100 Notable alumni of
Normal Superior School
Updated:
Normal Superior School is 59th in the world, 20th in Europe, and 2nd in France by aggregated alumni prominence. Below is the list of 100 notable alumni from Normal Superior School sorted by their wiki pages popularity. The directory includes famous graduates and former students along with research and academic staff. 3 individuals affiliated with Normal Superior School won Nobel Prizes in Physics.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
- Occupations
- biographernovelistmeteorologistliterary criticplaywright
- Biography
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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
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Louis Pasteur
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- 1844-1845 graduated with Bachelor of Science
- Occupations
- botanistmicrobiologistagronomistartistchemist
- Biography
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Louis Pasteur was a French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him. His research in chemistry led to remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of the causes and preventions of diseases, which laid down the foundations of hygiene, public health and much of modern medicine. Pasteur's works are credited with saving millions of lives through the developments of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has been honored as the "father of bacteriology" and the "father of microbiology" (together with Robert Koch; the latter epithet also attributed to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek).
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Michel Foucault
- Occupations
- philosopher
- Biography
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Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
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Émile Durkheim
- Occupations
- philosophersociologistprofessoranthropologisthistorian of religion
- Biography
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David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
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Pierre Bourdieu
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1951
- Occupations
- writerphotographersociologisttranslatoranthropologist
- Biography
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Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts). During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
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Jacques Derrida
- Occupations
- literary criticwriteruniversity teacherphilosopher
- Biography
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Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
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Georges Pompidou
- Occupations
- bankerpolitician
- Biography
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Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou was a French politician who served as President of France from 1969 to his death in 1974. He was earlier the longest-ever Prime Minister of France, under President Charles de Gaulle, from 1962 to 1968.
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Emmeline Pankhurst
- Occupations
- writerpoliticianwomen's rights activisthuman rights activistsuffragette
- Biography
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Emmeline Pankhurst was an English political activist who organised the UK suffragette movement and helped women win the right to vote. In 1999, Time named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating that "she shaped an idea of objects for our time" and "shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back". She was widely criticised for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work is recognised as a crucial element in achieving women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.
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Simone Weil
- Occupations
- French Resistance fighterwriterdiaristtrade unionisthigh school teacher
- Biography
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Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
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Bernard-Henri Lévy
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1968-1971
- Occupations
- publisheractornovelistjournalistbusinessperson
- Biography
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Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. His opinions, political activism and publications have also been the subject of several controversies over the years.
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Henri Bergson
- Occupations
- writerphilosophersociologistprofessor
- Biography
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Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Thomas Piketty
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1989-1993
- Occupations
- research felloweconomistwriterscreenwriter
- Biography
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Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is a professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, associate chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.
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Cédric Villani
- Occupations
- professeur des universitéspoliticianmathematician
- Biography
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Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani is a French politician and mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010, and he was the director of Sorbonne University's Institut Henri Poincaré from 2009 to 2017. As of September 2022, he is a professor at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.
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Laurent Wauquiez
- Occupations
- ministerpolitician
- Biography
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Laurent Timothée Marie Wauquiez is a French politician who has presided over the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes since 2016. He is a member of The Republicans (LR), which he led from 2017 to 2019 following the resignation of Nicolas Sarkozy.
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Évariste Galois
- Occupations
- mathematician
- Biography
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Évariste Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.
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Jean Jaurès
- Occupations
- writerprofessorhistorianjournalistpolitician
- Biography
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Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès, commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès ( French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒɔʁɛs]; Occitan: Joan Jaurés [dʒuˈan dʒawˈɾes]), was a French Socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became one of the first social democrats and (in 1902) the leader of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. The two parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, Jaurès was assassinated in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, but remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. As a heterodox Marxist, Jaurès rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, patriotism and internationalism.
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Alain Juppé
- Occupations
- politiciandiplomat
- Biography
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Alain Marie Juppé is a French politician. A member of The Republicans, he was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, during which period he faced major strikes that paralysed the country and became very unpopular. He left office after the victory of the left in the snap 1997 legislative elections. He had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1993 to 1995, and as Minister of the Budget and Spokesman for the Government from 1986 to 1988. He was president of the political party Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) from 2002 to 2004 and mayor of Bordeaux from 1995 to 2004.
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Louis Althusser
- Occupations
- politicianuniversity teachereditorphilosopher
- Biography
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Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
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Léopold Sédar Senghor
- Occupations
- writerpoliticianpoetFrench Resistance fighterphilosopher
- Biography
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Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal (1960–80).
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Léon Blum
- Occupations
- journalistliterary criticpoliticiandiplomat
- Biography
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André Léon Blum was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister of France.
