List of Famous people born in France

Jean-Pierre Chevènement is a French politician who served as a minister in the 1980s and 1990s best known for his candidacy in the 2002 French presidential election. After serving as mayor of Belfort, he was elected to the Senate for the Territoire de Belfort in 2008. As a cofounder of the PS and founder of the Republican and Citizen Movement (MRC), he is a significant figure of the French left.

Jean-Louis Murat is the pseudonym of the French singer/songwriter Jean-Louis Bergheaud. He spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in Murat-le-Quaire from which he got his pseudonym.

Claude-Michel Schönberg is a French record producer, actor, singer, songwriter, and musical theatre composer, best known for his collaborations with lyricist Alain Boublil. Major works include La Révolution Française (1973), Les Misérables (1980), Miss Saigon (1989), Martin Guerre (1996), The Pirate Queen (2006), and Marguerite (2008).

Martine Louise Marie Aubry is a French politician. She was the First Secretary of the French Socialist Party from November 2008 to April 2012, and has been the first female Mayor of Lille (Nord) since March 2001. Her father, Jacques Delors, served as Minister of Finance under President François Mitterrand and was also President of the European Commission.

Mathias Malzieu, the lead singer of the French band Dionysos, co-founded the group in 1993 when he lived in Valence in Drôme (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes). Three of his school-friends, comprised the original band membership.

Alexandra David-Néel was a Belgian–French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet, which was published in 1929. Her teachings influenced the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the popularisers of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and the esotericist Benjamin Creme.

Christine Pascal was a French actress, writer and director.

Alain Veinstein is a poet and writer, winner of the Mallarmé prize and a host and producer of radio.

John Vianney, venerated as Saint John Vianney, was a French Catholic priest who is venerated in the Catholic Church as a saint and as the patron saint of parish priests. He is often referred to as the "Curé d'Ars", internationally known for his priestly and pastoral work in his parish in Ars, France, because of the radical spiritual transformation of the community and its surroundings. Catholics attribute this to his saintly life, mortification, persevering ministry in the sacrament of confession, and ardent devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. His feast day is 4 August.

Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and politician noted for the Thomsen–Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"