I had missed this thread...
Rulers & warlords : Napoleon I, Louis XIV, Joan of Arc, Charles de Gaulle, Louis XV, Napoleon III, Richelieu, Philip II Augustus, Henry IV, Louis IX (Saint Louis), Louis XI, Francis I, Hughes Capet and the other "40 Kings who made France", Georges Clémenceau, Raymond Poincaré, ...
- Military leaders (only) : de Lattre de Tassigny, Juin, Leclerc, Koenig (World War II); Ferdinand Foch, Joffre, Philippe Pétain (World War I); Bazaine (Second Empire); Marshal Ney, Marshal Davout, Kléber, Marshal Kellermann, Saint-Cyr, Jourdan, Murat, André Massena, Moreau, Desaix (Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars); Lafayette, Latouche Tréville (American independence); Turenne, the Great Condé, Vauban, Marshal Luxembourg, Maurice of Saxe (Louis XIV wars), Gaston de Foix (Italian wars), ...
Debatable : Vercingetorix, Charlemagne, Clovis, Charles Martel, William the Conqueror, ...
Artists :
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Writers : Victor Hugo, Balzac, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, François Rabelais, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach, Jules Verne (half French half Breton), Voltaire, Montesquieu, Albert Camus, Flaubert, La Bruyère, Musset, Malraux, Maupassant, Gérard de Nerval, Pascal, Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Sand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stendhal, Emile Zola, Anatole France, Jean Cocteau ... And many, many others I forgot.
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Painters : Edouard Manet, Renoir, Claude Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, Gustave Courbet, David, Benjamin-Constant, Louis Breton, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Jean Fouquet, Fernand Léger ... And again, many others I forgot.
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Musicians : Ravel, Debussy, Bizet, Berlioz, Offenbach, Lully, Charpentier, Rameau ...
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Sculptors : Auguste Rodin, Auguste Bartholdi
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Architects : Vauban, Le Corbusier, Louis le Vau, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Soufflot, François Mansart, Jules Mansart, Pierre de Montereau, Raymond du Temple, ...
Scientists : Louis Pasteur, René Descartes, Ambroise Paré, Pierre & Marie Curie, Georges Cuvier, Antoine Lavoisier, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Louis Couffignal, Henri Poincaré, Henri Becquerel, Marcelin Berthelot, Louis de Broglie, Joseph le Bel ...
Explorers : Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain (Canada); René Robert de la Salle, Louis Jollier, Jacques Marquette (Mississipi river); Jean-François La Pérouse (Australia)
To be continued, of course...
