French classical scholars

Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet (French pronunciation: [vidal nakɛ]; 23 July 1930 – 29 July 2006) was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1969.
Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested (and deeply involved) in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War (1954–62), during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army, as well as Jewish history. He participated with Michel Foucault and Jean-Marie Domenach in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), which was one of the first French new social movements. He was part of debates over historiography in which he criticized negationism, and he was a supporter of Middle East peace efforts. To the end of his life, Vidal-Naquet never abandoned his fascination with Antiquity.

Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier (15 August 1823 – 20 November 1908), French classical scholar, and secretary of the Académie française, was born at Nîmes.
The Roman monuments of his native town very early attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history. He made epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a professor of rhetoric at the University of Angoulême, where he lived and worked for ten years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was called to Paris to be professor at the Lycée Charlemagne.
He began his literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the life and work of Marcus Terentius Varro (1861). In 1861 he was made professor of Latin oratory at the Collège de France, and he became an active contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. In 1865 he published Cicéron et ses amis (Eng. trans. by AD Jones, 1897), which has enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome, Boissier had learned to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with exquisite vivacity.
In 1874 he published La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity. In L'Opposition sous les Césars (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus. By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of scholars and men of letters, and on the death of HJG Patin, the author of Études sur les tragiques grecs, in 1876, he was elected a member of the Académie française, of which he was appointed perpetual secretary in 1895.
His later works include Promenades archéologiques: Rome et Pompei (1880; second series, 1886); L'Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques (1901); La Fin du paganisme (2 vols, 1891); La Conjuration de Catilina (1905); Tacite (1903, Eng, trans. by WG Hutchison, 1906). He was a representative example of the French talent for lucidity and elegance applied with entire seriousness to weighty matters of literature. Though he devoted himself mainly to his great theme, the reconstruction of the elements of Roman society, he also wrote monographs on Madame de Sévigné (1887) and Saint-Simon (1892). He died in June 1908.

Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien (French: [ʁavɛsɔ̃ mɔljɛ̃]; 23 October 1813 – 18 May 1900) was a French philosopher, 'perhaps France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century'. He was originally and remains more commonly known as Félix Ravaisson.His 'seminal' 'key' work was De l’habitude (1838), translated in English as Of Habit. Ravaisson's philosophy is in the tradition of French Spiritualism, which was initiated by Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) with the essay "The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking" (1802). However, Ravaisson developed his doctrine as what he called 'spiritualist realism' and 'spiritualist positivism', and – according to Ravaisson scholar Mark Sinclair – can be thought of as founding 'the school of contingency'. His most well known and influential successor was Henri Bergson, with whom the tradition can be seen to end during the 1930s; although the 'lineage' of this 'philosophy of life' can be seen to return in the late twentieth century with Gilles Deleuze. Ravaisson never worked in the French state university system, in his late 20s declining a position at the University of Rennes. In 1838 he was employed as the principle private secretary to the Minister of Public Instruction, going on to secure high-ranking positions such as Inspector General of Libraries, and then the Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Louvre. Later in his life he was appointed as the President of the Jury of the Aggregation of philosophy in France, 'a position of considerable influence'. Ravaisson, was not only a philosopher, classicist, archivist, and educational administrator, but also a painter exhibiting under the name Laché.

Pierre Grimal (November 21, 1912, in Paris – November 2, 1996, in Paris) was a French historian, classicist and Latinist. Fascinated by the Greek and Roman civilizations, he did much to promote the cultural inheritance of the classical world, both among specialists and the general public.