List of Famous people born in Occitania, France
Jean-Louis Etienne
Jean-Louis Étienne is a French doctor, explorer and scientist. He is well known for his Arctic explorations, where he was the first man to reach the North pole alone in 1986, and his Antarctic explorations, including the famous 1990 International Trans-Antarctica Expedition.
Auguste Comte
Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology; indeed, he invented the term and treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.
Bernard Laporte
Bernard Laporte is a rugby player, coach and former French Secretary of State for Sport. From 1999 to 2007, Laporte was the head coach of the France national team. In 2011, he became the head coach at Toulon, after Philippe Saint-André became the new national team coach. He was previously the coach at Stade Français. He was the first fully professional head coach of France. On 3 December 2016, Bernard Laporte was elected president of the French Rugby Federation.
Stéphane Diagana
Stéphane Diagana is a retired, French track and field sprinter and hurdler. His specialities were the 400 metres hurdles and the 4 x 400 metres relay.
Yvette Horner
Yvette Horner was a French accordionist, pianist and composer known for performing with the Tour de France during the 1950s and 1960s. During her 70-year long career, she gave more than two thousand concerts and released around 150 records, selling a total of 30 million copies.
Bernard Werber
Bernard Werber is a French science fiction writer, active since the 1990s. He is chiefly recognized for having written the trilogy Les Fourmis, the only one of his novels to have been published in English. This series weaves together philosophy, spirituality, science fiction, thriller, science, mythology and consciousness.
Hubertus
Hubertus or Hubert was a Christian saint who became the first bishop of Liège in 708 AD. He is the patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians, and metalworkers. Known as the "Apostle of the Ardennes", he was called upon, until the early 20th century, to cure rabies through the use of the traditional St Hubert's Key.
René Bousquet
René Bousquet was a high-ranking French political appointee who served as secretary general to the Vichy regime police from May 1942 to 31 December 1943. For personal heroism, he had become a protégé of prominent officials before the war and rose rapidly in the government.
Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic and Arabic fluently. During the early 19th century, French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1798–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic or ideographic. Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.
Georges de Caunes
Louis Georges Gustave de Caunes, professionally known as Georges de Caunes, was a well-known French television and radio presenter, journalist, writer and producer whose career spanned over six decades in French language television and radio.