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Jean d'Ormesson
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1944
- Occupations
- journalistwriterphilosopher
- Biography
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Count Jean Bruno Wladimir François-de-Paule Lefèvre d'Ormesson was a French writer and novelist. He authored forty books, was the director of Le Figaro from 1974 to 1977, as well as the dean of the Académie Française, to which he was elected in 1973, until his death, in addition to his service as president of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies within UNESCO (1992–1997).
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Bruno Le Maire
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1989
- Occupations
- diplomatpoliticianinternational forum participant
- Biography
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Bruno Le Maire is a French politician, writer, and former diplomat who has served as Economy and Finance Minister since 2017 under President Emmanuel Macron.
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Raphaël Enthoven
- Occupations
- essayistradio personalityphilosophertelevision presenter
- Biography
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Raphaël Enthoven is a French philosophy teacher, radio host and television host. An agrégé who taught at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 and Paris Diderot University, Enthoven is known to the French public for hosting various philosophy-related shows on radio and television. Although he has been described as a philosopher, Enthoven himself rejects being labeled as such.
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Romain Rolland
- Occupations
- teachermusicianessayistbiographermusicologist
- Biography
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Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".
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Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
- Occupations
- playwrightwriterscreenwritertranslatoractor
- Biography
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Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a Franco-Belgian playwright, short story writer and novelist, as well as a film director. His plays have been staged in over fifty countries all over the world.
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Aimé Césaire
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1935-1938
- Occupations
- poet
- Biography
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Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word négritude in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.
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Alexander Grothendieck
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1948-1949
- Occupations
- university teachermathematician
- Biography
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Alexander Grothendieck was a French mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Occupations
- aestheticianphilosopherart theoristprofessor
- Biography
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Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
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Laurent Fabius
- Occupations
- lecturerpoliticianforeign ministerdiplomat
- Biography
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Laurent Fabius is a French politician serving as president of the Constitutional Council since 8 March 2016. A member of the Socialist Party, he previously served as Prime Minister of France from 17 July 1984 to 20 March 1986. Fabius was 37 years old when he was appointed and is, after Gabriel Attal, the second youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic.
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Joseph Fourier
- Occupations
- mathematician
- Biography
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Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
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Esther Duflo
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1992
- Occupations
- economistuniversity teacher
- Biography
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Esther Duflo Banerjee, FBA is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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Juan Branco
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- In 2014 graduated with doctorate in France
- Occupations
- essayistlawyer
- Biography
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Juan Branco is a French and Spanish lawyer, political activist and writer.
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Alain Badiou
- Occupations
- university teachersociologistplaywrighteditorphilosopher
- Biography
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Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou's work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics, in particular set theory and category theory. Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought. Unlike his peers, Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth. His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.
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Marc Bloch
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1904
- Occupations
- university teachermedievalistFrench Resistance fighterprofessorlecturer
- Biography
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Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944).
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Raymond Aron
- Occupations
- sociologistprofessoreconomistwriterphilosopher
- Biography
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Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century.
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Édouard Louis
- Occupations
- editorwriter
- Biography
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Édouard Louis is a French writer.
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Paul Langevin
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1894-1897
- Occupations
- physicistuniversity teacherchemistphilosopher of sciencepedagogue
- Biography
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Paul Langevin was a French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. He was one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an anti-fascist organization created after the 6 February 1934 far right riots. Being a public opponent of fascism in the 1930s resulted in his arrest and being held under house arrest by the Vichy government for most of World War II. Langevin was also president of the Human Rights League (LDH) from 1944 to 1946, having recently joined the French Communist Party.
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Régis Debray
- Occupations
- writerteacherofficialphilosopherjournalist
- Biography
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Jules Régis Debray is a French philosopher, journalist, former government official and academic. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society, and for associating with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and advancing Salvador Allende's presidency in Chile in the early 1970s. He returned to France in 1973 and later held various official posts in the French government.
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Jeanne Balibar
- Occupations
- actor
- Biography
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Jeanne Balibar is a French actress and singer.
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Charles Péguy
- Occupations
- writerphilosopherjournalistmilitary personnelliterary critic
- Biography
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Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing (but generally non-practicing) Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.
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Michel Serres
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1952
- Occupations
- philosopherhistorian of science
- Biography
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Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose.
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Cahit Arf
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1930-1933
- Occupations
- topologistmathematician
- Biography
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Cahit Arf was a Turkish mathematician. He is known for the Arf invariant of a quadratic form in characteristic 2 (applied in knot theory and surgery theory) in topology, the Hasse–Arf theorem in ramification theory, Arf semigroups and Arf rings.
