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François Auguste Rene Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917), known as Auguste Rodin, was a celebrated French sculptor and artist.
Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a French writer, remembered as a master of the short story form, and as a representative of the naturalist school of writers, who depicted human lives and destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.
Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) 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, especially as applied to <i>plein-air</i> landscape painting.<br/><br/>

The term 'Impressionism' is derived from the title of his painting <i>Impression, soleil levant</i> (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Sarah Bernhardt (23 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage and early film actress. She was referred to as 'the most famous actress the world has ever known', and is regarded as one of the finest actors of all time.<br/><br/>

Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, at the beginning of the Belle Epoque period, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas. She developed a reputation as a sublime dramatic actress and tragedienne, earning the nickname 'The Divine Sarah'. In her later career she starred in some of the earliest films ever produced.
Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.<br/><br/>

Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, best known for his 'Ave Maria', based on a work by Bach, as well as his opera 'Faust'.
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.<br/><br/>

Pasteur's medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. Together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, he is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology.
Franz Liszt (born Franz Joseph Liszt), Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern usage Liszt Ferenc (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a prolific 19th-century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, organist, philanthropist, author, nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary.
Victor Marie Hugo 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem.<br/><br/> 


Outside France, his best-known works are the acclaimed novels Les Miserables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of the death penalty.<br/><br/> 


Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He was buried in the Pantheon. His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on francs.
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a French novelist and memoirist. She is equally well known for her much publicized romantic affairs with a number of artists, including Polish-French composer and pianist Frederic Chopin and the writer Alfred de Musset.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic  artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.