Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by France

Georges Claude (24 September 1870 – 23 May 1960) was a French engineer and inventor. He is noted for his early work on the industrial liquefaction of air, for the invention and commercialization of neon lighting, and for a large experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths. He has been considered by some to be "the Edison of France". Claude was an active collaborator with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War, for which he was imprisoned in 1945 and stripped of his honors.

Michel Paul Fourniret (4 April 1942 – 10 May 2021) was a French serial killer who confessed to killing 12 people in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2003. After he was arrested in June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in Ciney, Fourniret confessed in 2004 to killing nine people — eight females and one male — having been informed on by his then-wife, Monique Pierrette Olivier (born 31 October 1948). Fourniret was convicted of seven of these murders on 28 May 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, while Olivier was given life with a minimum term of 28 years for complicity.In February 2018, Fourniret confessed to killing two more women. On 16 November 2018, Fourniret and Olivier were convicted of the murder of Farida Hammiche, the last of the eight women that Fourniret confessed to killing in 2004. Fourniret was given a second life sentence and Olivier was sentenced to a further 20 years of imprisonment. In March 2020, Fourniret confessed to killing Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared from Guermantes in 2003.

Henri Charrière (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi ʃaʁjɛʁ]; 16 November 1906 – 29 July 1973) was a French writer, convicted in 1931 as a murderer by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a penal colony in French Guiana. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates, rather than Charrière himself. Charrière denied committing the murder, although he freely admitted to having committed various other petty crimes prior to his incarceration.

Guy Georges (born Guy Rampillon; 15 October 1962) is a French serial killer and serial rapist, dubbed le tueur de l'Est Parisien (the East Paris killer) or The Beast of the Bastille. He was convicted on 5 April 2001, of murdering seven women between 1991 and 1997. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 22 years.

Émile Louis (21 January 1934 – 20 October 2013) was a French bus driver and the prime suspect in the disappearance of seven young women in the Yonne department, Burgundy, in the late 1970s. He confessed to their murders in 2000 but retracted this confession one month later. Louis was sentenced to life in prison by the cour d'assises of Yonne in 2004. The sentence, which was upheld on appeal in 2006, was confirmed by the Court of Cassation in 2007.

Claude Lastennet (born January 19, 1971) is a French serial killer who was convicted of murdering five elderly women between August 1993 and January 1994.
Lastennet was convicted of murdering the following 5 victims:
Lastennet was arrested on January 12, 1994, and admitted his guilt to police. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 18 years.

Jean-Claude Romand (born 11 February 1954) is a French spree killer and impostor who pretended to be a medical doctor for 18 years before killing his wife, children and parents in January 1993 when he was about to be exposed.
Heavy suspicions also weigh around the death of his father-in-law, Pierre Crolet, who fell from a staircase on 23 October 1988. Jean-Claude Romand is the only witness to the alleged accident.