Curated playlist
French atheists
- André BretonSurrealist founder André Breton once wrote that firing a revolver blindly into a crowd was the simplest surrealist act.
- Claude MonetImpressionism began as a critic's insult. Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise gave it the name.
- Henri MatisseHenri Matisse did not pick up a paintbrush until he was nineteen. He had been trained as a lawyer.
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Catholic. As a boy in Poland, he memorized prayers to hide.
- Denis DiderotJailed writer Denis Diderot annotated Paradise Lost with a toothpick and ink made from slate and wine.
- Marcel DuchampIn 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a signed urinal to a New York show, and the committee turned it away.
- Maurice RavelMaurice Ravel was twice expelled from the Paris Conservatoire. He later became France's greatest living composer.
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus thanked his old schoolteacher right after his mother when he won the Nobel Prize.
- Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault's surgeon father expected him to become a surgeon too. He became a leading thinker on power instead.
- Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet argued for decades against every other leading chemist, and was partly right.
- François TruffautIn 1958 François Truffaut was the only French critic not invited to Cannes. A year later, Cannes gave him Best Director.
- Marie CurieMarie Curie's cookbooks are still highly radioactive. They are sealed in lead-lined boxes.
- Marquis de SadeOn the 2nd of July 1789, the Marquis de Sade stood at a window of the Bastille and shouted through a megaphone he had improvised himself. He told the people in the street below that the warders were murdering the prisoners. That evening he…
- Gilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze never trimmed his fingernails. He once explained that he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and so could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". It is a…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir's partnership with Sartre began on a bench outside the Louvre.
- Georges BatailleGeorges Bataille's secret society Acéphale never found an executioner. Every member had agreed to be the victim.
- Yann LeCunYann LeCun spent a postdoc year under Geoffrey Hinton, then shared a Turing Award with him.
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff poked citrus thorns into starfish larvae in 1882 and watched cells swarm them.