1945 births

Bruno Cotte (born 10 June 1945 in Lyon) is a French judge of the International Criminal Court. Prior to his appointment to the ICC Cotte was a member of the Cour de Cassation, France's supreme court of appeal. He had been Director for Criminal Affairs and Pardons in the French Ministry of Justice, Attorney General of the Versailles Court of Appeal and a public prosecutor of the Paris district court. He was elected to the ICC in 2008 to fill a judicial vacancy and was elected from the Western European and Others group of states. He is a member of the List A of judges, the list comprising those judges who are experts in criminal law.

Claire Gibault (born 31 October 1945 in Le Mans) is a French conductor and politician and a Member of the European Parliament for the south-east of France. She is a member of the Union for French Democracy, which is part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education and its Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality.
She is also a member of the delegation to the EU–Bulgaria Joint Parliamentary Committee and a substitute for the delegation for relations with Japan.

Alain du Plessis de Pouzilhac (born 1945) is a French advertising executive. He was the CEO of France 24. He was President of France Médias Monde from 2008 to 2012.
He was the President of French rugby club RC Narbonne from 1997 to 2001.

Janou Lefèbvre (later Tissot, born 14 May 1945) is a retired French equestrian show jumper. She competed at the 1964, 1968 and 1972 Olympics and won team silver medals in 1964 and 1968. She won the individual world title in 1970 as Lefèbvre and in 1974 as Tissot, as she got married and changed her surname in between.

Patrick Gilles Marie Le Quément (born 4 February 1945 in Marseille) is a retired French car designer, formerly chief designer of Renault.
Born in France but brought up in the United Kingdom, Le Quément holds a BA Hons. degree in Product Design from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, and an MBA from Danbury Park Management Centre.
Le Quément joined Simca of France in 1966 after graduation, but left and set up his own design business which failed. He returned to England and joined Ford in 1968 as a designer. Here his signature products included the Ford Cargo truck, and 1982's seminal Ford Sierra, ridiculed at the time for its jelly mould shape. The latter car was designed at Ford's engineering and research centre in Cologne-Merkenich, Germany. Promised promotion, he went to Detroit but returned to Europe in June 1985 when Carl Hahn, Chairman of the Volkswagen Group, invited him to set up a centre for Advance Design and Strategy.In light of poor and declining sales, Renault then-chairman and CEO Raymond Levy recruited le Quément on a hunch that French design could jump-start the company. But before he took the job as vice president, corporate design in 1987, le Quément demanded structural changes in the role of design at Renault, telling Levy: his department would no longer answer to engineering; outside consultants were removed; the design team was doubled to more than 350 people; the department took a seat on the executive board; and personally, le Quément answered to no one but the chairman.
His team's products since have included Twingo, Mégane and Mégane II – which he later admitted in an interview with Automotive News Europe magazine, was too much of a bold design; Scénic; the Espace models of 1994 and 1998; Kangoo; Laguna models of 1994; Avantime and the Vel Satis of 2002.
Le Quément's motto is Design = Quality, and says his structural changes of Renault design were to develop an independent and innovative formal language: "Up to just a few years ago, I would have given you the name of individual products – but today I would be more inclined to say Renault Design. So basically we have abandoned what I call 'styling esperanto', namely the formal language used by most other manufacturers".In 1987 Le Quément was appointed Senior Vice President of Quality and Corporate Design in 1995, when he also joined the Renault Management Committee. He is the head of Joint Design Policy Group formed by Renault-Nissan design body, since it was founded in 1999. Louis Schweitzer asked him to analyse the design organisation of Nissan in 1999. Le Quément advised establishment of a head designer position, divorced from industrial tasks. Carlos Ghosn, in charge of Nissan, asked Le Quément to draw up a shortlist of designers for this position. Shiro Nakamura was Le Quément's favourite and became head designer at Nissan.In 2002 he was the winner of the Lucky Strike Designer Award, and he sits on the board of the Europa Academy for Automotive Excellence.Then, Ghosn, CEO of Renault Group, asked Le Quément to prepare his retirement from Renault, advising his successor. Laurens van den Acker was then hired at Renault. On 10 April 2009, Le Quément announced his retirement in October 2009. He was replaced at Renault by Laurens van den Acker.
After retiring from Renault, Le Quément started doing exterior design work for Lagoon catamaran, a division of Groupe Beneteau.

Georges Lech (born 2 June 1945) is a French retired football player. He is of Polish descent.