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Jacques Rancière
- Occupations
- literary criticaestheticianuniversity teacherphilosopher
- Biography
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Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital (1965) with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.
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Ngô Bảo Châu
- Occupations
- professormathematician
- Biography
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Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms (proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad). He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.
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Jean-Charles Naouri
- Occupations
- businesspersonentrepreneur
- Biography
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Jean-Charles Naouri is a French businessman. He is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder of Groupe Casino.
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Marisol Touraine
- Occupations
- international forum participantpolitician
- Biography
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Marisol Touraine is a French politician who served as Minister of Social Affairs and Health under Prime Ministers Jean-Marc Ayrault, Manuel Valls, and Bernard Cazeneuve.
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Hippolyte Taine
- Occupations
- historianwriterliterary criticart historianphilosopher
- Biography
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Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.
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Jacques Le Goff
- Occupations
- historianmedievalistFrench Resistance fighter
- Biography
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Jacques Le Goff was a French historian and prolific author specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries.
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Stéphane Hessel
- Occupations
- French Resistance fighterpolitical activistwriterdiplomat
- Biography
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Stéphane Frédéric Hessel was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, Resistance member and BCRA agent. Born German, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and protection for the post–World War II social vision. His short book Time for Outrage! sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.
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Maurice Genevoix
- Occupations
- poetreserve officerwriterbiographer
- Biography
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Maurice Genevoix was a French author and WW1 veteran who is best known for his book, Ceux de 14.
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Christophe Barbier
- Occupations
- editor-in-chiefjournalist
- Biography
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Christophe Barbier is a French political journalist and columnist who was chief editor of L'Express from 2006 to 2016.
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Alain
- Occupations
- journalistwriterphilosopherteacher
- Biography
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Émile-Auguste Chartier, commonly known as Alain ([alɛ̃]), was a French philosopher, journalist, essayist, pacifist, and teacher of philosophy. He adopted his pseudonym as the most banal he could find. There is no evidence he ever thought in so doing of the 15th century Norman poet Alain Chartier.
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Martin Hirsch
- Occupations
- official
- Biography
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Martin Hirsch is a French civil servant who was the former head of Emmaüs France, the former High Commissioner for Active Solidarity against Poverty, and the High Commissioner for Youth in the government of François Fillon. Hirsch was in charge of setting up the Revenu de solidarité active and left the government in March 2010 to head the state's Civic Service Agency.
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François-Xavier Bellamy
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 2005-2008
- Occupations
- essayistpolitician
- Biography
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François-Xavier Bellamy is a French essayist, high-school teacher and politician. He is a former Deputy Mayor of Versailles (2008–2019) and now a Member of the European Parliament (2019–present), having led The Republicans (LR) list in the 2019 election. Since 2023, he has been The Republicans executive vice president.
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Assia Djebar
- Occupations
- translatorwriterprofessorlinguisthistorian
- Biography
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Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, known by her pen name Assia Djebar (Arabic: آسيا جبار), was an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is "frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a genealogy of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial." Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie française on 16 June 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. For the entire body of her work she was awarded the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was often named as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Alain Touraine
- Occupations
- sociologistuniversity teacher
- Biography
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Alain Touraine was a French sociologist. He was research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux. Touraine was an important figure in the founding of French sociology of work after World War II and later became an internationally-renowned sociologist of social movements, particularly the May 68 student movement in France and the Solidarity trade-union movement in communist Poland.
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Jean Giraudoux
- Occupations
- writerscreenwriterplaywrightdiplomatessayist
- Biography
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Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II.
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André Weil
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1922-1925
- Occupations
- mathematicianuniversity teacherhistorian of mathematics
- Biography
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André Weil was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. His influence is due both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark he left on mathematical practice and style, through some of his own works as well as through the Bourbaki group, of which he was one of the principal founders.
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Anne Lauvergeon
- Occupations
- entrepreneurbusinesspersoninternational forum participantphysicistengineer
- Biography
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Anne Lauvergeon is a French businesswoman who served as CEO of Areva from 2001 until 2011. According to The Wall Street Journal, she is known internationally as one of the most prominent defenders of nuclear power.
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Jean-François Revel
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1943
- Occupations
- journalist
- Biography
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Jean-François Revel was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. A prominent public intellectual, Revel was a socialist in his youth but later became a prominent European proponent of classical liberalism and free market economics. He was a member of the Académie française after June 1998. He is best known for his book Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, published in French in 1970.
