Curated playlist
Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni
- VoltaireFrench writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
- Edgar DegasEdgar Degas was born on the 19th of July 1834 in Paris, under the full name Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas. He later adopted the simpler spelling himself, a quiet act of self-invention that suited a man who spent his life reshaping how art…
- MolièreMolière collapsed on stage on the 17th of February 1673, mid-performance, coughing and haemorrhaging blood. He was playing Argan, a hypochondriac obsessed with his own imaginary ailments, in a play he himself had written called The…
- 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…
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The prize was announced on the 22nd of October 1964. Nine days earlier, on the…
- 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…
- Charles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire was born in Paris on the 9th of April 1821, into a city that would both inspire and consume him. His father was a senior civil servant and amateur artist who died when Baudelaire was still a child. His mother remarried a…
- Eugène DelacroixEugène Delacroix once heard the poet and critic Baudelaire describe him this way: "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." That tension defines the French Romantic…
- Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim was born on the 15th of April 1858 in Épinal, Lorraine, France, the son of a rabbi and the grandson of a rabbi, and the great-grandson of one too. His family's rabbinical lineage stretched back eight generations. Nobody…
- Maximilien RobespierreMaximilien Robespierre was born in Arras on the 6th of May 1758. Thirty-six years later, on the 28th of July 1794, he was executed without trial, sent to the guillotine along with around 90 others by the very revolutionary movement he had…
- Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was born in Paris on the 4th of March 1898, the son of a highly educated general in the French Army. By the time he died in the same city on the 11th of October 1986, he had published more than seventy-five books, mastered…