Curated playlist
Members of the Académie Française
- VoltaireFrench writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
- Eugène IonescoEugène Ionesco sat down at age 40 to learn English from a textbook, and what came out of that exercise was not a language skill but a theatrical revolution. The Assimil method asked him to copy whole sentences and memorize them. When he…
- 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…
- MontesquieuMontesquieu, born Charles Louis de Secondat on the 18th of January 1689, grew up in a château 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux, in southwest France. His father's lineage traced back to Richard de la Pole, a Yorkist claimant to the English…
- Jean RacineJean Racine was born on the 22nd of December 1639 in La Ferté-Milon, a small town in the province of Picardy in northern France, and he would die sixty years later having written plays that still trouble audiences with the question: can a…
- Louis PasteurOn the 6th of July 1885, Louis Pasteur faced a choice that could have ended in his prosecution. A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur held a rabies vaccine he had tested in dogs, but he held no…
- 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."…
- Jean CocteauJean Cocteau called himself a poet, and only a poet, even after he had written novels, staged plays, drawn erotica, and directed films that critics still study. He divided his entire output into kinds of poetry: poésie de roman, poésie de…
- Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de GuibertJacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert was born on the 12th of November 1743 in Montauban, and by the time he was thirteen years old, he was already following his father into the theaters of war across Germany. Most military thinkers…
- 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…
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier fell down a flight of stairs on the 4th of May 1830. He had been living with a heart condition since his days in Egypt and Grenoble, but that fall aggravated the malady beyond what anyone had feared. Twelve days later, he…
- Pierre-Simon LaplacePierre-Simon Laplace stood before Napoleon Bonaparte in the early years of the nineteenth century and handed him a copy of his book on the universe. Napoleon, who enjoyed putting embarrassing questions to learned men, looked up and said:…
- Alexis de TocquevilleAlexis de Tocqueville sailed to the United States in 1831 on a narrow assignment. The July Monarchy had sent him to examine American prisons and penitentiaries. He went with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, and the two did visit…
- 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…
- Victor DuruyVictor Duruy was born in Paris on the 10th of September 1811, the son of a factory worker, and his family expected him to follow his father into the trade. He had other plans. Duruy passed through the Ecole Normale Superieure with such…
- Hippolyte TaineHippolyte Taine was born on the 21st of April 1828 in Vouziers, a small town in the Ardennes, and he would grow up to reshape how an entire civilization understood its own literature, history, and revolution. Maurice Baring, writing in the…
- Louis de BroglieLouis de Broglie was born on the 15th of August 1892 in Dieppe, France, into a noble family that had sent soldiers and statesmen to French courts for centuries. He arrived in the world as the youngest son of the 5th duc de Broglie, heir to…