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Édouard Herriot
- Occupations
- politician
- Biography
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Édouard Marie Herriot was a French Radical politician of the Third Republic who served three times as Prime Minister (1924–1925; 1926; 1932) and twice as President of the Chamber of Deputies. He led the first Cartel des Gauches. Under the Fourth Republic, he served as President of the National Assembly until 1954. A historian by occupation, Herriot was elected to the Académie Française's eighth seat in 1946. He served as Mayor of Lyon for more than 45 years, from 1905 until his death, except for a brief period from 1940 to 1945, when he was exiled to Germany for opposing the Vichy regime.
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Jean Perrin
- Occupations
- physicistuniversity teacherchemistcomposertheoretical physicist
- Biography
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Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids (sedimentation equilibrium), verified Albert Einstein's explanation of this phenomenon and thereby confirmed the atomic nature of matter. For this achievement he was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926.
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Jean-Pierre Serre
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1945-1948
- Occupations
- mathematician
- Biography
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Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.
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Henri Wallon
- Occupations
- writerprofessorphysicianpoliticianpsychologist
- Biography
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Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist (in the field of social psychology), neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon.
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Michel Marcel Navratil
- Occupations
- philosopheruniversity teacher
- Biography
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Michel Marcel Navratil, Jr. was a French philosophy professor who was one of the last survivors of the sinking of Titanic on 15 April 1912. He, along with his brother, Edmond (1910–1953), were known as the "Titanic Orphans", having been the only children rescued without a parent or guardian. He was three years old at the time of the disaster.
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Lucien Febvre
- Occupations
- professorhistorian
- Biography
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Lucien Paul Victor Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He was the initial editor of the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.
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Gérard Genette
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1951
- Occupations
- literary theoristuniversity teacherliterary criticopinion journalistliterary historian
- Biography
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Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
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Vladimir Jankélévitch
- Occupations
- musicologistuniversity teacherphilosopherFrench Resistance fighter
- Biography
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Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist.
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Julia Cagé
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 2005-2009
- Occupations
- economist
- Biography
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Julia Cagé is a French economist specializing in development economics, political economy, and economic history.
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Georges Dumézil
- Occupations
- military personnelanthropologisthistorian of religionlinguist
- Biography
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Georges Edmond Raoul Dumézil was a French philologist, linguist, and religious studies scholar who specialized in comparative linguistics and mythology. He was a professor at Istanbul University, École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie Française. Dumézil is well known for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis on Proto-Indo-European mythology and society. His research has had a major influence on the fields of comparative mythology and Indo-European studies.
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Michel Sapin
- Occupations
- international forum participantpolitician
- Biography
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Michel Sapin is a French politician who served as Minister of Finance from 1992 to 1993 and again from 2014 to 2017. He is a member of the Socialist Party.
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Paul Vidal de La Blache
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1863-1866
- Occupations
- cartographergeographer
- Biography
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Paul Vidal de La Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.
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Marc Augé
- Occupations
- anthropologistdirecteur d'étudesethnologistuniversity teacher
- Biography
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Marc Augé was a French anthropologist.
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Pierre Brossolette
- Occupations
- journalistFrench Resistance fighterpolitician
- Biography
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Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, left-wing politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II. He ran an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance at the Rue de la Pompe, before serving as a liaison officer in London, where he also was a radio anchor for the BBC. Arrested in Brittany as he was trying to reach the UK on a mission back from France alongside Émile Bollaert, Brossolette was taken into custody by the Sicherheitsdienst. He committed suicide by jumping out of a window at their headquarters on 84 Avenue Foch in Paris as he feared he would reveal the lengths of French Resistance networks under torture; he died of his wounds at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital later that day. In 2015, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon with national honours at the request of President François Hollande, alongside politician Jean Zay and fellow Resistance members Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz.
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Pierre Janet
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1879-1882
- Occupations
- professorpsychotherapistpsychiatristneurologistpsychologist
- Biography
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Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
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Roger Caillois
- Occupations
- sociologisttranslatorwriterpoetliterary critic
- Biography
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Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, ludology and philosophy by focusing on diverse subjects such as games and play as well as the sacred. He was also instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Ángel Asturias to the French public. After his death, the French Literary award Prix Roger Caillois was named after him in 1991.
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Jules Romains
- Occupations
- playwrightwriterpoet
- Biography
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Jules Romains was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement. His works include the play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine, and a cycle of works called Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good Will). Sinclair Lewis called him one of the six best novelists in the world.
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Serge Haroche
- Occupations
- physicistinternational forum participantprofesseur des universitésscientist
- Biography
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Serge Haroche is a French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with David J. Wineland for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", a study of the particle of light, the photon. This and his other works developed laser spectroscopy. Since 2001, Haroche is a professor at the Collège de France and holds the chair of quantum physics.
