Famous French Personalities

Famous French People

Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris. He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine AubrÐ"©e Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians.

In 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist EugÐ"Ёne Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.

In 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, FrÐ"©dÐ"©ric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes. He was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

His most famous painting is the "Water-lillies" which he painted in the elaborate garden he had made for himself. Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.

Jeanne d'Arc [Joan of Arc] (1412-1431 approx.) was a village girl, the daughter of a farmer. She believed that the voices of St. Catherine, St. Margaret and St. Michael had ordered her to lead the French army into battle against the English and to see the heir to the throne crowned King Charles VII of France.

Joan persuaded Charles and the generals of the French army to let her take on this task and raised the siege of the town of Orleans. Charles was crowned King in Rheims Cathedral, but Joan was captured during a later attempt to reclaim the city of Paris.

At this time the Catholic Church was dominant in both France and England. Joan was accused of heresy and was burnt at the stake. In 1922 she was made a saint ("canonised").

NapolÐ"©on Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a famous French general who became Emperor of France in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

He was responsible for introducing measures which form the basis of many of France's institutions that still exist today, including an educational law to set up state grammar schools (lycÐ"©s) which aimed to provide well-trained army officers and civil servants.

During his reign France was constantly at war. Napoleon built a huge empire, so that by 1812 he controlled the greater part of Western Europe. Eventually he was defeated when France was invaded by Russian, Prussian, Austrian and British armies.

Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba. He managed to escape and ruled France again for just a hundred days before being defeated by Wellington at Waterloo. He was sent as a prisoner to St. Helena, where he died in 1821.

Louis Braille (1809-1852) invented the system of raised dots which form letters for the visually impaired to read.

Louis was blinded in an accident at the age of 4. He was sent to one of the first schools for blind boys in Paris, where they were taught simple skills to help them earn a living without begging. Without being able to read, it was difficult for blind people to have much education.

Braille's idea for using raised dots came from a ex-soldier, who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. This man visited the school in 1821 to show his idea for raised-dot writing in wartime. Soldiers on the front line could pass raised-dot messages to each other silently, without giving away their position to the enemy.

His system used 12 dots, and proved too complicated for soldiers to use in practice, but Braille started experimenting and worked out that people could easily "read" a 6-dot letter or number with their fingers. In 1827 the first book in "Braille" writing was published.

Blind people welcomed the independence it gave them - to write as well as read; but at first some schools for the blind tried to ban Braille.

It is now used in almost every country in the world.

Louis Pasteur (1822-95) was the first person to understand the connection between microbes and disease. He developed the process of pasteurization, a method of killing the microbes in milk products by heating the liquid to a temperature high enough to kill the germs that are present, but not so high that it spoils the taste.

Pasteur's experiments showed that microbes can be passed to people and animals in the air they breathe, the food they eat and the water they drink. He believed that microbes are the cause of many serious diseases and began work to find out if it might be possible to crontrol diseases by controlling the microorganisms that caused them.

In 1885, Pasteur discovered