Antoine Henri Becquerel (; French pronunciation: [ɑ̃twan ɑ̃ʁi bɛkʁɛl]; 15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.
Henri-Émile Bazin (10 January 1829 – 7 February 1917), also known as Henry Bazin, was a French engineer specializing in hydraulic engineering, and whose main contributions relate to the systematic study of free surface flows and the measurement of flows (gauging).
Alain Lipietz (born September 19, 1947 as Alain Guy Lipiec) is a French engineer, economist and politician, a former Member of the European Parliament, and a member of the French Green Party. He has, however, been suspended from the party since 25 March 2014 and is an elected local politician in Val de Bièvre, Paris, France.
Jacques Gounon CBE, born 25 April 1953, is a French senior civil servant and business manager who currently serves as president of Getlink.
Albert Irénée Caquot (1 July 1881 – 28 November 1976) was a French engineer. He received the “Croix de Guerre 1914–1918 (France)” (military honor) and was Grand-croix of the Légion d’Honneur (1951). In 1962, he was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal. He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1934 until his death in 1976.
Gérard Mestrallet (French pronunciation: [ʒeʁaʁ mɛstʁalɛ], born 1 April 1949 in Paris, France) is a French manager who served as chairman of the board of directors of Engie and as CEO from 2008 to 2016. He is also the chairman of Suez.
Jean Peyrelevade (born 24 October 1939) is a senior French center-left politician and business leader.
Édouard Brézin (French: [bʁezɛ̃]; born 1 December 1938 Paris) is a French theoretical physicist. He is professor at Université Paris 6, working at the laboratory for theoretical physics (LPT) of the École Normale Supérieure since 1986.
Fulgence Bienvenüe (French pronunciation: [fylʒɑ̃s bjɛ̃v(ə)ny]; 27 January 1852 – 3 August 1936) was a French civil engineer, best known for his role in the construction of the Paris Métro, and has been called "Le Père du Métro" (Father of the Metro).: 162 A native of Uzel in Brittany, and the son of a notary, in 1872 Bienvenüe graduated from the École Polytechnique as a civil engineer: 150 and the same year he began working for the Department of Bridges and Roads at Alençon.: 150 His first assignment was the construction of new railway lines in the Mayenne area, in the course of which his left arm had to be amputated after being crushed in a construction accident.
In 1886, Bienvenüe moved on to Paris to design and supervise the construction of aqueducts for the city, drawing water from the rivers Aube and Loire.: 151 Next, he built a cable railway near the Place de la République and created the park of Buttes-Chaumont.: 151 In 1891, he was appointed as Engineer-in-Chief for Bridges and Roads, the most prestigious engineering job in France.: 151 Paris city officials selected Bienvenüe to become chief engineer for the Paris Métro in 1896. He designed a special way of building new tunnels which allowed the swift repaving of the roads above; this involved (among other things) building the crown of the tunnel first and the floor last, the reverse of the usual method at that time.: 151, 162 Bienvenüe has the credit for the mostly swift and relatively uneventful construction of the Métro through the difficult and heterogenous Parisian soils and rocks.: 150–1, 162 He came up with the idea of freezing wet and unstable soil in order to permit the drilling of tunnels. He was to supervise the Paris Metro construction for more than three decades, finally retiring on 6 December 1932.
Bienvenüe's construction of the Métro was widely praised and has been described admiringly as a work "worthy of the Romans".: 160, 162 He eventually accumulated many honors for his engineering accomplishments, including the Grand Prix Berger of the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1909) and the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor (1929).: 160 On 30 June 1933, the Avenue du Maine station on the Metro was renamed Bienvenüe in his honor. The naming ceremony took place in his presence; there was a last-minute scramble to repaint the station's new nameboards when it was discovered that the unusual diaeresis in his name had been omitted, making it the French word for "welcome". In 1942 the station was linked to the adjacent Montparnasse station, forming a single station named Montparnasse-Bienvenüe.
Bienvenüe was buried in 1936 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
Lycée Fulgence Bienvenüe high school in Loudéac, Brittany is named after Bienvenüe.
Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ʃaʁl adɔlf alfɑ̃]; 26 October 1817 – 6 December 1891) was a French engineer of the Corps of Bridges and Roads. As a close associate of Baron Haussmann and later as Director of Public Works at Paris City Hall from 1871, he was instrumental in the large-scale renovation of Paris in the second half of the 19th century. In 1889, Alphand was elevated to the rank of Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. In 1891, shortly before his death, he succeeded Haussmann as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.