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Muriel Barbery
- Occupations
- novelistwriter
- Biography
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Muriel Barbery is a French novelist and philosophy teacher. Her 2006 novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog quickly sold more than a million copies in several countries.
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Alice Zeniter
- Occupations
- writernovelistdirectortranslatorplaywright
- Biography
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Alice Zeniter is a French novelist, translator, scriptwriter, dramatist and director.
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Étienne Balibar
- Occupations
- philosopher
- Biography
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Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
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Laurent Schwartz
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1934-1937
- Occupations
- university teacherentomologistmathematician
- Biography
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Laurent-Moïse Schwartz was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on the theory of distributions. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique.
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Gabriel Lippmann
- Occupations
- physicistinventorphotographerprofessor
- Biography
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Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.
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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1949
- Occupations
- historianhigh school teacheruniversity teacher
- Biography
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Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.
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Georges Canguilhem
- Occupations
- university teacherhistorian of scienceFrench Resistance fighterhistorianphysician
- Biography
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Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science (in particular, biology).
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Alessio Figalli
- Occupations
- university teachermathematician
- Biography
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Alessio Figalli is an Italian mathematician working primarily on calculus of variations and partial differential equations.
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Paul Nizan
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1924
- Occupations
- translatorwriterpoliticianphilosopheressayist
- Biography
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Paul-Yves Nizan was a French philosopher and writer.
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Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
- Occupations
- physicist
- Biography
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Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.
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Henri Lebesgue
- Occupations
- professormathematician
- Biography
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Henri Léon Lebesgue was a French mathematician known for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th-century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Intégrale, longueur, aire ("Integral, length, area") at the University of Nancy during 1902.
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Alexandre Adler
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1969-1974
- Occupations
- historianjournalist
- Biography
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Alexandre Adler was a French historian, journalist and expert of contemporary geopolitics, the former USSR, and the Middle East. He was a Knight of the Legion of Honour (2002). A Maoist in his youth and then a member of the Communist Party (PCF), he shifted to the right at the end of the 1970s and later became close to U.S. neoconservatives, as did his wife Blandine Kriegel (daughter of the communist Resistant Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont). Adler was the counsellor of Roger Cukiermann, chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France).
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Maurice Halbwachs
- Occupations
- sociologistpsychologistprofessorstatisticianphilosopher
- Biography
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Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte; study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament. (1951)
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Gaston Julia
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1911-1914
- Occupations
- university teachermathematician
- Biography
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Gaston Maurice Julia was a French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set. His works were popularized by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; the Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely related. He founded, independently with Pierre Fatou, the modern theory of holomorphic dynamics.
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Marie Darrieussecq
- Enrolled in Normal Superior School
- Studied in 1990-1994
- Occupations
- psychoanalystwriter
- Biography
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Marie Darrieussecq is a French writer. She is also a translator, and has practised as a psychoanalyst.
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Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
- Occupations
- university teacherphysicist
- Biography
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Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms. Currently he is still an active researcher, working at the École normale supérieure (Paris).
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Jean-Luc Marion
- Occupations
- theologianuniversity teacherphilosopher
- Biography
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Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian. Marion is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, but also religion. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.
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Émile Borel
- Occupations
- politicianuniversity teacherEsperantistFrench Resistance fightermathematician
- Biography
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Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel was a French mathematician and politician. As a mathematician, he was known for his founding work in the areas of measure theory and probability.
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Isabelle Kocher
- Occupations
- business executivebusinesspersoninternational forum participant
- Biography
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Isabelle Kocher is a French businesswoman. She was the chief executive officer of Engie (previously GDF Suez) until February 24 2020.
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Alain Peyrefitte
- Occupations
- diplomatwriterpoliticianministerphilosopher
- Biography
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Alain Peyrefitte was a French scholar and politician. He was a confidant of Charles de Gaulle and had a long career in public service, serving as a diplomat in Germany and Poland. Peyrefitte is remembered for his support for partitioning Algeria amid the Algerian War.
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Nicușor Dan
- Occupations
- mathematicianpoliticianuniversity teacheractivist
- Biography
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Nicușor Dan is a Romanian activist, mathematician, former member of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania as well as founder and former leader of the Romanian political party Save Romania Union (USR). He is currently serving as the Mayor of Bucharest following the 2020 Romanian local elections as independent politician.
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Stanislas Dehaene
- Occupations
- Director of Research at CNRSuniversity teacherpsychologistneuroscientist
- Biography
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Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
