People from La Roche-sur-Yon

Yvan Craipeau (24 September 1911, La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée – 13 December 2001) was a French Trotskyist activist.
Born in La Roche-sur-Yon, he helped found a local independent Marxist organisation while he was still in his teens. Expelled from school, he moved to Paris and became associated with the Trotskyist group around La Verité. In 1930, the group founded the Communist League. It considered itself an external faction of the Communist Party of France and so admitted current and former members of the French Communist Party. However, the rule was relaxed, and Craipeau was allowed to join in 1931. He joined the League's executive committee with the responsibility for developing a youth wing.
By 1933, he was able to organise a meeting attended by 1000 members of the youth wings of the Communist Party and the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. In 1933, he was Trotsky's personal secretary.
In 1936, Craipeau became a leading member of the new Internationalist Workers Party (POI). The following year, in reaction to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, he began a re-analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union. He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system, an idea that he introduced to Trotskyism.
During World War II, he was pronounced unfit for duty, and attempted, with Marcel Hic, to publish La Verité secretly. This was difficult, and following a series of setbacks, he turned instead to work influencing the German Army. He wrote an account of this activity in his books Contre vents et marées and La Libération Confisquée. The former work, on the Occupation period itself, was published in English in 2013.
In 1944, Craipeau was the architect of unity between three of France's four Trotskyist groups: the POI itself, the Comités Communistes Internationalistes and the Octobre group. They formed the Internationalist Communist Party, and in 1946, he was elected its General Secretary. In the same year, he was also elevated to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. However, he could not agree with the International's perspective that a crisis in capitalism was imminent, and soon after the POI sided with the International, he was expelled.
Craipeau temporarily withdrew from politics, and in 1951, he moved to Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, where he became a school teacher and soon secretary of the National Education Federation trade union.
In 1954, Craipeau returned to mainland France, where he participated in the creation of the New Left. This fused with the Movement for the Liberation of the City to form the Union of the Socialist Left (UGS) and, in 1960 with several groups to form the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). He remained a leading member of this party for many years, during which he wrote numerous books on left-wing politics and revolution.

Éric Chevillard (born 18 June 1964) is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.
Chevillard was born in La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée. His work often plays with the codes of narration, sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is being told. His books have consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (7 November 1828 – 17 January 1886) was a French painter.

Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939) was a French illustrator, comic book artist and animator. He became famous for creating the logo for Laughing Cow Cheese (La vache qui rit), and is one of the precursors of animal comics. His work has inspired many other artists, notably Hergé and Edmond-François Calvo.
A native of La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée, Rabier started to work as an illustrator for various newspapers after meeting political cartoonist Caran d'Ache. His first album for children was the story of Tintin-Lutin, published in 1898, which told of a young lutin or "imp"; here his main characters are human and not animals, as they came to be in later albums. His most famous creations are Gideon the duck and the characters he drew for Le roman de Renart.
He died at Faverolles, Indre, in 1939.