science (Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, FNSP). These two entities are collectively referred to as Sciences Po (see Use of Sciences Po), and are two of the most prestigious public policy research and teaching bodies in Europe. Descoings was also a senior member of the Conseil d'État.
Michel Bon (born 5 July 1943) is a French businessman and politician. He is a graduate of the ESSEC Business School, of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, of the École nationale d'administration and of Stanford Business School.In 1981, he was selected to be one of the first Young Leaders of the French-American Foundation.He worked at the banks Crédit national and Crédit Agricole. He has been CEO then Chairman of the supermarket group Carrefour. From 1993 to 1995 he was head of the French unemployment agency. He was Chairman of France Télécom from 1995 to 2002.He was formerly president of the Institut Pasteur. He is also an administrator at Lafarge and formerly of Air Liquide.
Jean-Pierre Elkabbach (29 September 1937 – 3 October 2023) was a French journalist.
Jacques José Mardoché Attali (French pronunciation: [ʒak atali]; born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant.
A very prolific writer, Attali published 86 books in 54 years, between 1969 and 2023.
Attali served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991, and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1991 to 1993. In 1997, upon the request of education minister Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the higher education degrees system. From 2008 to 2010, he led the government committee on how to ignite the growth of the French economy, under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Attali co-founded the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the development of new technologies. He also founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, now called Positive Planet, and is the head of Attali & Associates (A&A), an international consultancy firm on strategy, corporate finance and venture capital. Interested in the arts, he has been nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has published more than fifty books, including Verbatim (1981), Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom (1999), and A Brief History of the Future (2006).
In 2009, Foreign Policy called him as one of the top 100 "global thinkers" in the world.
Michel Vauzelle (born 15 August 1944) is a French politician who served as Keeper of the Seals of France, Minister of Justice under Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy from 1992 to 1993. A member of the Socialist Party (PS), he also served as Mayor of Arles from 1995 to 1998 and President of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur from 1998 until 2015.
A native of Montélimar, Vauzelle was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Bouches-du-Rhône from 1986 to 1992 and again from 1997 to 2002 and 2007 to 2017. He was first elected at-large (1986–1988), before representing the department's 16th constituency. In 2007, he defeated Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) incumbent Roland Chassain who had previously defeated him in 2002. Vauzelle, who had a narrower victory against a National Front (FN) candidate in 2012, did not contest the 2017 legislative election, in which the seat was won by Monica Michel of La République En Marche! (LREM), a first-time candidate.
François Gérard Marie Léotard (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ʒeʁaʁ maʁi leɔtaʁ]; 26 March 1942 – 25 April 2023) was a French politician. Singer and actor Philippe Léotard was his brother.
A member of the Republican Party, the liberal-conservative component of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), he appeared in the foreground of the political scene in the 1980s. He led a new generation of right-wing politicians, the "renovationmen", who opposed the old right-wing leaders Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
In 1981, he was selected to be one of the first Young Leaders of the French-American Foundation. His political career started with being elected as the mayor of Fréjus in 1977. He served two terms as the deputy of Var.As culture minister from 1986 to 1988, he sold the main public TV channel TF1. He returned to the French cabinet as defense minister, from 1993 to 1995. Supporting the candidacy of Edouard Balladur in the 1995 presidential election, he was dismissed after Chirac's election. Elected president of the UDF in 1996, he could not prevent the split of this confederation two years later with Alain Madelin's secession. This and the party's poor showing in the 1998 regional elections prompted his resignation. After a mission in Macedonia in 2001 as representative of the European Union, he retired from politics. In 2003, he created together with other prominent European personalities the Medbridge Strategy Center, whose goal is to promote dialogue and mutual understanding between Europe and the Middle East. He later authored several books.
Léotard died in Fréjus on 25 April 2023, at age 81.
Bernard Cornut-Gentille (26 July 1909 – 21 January 1992) was a French administrator and politician.
Born in Brest, Finistère, Cornut-Gentille studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. In 1943 he was appointed as the Subprefect of Reims, but resigned to assist the Free French delegate Émile Bollaert. Following the Liberation of France he served as Prefect of Ille-et-Vilaine, of the Somme, and of the Bas-Rhin. In 1948 he was appointed High Commissioner in French Equatorial Africa then, from 1951 to 1956, High Commissioner in French West Africa.After this, he served as France's permanent representative to the United Nations Security Council, and in 1957 as ambassador to Argentina.Standing for the Gaullist Party, the UNR, he was elected to represent Alpes-Maritimes in the 1958 election to the National Assembly of France. He had been minister without portfolio in June 1958, then Minister of Overseas France from 3 June 1958 to 8 January 1959 in the governments of Charles de Gaulle. Under Michel Debré he served as Minister of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones from 8 January 1959 to 5 February 1960. He resigned ministerial office at the same time as Jacques Soustelle, over the handling of the affair of the barricades in Algiers and broke with the Gaullists.
He sat in the National Assembly as an independent (French: non-inscrit) until 1968 and again from 1973 to 1978. Locally, he served as mayor of Cannes from 1959 to 1978. Here he initiated a programme of redevelopment and renovation.
His nephew François Cornut-Gentille has served as representative of the Haute-Marne department since 1993 and mayor of Saint-Dizier since 1995.