French writer Jacques Natanson (15 May 1901 – 19 May 1975) first became involved in the movies in 1929 when one of his plays was adapted for the screen. He enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Max Ophüls, on such films as "La Ronde" (1951, earning an Academy Award nomination), "Le Plaisir" (1952) and "Lola Montès" (1955).
Frédéric Dard (Frédéric Charles Antoine Dard; 29 June 1921, in Bourgoin-Jallieu, Isère, France – 6 June 2000, in Bonnefontaine, Fribourg, Switzerland) was a French crime writer. He wrote more than three hundred novels, plays and screenplays, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, including the San-Antonio book series.
Daniel Boulanger (24 January 1922 – 27 October 2014) was a French novelist, playwright, poet and screenwriter. He has also played secondary roles in films and was a member of the Académie Goncourt from 1983 until his death. He was born in Compiègne, Oise.
Boulanger is most known for his roles as the detective hunting down Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, the neighbor of Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut's Bed and Board and as a comical gangster in Shoot the Piano Player, another Truffaut feature. On 27 October 2014, Boulanger died at the age of 92.
Roger Coggio (11 March 1934 – 22 October 2001) was a French actor, film director and screenwriter. He appeared in 40 films between 1954 and 1998. He was married to actress Pascale Audret. He died of cancer.
René Huyghe (3 May 1906 – 5 February 1997) was a French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art. He was also a curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France and from 1960 a member of the Académie Française. He was the father of the writer François-Bernard Huyghe.
Georges-Emmanuel Clancier (3 May 1914 – 4 July 2018) was a French poet, novelist, and journalist. He won the Prix Goncourt (poetry), the Grand Prize of the Académie française, and the grand prize of the Société des gens de lettres.
Michel de Certeau (French: [sɛʁto]; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and widely regarded as a historian who had interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary urban life.A multidisciplinarian, he wrote ground-breaking studies in fields as diverse as mysticism, the act of faith, cultural dynamics in contemporary society, and historiography as an intellectual practice. His impact continues unabated, with new volumes appearing regularly, and perhaps surprisingly his reputation is growing even more rapidly in English and German-speaking countries and the Mediterranean than in his native France. This strong and growing interest in academia is not matched in the public sphere; however, partly due to his being considered a "difficult" author because of his highly personal style which makes translation difficult, and partly due to the declining status of French in the world generally. Nevertheless, portions of his prolific output have been translated into a dozen languages.
Jean Cazeneuve (17 May 1915 – 4 October 2005) was a French sociologist and anthropologist. Apart from being a scholar, he has been involved with Radio and TV at the executive level; from 1964 till 1974 he has been president of the French public Radio and TV agency (ORTF), after which he has been chairman of TF1, the first French national-wide channel, till 1978. He joined the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1973, of which became president in 1983.
He is highly regarded for his illuminating contribution to the study the ritual clowns.
André Castelot, born André Storms (23 January 1911, Antwerp – 18 July 2004, Neuilly-sur-Seine), was a French writer and scriptwriter born in Belgium. He was the son of the Symbolist painter Maurice Chabas and Gabrielle Storms-Castelot (née Gabrielle Alice Castelot), and the brother of the film actor Jacques Castelot. He wrote more than one hundred books, mostly biographies of famous people.
René Barjavel (24 January 1911 – 24 November 1985) was a French author, journalist and critic who may have been the first to think of the grandfather paradox in time travel. He was born in Nyons, a town in the Drôme department in southeastern France. He is best known as a science fiction author, whose work often involved the fall of civilisation due to technocratic hubris and the madness of war, but who also favoured themes emphasising the durability of love.René Barjavel wrote several novels with these themes, such as Ravage (translated as Ashes, ashes), Le Grand Secret, La Nuit des temps (translated as The Ice People), and Une rose au paradis. His writing is poetic, dreamy and sometimes philosophical. Some of his works have their roots in an empirical and poetic questioning of the existence of God (notably La Faim du tigre). He was also interested in the environmental heritage which we leave to future generations. Whilst his works are rarely taught in French schools, his books are very popular in France.
Barjavel wrote Le Voyageur imprudent (1943), the first novel to present the famous Grandfather paradox of time travel: if one goes backwards in time and kills one of their ancestors before he had children, the traveller cannot exist and therefore cannot kill the ancestor.
Barjavel died in 1985 and was buried with his ancestors in Tarendol (commune) cemetery, opposite Mount Ventoux in Provence. He used these place names in his books; Mount Ventoux appears as the site of the space base in Colomb de la lune, for example, and Tarendol is the name of the hero in the eponymous novel.