Lionel Poilâne (June 10, 1945 – October 31, 2002) was a French baker and entrepreneur whose commitment to crafting quality bread earned him worldwide renown. His father, Pierre Poilâne started a baking business in 1932, creating bread using stone-ground flour, natural fermentation and a wood-fired oven. Lionel took over the bakery in 1970, continuing the traditional methods.
Poilâne is widely known for a round, two-kilogram sourdough country bread referred to as a miche or pain Poilâne. This bread is often referred to as whole-wheat but in fact is not: the flour used is mostly so-called grey flour of 85% extraction (meaning that some but not all of the wheat bran is retained). According to Poilâne's own website, the dough also contains 30% spelt, an ancestor of wheat.
In addition to miches, the Poilâne bakery offers rye bread, raisin bread, nut bread, Punitions (shortbread cookies), and an assortment of pastries to its clients. Poilâne is perhaps one of the most famous names in the baking industry today.
Poilâne mastered his single product and trained his apprentices in the physical baking process, which he believed to be the most important aspect of his vision. He believed as much of the work as possible should be done by hand, by one person taking responsibility for their loaves from start to finish. Lionel Poilâne laid the basis of a concept he called "retro-innovation"; combining the best of traditional elements together with the best of modern developments. The only deviation from his father's original formula was machine kneading, saving hours of work for his bakers. He was knighted as a Knight of the National Order of Merit for services to the economy in 1993.
Pain Poilâne is produced in the Latin Quarter of Paris where it is sold at the original boulangerie on rue du Cherche-Midi. A second Paris bakery on boulevard de Grenelle is located in the 15th arrondissement. The worldwide demand for Poilâne bread is met in a facility located in Bièvres which was built in the 1980s. The Bièvres bakery produces around 15,000 loaves per day in 24 wood-burning ovens which are exact replicas of the ovens used at the Paris locations. These loaves are shipped worldwide. The firm opened a facility in London's Belgravia district in June 2000.
On October 31, 2002, Lionel Poilâne was killed when the helicopter he was piloting crashed into the bay of Cancale, off the coast of Brittany. The passengers, Poilâne's wife Irena and their dog, also died in the crash. Poilâne was survived by daughters Athena and Apollonia, who now runs the enterprise. Apollonia is a graduate of Harvard University.Lionel's brother Max Poilâne went his own way and opened his own bakery. There are three Max Poilâne bakery locations in Paris. Bread lovers debate which baker makes the better bread, although Lionel's bread is more famous outside of Paris.

René Pétillon (French: [petijɔ̃]; 12 December 1945, Lesneven – 30 September 2018) was a French satirical and political cartoonist and comics artist. As a cartoonist he was most famous for his work in Canard Enchaîné. As a comics artist his best known and longest-running series was the humoristic comic strip Jack Palmer, about a goofy private detective.Pétillon joined Pilote magazine in 1972. From 1993, he published cartoons in the Canard Enchaîné and he signed them as Pétillon.In 1989, he was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2002 he get the Grand prix de l'humour vache at the Salon international du dessin de presse et d'humour in Saint-Just-le-Martel.In 2001, he published L'Enquête Corse ("The Corsican Enquiry"), dealing with the "independentist" groups in Corsica. The album was a popular and critical success, with 300,000 printed in French plus 30,000 in Corsican. A movie of the same name, starring Jean Reno, was based on the book and released in 2004.His work appeared in L'Écho des Savanes too and in 2015 he also published in Charlie Hebdo.He died in 2018 after a long illness.

Gérard Manset (also known as Manset; born 21 August 1945 in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French singer-songwriter, painter, photographer and writer. He is best known for his musical work. Since 1972, the covers of his albums state his name as simply "Manset".
Manset spent his childhood in the suburbs of Paris (Saint-Cloud) and then in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. He failed his baccalauréat due to a failing grade in French.
In 1964, Manset was the recipient of the Concours général, and enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. The Salon d'Automne welcomed Manset in its engraving section in 1966. Manset's work was also shown at the Paris Salon. At the same time, Manset approached various French advertising agencies with his drawings, without success.
Manset began to play guitar, but was also interested in the drums. He borrowed his sister's piano book, and began learning to play the piano as well.
The mystery that was created around Manset was born from the rarity of his media appearances, his refusal to give concerts, and, above all, the uncompromising character of his work.

Francis Marmande (born 1945) is a French author, musician and journalist for the French newspaper Le Monde since 1977. Marmande currently serves as the director of a modern literature laboratory (Littérature au présent) at University of Paris VII: Denis Diderot.Marmande graduated in 1966 from the École Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud. A jazz critic, Marmande also plays double bass and has recorded with the Jac Berrocal Group. He was a contributor to Jazz Magazine from 1971 to 2000, which he also helped illustrate from 1976 to 1994.
Since 2006, he has had a regular column in Le Monde, writing on topics such as jazz, bullfighting, and literature.