Curated playlist
French male essayists
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. That is a strange place for a man whose English readers, for over a century, were handed something…
- Denis DiderotDenis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713 in Langres, Champagne, the son of a cutler named Didier Diderot. He died on the 31st of July 1784, having spent more than two decades producing one of the most provocative publishing…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he would never meet. Lucien Camus, a poor agricultural laborer, died in combat…
- André GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary would call him "France's greatest contemporary man of letters." He wrote more than…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- Michel de MontaigneMichel de Montaigne was born on the 28th of February 1533 at the family estate, Chateau de Montaigne, in the Guyenne region of France. He would go on to invent something most of us take for granted: the essay. Not the five-paragraph school…
- StendhalStendhal collapsed on a Paris street on the 23rd of March 1842 and died a few hours later. He had spent decades writing under false names, hiding behind more than a hundred pseudonyms, signing letters as "William Crocodile" or "Don Phlegm"…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré was born on the 29th of April 1854 in the Cité Ducale neighborhood of Nancy, and by the time he died on the 17th of July 1912, he had touched nearly every branch of mathematics that existed in his lifetime. His peers called…
- Charles-François LebrunCharles-François Lebrun was born on the 19th of March 1739 in Saint-Sauveur-Lendelin, a small town in the Manche region of France, and he would live to see nearly every form of government his country could devise. Monarchy, republic,…
- Joseph FouchéJoseph Fouché ordered the words "Death is an eternal sleep" inscribed over the gates of every cemetery in the Nièvre department. That command tells you something essential about the man: theatrical, ideologically ruthless, and perfectly…