Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 as the leader of the Orléanist party. As a member of the cadet branch of the Royal House of France and a cousin of King Louis XVI of France by reason of his descent from their common...

André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". The SI unit of measurement of electri...

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Lodewijk Napoleon in Dutch), king of Holland (1806-1810). Intended by his older brother Napoleon Bonaparte as little more than a French governor, Louis took his duties as King seriously, calling himself King Lodewi...

Jean Lafitte was a French pirate and privateer who operated in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century. He and his older brother Pierre spelled their last name Laffite, but English language documents of the time used "Lafitte". This ha...

Alexandre Deschapelles was a French chess player who, between the death of Philidor and the arrival of Louis de la Bourdonnais, was probably the strongest player in the world. He was considered the unofficial world champion from about 1800–...

Marie Antoine Carême known as "The King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings" was an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as haute cuisine, the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery favored...

John James Audubon (Jean-Jacques) was a French American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in t...

Louis Daguerre was a doctor, a painter and a theatrical set designer, but he is best remembered as one of the inventors of photography. Both he and Nicéphore Niepce began their initial experiments separately, but in 1829, they teamed up. Ni...

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the...

Anyone who has studied ancient Egypt will be familiar with Jean Francois Champollion, The Father of Egyptology. He was, after all, credited with deciphering hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone and thus giving scholars the key to understand...

Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was a French explorer, naval officer and rear admiral, who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. In honour of his many valuable chartings, the D'Urville Sea...

Marie Louise, Empress of the French (1810–1815) as consort of Napoleon I and duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla (1816–47), daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (later Emperor of Austria as Francis I.) She was married (1810) to N...

Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais was a French chess master, possibly the strongest player in the early 19th century. La Bourdonnais was born on the island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean in 1795. He learned chess in 1814 and began...

Gabriel Lamé was a French mathematician who contributed to the theory of partial differential equations by the use of curvilinear coordinates, and the mathematical theory of elasticity. He became well known for his general theory of curv...

Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel was a French mathematician and physicist. His studies were affected by the troubles of the Napoleonic era. He went on to form his own school École Sainte-Barbe. Duhamel's principle, a method of obtaining solut...