Franco Venturi was an Italian historian, essayist and journalist, a scholar of the Enlightenment in Italy and of the history of Russia, and an anti-fascist active in the Resistance.
Dominique François Jean Arago, known simply as François Arago, was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician.
François Baron de Tott was an aristocrat and a French military officer of Slovak origin. Born on August 17, 1733 in Chamigny, a village in northern France, the descendant of a Hungarian nobleman, who had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire and then moved on to France with the cavalry of Count Miklós Bercsényi, and was later raised to the rank of baron.
François Béroalde de Verville was a French Renaissance novelist, poet and intellectual. He was born in Paris, the son of Matthieu Brouard, called "Béroalde", a professor of Agrippa d'Aubigné and Pierre de l'Estoile and a Huguenot; his mother, Marie Bletz, was the niece of the humanist and Hebrew scholar François Vatable. At the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, his family fled to Geneva (1573), but Béroalde returned to Paris in 1581. During the civil wars, Béroalde abjured Calvinism and joined the factions around Henri III of France. In 1589 he moved to Tours, and became chanoine (canon) of the cathedral chapter of Saint Gatien, Tours, where he remained until his death.
François Bonivard was a nobleman, ecclesiastic, historian, and Geneva patriot at the time of the Republic of Geneva. His life was the inspiration for Lord Byron's 1816 poem The Prisoner of Chillon. He was a partisan of the Protestant Reformation, and by most accounts was a libertine, despite his vocation.
