University of Paris alumni

Jean-Luc Godard (UK: GOD-ar, US: goh-DAR; French: [ʒɑ̃ lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; 3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014).During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard criticised mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which de-emphasised innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless, helping to establish the New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works. After the New Wave, his politics were less radical, and his later films came to be about human conflict and artistic representation "from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective."Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville. His collaborations with Karina — which included such critically acclaimed films as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) — were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine. In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time. He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award.

Irène Joliot-Curie (French: [iʁɛn ʒɔljo kyʁi] ; née Curie; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. In addition to the following honours in the family: the first ever woman Nobel Prize laureate, the first ever person and, to this day, only woman double Nobel Prize laureate, the sole person to this day with two Nobel Prizes in different sciences, thanks to her mother.
Her mother Marie Skłodowska–Curie and herself also form the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes whilst Pierre and Irène Curie form the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes by the same occasion, whilst there are 6 father-son pairs who have won Nobel Prizes by comparison.She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also prominent scientists.In 1945, she was one of the six commissioners of the new French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from an acute leukemia linked to her exposure to polonium and X-rays.

Roland Gérard Barthes (; French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and the 1967/1968 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

René Jean Pleven (French pronunciation: [ʁəne pləvɛ̃]; 15 April 1901 – 13 January 1993) was a notable French politician of the Fourth Republic. A member of the Free French, he helped found the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR), a political party that was meant to be a successor to the wartime Resistance movement. He served as prime minister twice in the early 1950s, where his most notable contribution was the introduction of the Pleven Plan, which called for a European Defence Community between France, Italy, West Germany, and the Benelux countries.

Jacques Vergès (5 March 1925 – 15 August 2013) was a Siamese-born French lawyer and anti-colonial activist. Vergès began as a fighter in the French Resistance during World War II, under Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces. After becoming a lawyer, he became well known for his defense of FLN militants during the Algerian War of Independence. He was later involved in a number of controversial and high-profile legal cases, with a series of defendants charged with terrorism, serial murder, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. This includes Nazi officer Klaus Barbie "the Butcher of Lyon" in 1987, terrorist Carlos the Jackal in 1994, and former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan in 2008. He also defended infamous Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy in 1998 as well as members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. As a result of taking on such clients, he garnered criticism from members of the public, including intellectuals Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, political-activist Gerry Gable as well as Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.Vergès attracted widespread public attention in the 1950s for his use of trials as a forum for expressing views against French colonial rule in Algeria, questioning the authority of the prosecution and causing chaos in proceedings – a method he promoted as "rupture defense" in his book De la stratégie judiciaire. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1960 and temporarily lost his license to officially practice law. He was a supporter of the Palestinian fedayeen in the 1960s. He would later disappear from 1970 to 1978, without ever explaining his whereabouts during that period. An outspoken anti-imperialist, he continued his vocal political activism in the 2000s, including opposing the War on Terror. The media sensationalized his activities with the sobriquet "the Devil's advocate", and Vergès himself contributed to his "notorious" public persona by such acts as titling his autobiography The Brilliant Bastard and giving provocative replies in interviews, such as "I'd even defend Bush! But only if he agrees to plead guilty."

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.

Louis Eugène Félix Néel (22 November 1904 – 17 November 2000) was a French physicist born in Lyon who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his studies of the magnetic properties of solids.

Luiz Frias (born 1964) is the chairman of the board of directors for both Grupo Folha and Universo Online (UOL Inc.) based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is an economics graduate from University of São Paulo, with a master's degree from the University of Cambridge, England, and the University of Paris (also known as the Sorbonne), France. He joined Group Folha in June 1981, and was appointed chief executive officer (CEO) in 1989 and chairman in 1991. He has been president of UOL since it was founded and is also the president of Group Folha. Luiz is the son of Octávio Frias, president of Grupo Folha until his death in 2007, and the younger brother of Otávio Frias Filho, editorial director of both Grupo Folha and its main newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo.

Alfonso Rangel Guerra (16 November 1928 – 6 May 2020) was a Mexican lawyer, educator, writer and administrator.

José María Cantú Garza (13 December 1938 – 12 November 2007) was a Mexican genetics researcher.
Cantú was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León in 1938 and moved to Reynosa, Tamaulipas. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Medicine from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, 1965) and received a doctorate degree in Human Genetics from the University of Paris I.
He worked as a professor in the University of Guadalajara and served as head of the Genetics Division of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS). He published about 400 papers and 80 book chapters.