Writers from Lyon

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: , French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi]; 29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight (Vol de nuit). They were translated into many languages.
Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised by the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.

Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in the United States of America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, even though he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from the French island of Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown.

Louis-François-Marie Nicolaïe (28 January 1811 – 8 February 1879), better known as Clairville, was a 19th-century French comedian, poet, chansonnier, goguettier and playwright.

Auguste Jal (12 April 1795, in Lyon – 5 April 1873) was a French author who wrote on maritime archaeology and history.

Azouz Begag (Arabic: عزوز بقاق) (born 5 February 1957) is a French writer, politician and researcher in economics and sociology at the CNRS. He was the delegate minister for equal opportunities of France in the government of French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) till 5 April 2007. He resigned to support the moderate centrist candidate François Bayrou, one of the two UMP ministers to do so.
Before becoming minister, Begag was decorated and made Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mérite and Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Charles-Robert Ageron (6 November 1923 – 3 September 2008) was a French historian specializing in colonial Algeria. He was born on 6 November 1923 in Lyon and died on 3 September 2008 in Kremlin-Bicêtre.

Jean-Marie Domenach (French: [dɔmənak]; 13 February 1922 – 5 July 1997) was a French writer and intellectual. He was noted as a left-wing and Catholic thinker.Domenach was born in Lyon, where he studied at the Lycée du Parc. In 1949 he became an editor of Esprit, the literary and political journal of personalism and non-conformism founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier. In 1956, Domenach became chief editor. He voluntarily retired from Esprit in 1977, at age 54, and began writing and teaching at the university level. Opposed to torture during the Algerian War, he also held a meeting denouncing the 1961 Paris massacre. He died in Paris in 1997, aged 75.

Gabriel Chevallier (3 May 1895 – 6 April 1969) was a French novelist widely known as the author of the satire Clochemerle. He is also known for Fear (La Peur), a novel about the World War I.

Pierre Dupont (23 April 1821 – 25 July 1870) was a French songwriter.
Dupont was born in Lyon as the son of a blacksmith. His mother died before he was five years old, and he was brought up in the country by his godfather, a village priest. He was educated at the seminary of L'Argentière, and was afterwards apprenticed to a notary at Lyon. In 1839 he found his way to Paris, and some of his poems were inserted, in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne. Two years later he was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume – Les Deux Anges – through the exertions of a kinsman and of Pierre Lebrun.
In 1842 he received a prize from the Academy, and worked for some time on the official dictionary. Gounod's appreciation of his peasant song, Les Bœufs (1846), settled his vocation as a songwriter. He had no theoretical knowledge of music, but he composed both the words and the melodies of his songs, the two processes being generally simultaneous. He himself remained so innocent of musical knowledge that he had to engage Ernest Reyer to write down his airs.
He sang his own songs, as they were composed, at the workmen's concerts in the Salle de la Fraternité du Faubourg Saint-Denis; the public performance of his famous "Le chant du pain" was forbidden; "Le chant des ouvriers" (1846) was even more popular; and in 1851 he paid the penalty of having become the poet laureate of the socialistic aspirations of the time by being condemned to seven years of exile from France.
The sentence was cancelled, and the poet withdrew for a time from participation in politics. He died at Lyon, where his later years were spent, on 25 July 1870.
His songs have appeared in various forms:

Chants et chansons (3 vols., with music, 1852–1854)
Chants et poesies (7th edition, 1862)Among the best-known are "Le Braconnier", "Le Tisserand", "La Vache blanche", "La Chanson du blé", but many others might be mentioned of equal spontaneity and charm. His later works have not the same merit.

Marie-Louise Victorine Bessarabo (pen names, Héra Mirtel, Juliette de Boulogne, Juliette de Lotus; 24 October 1868 - 21 March 1931) was a French writer, woman of letters, militant feminist, salonnier, lecturer, and ardent suffragist. She was also a spiritist and a "believer in the Black Mass," a stock exchange gambler, a plotter for the restoration of the royalist regime in France, as well as an advisor of other women in matrimony and affairs of the heart. Mirtel was famous for the murder of her second husband, Georges Bessarabo, whose body was sent in a "bloody trunk" "from Paris to Nancy, by rail. Brilliantly defended by Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, she was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. She was suspected of having murdered her first husband as well.