France: the essential lives

Cogito ergo sum and coordinate geometry.

Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.

Separation of powers, copied into nearly every written constitution since.

Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.

Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².

Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.

Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

French consul in China whose L'Acuponcture Chinoise opened the practice to Europe.

Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.

The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.

Wrote on attention, affliction and rootedness while working the factory floor.

The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.

Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century put wealth inequality data at the centre of policy.

Randomised trials made development aid an experimental science.