Jean-Benjamin François de la Borde was a French composer, writer on music and fermier général. Born into an aristocratic family, he studied violin under Antoine Dauvergne and composition under Jean-Philippe Rameau. From 1762 to 1774, he served at the court of Louis XV as premier valet de la chambre, losing his post on the death of the king. He wrote many operas, mostly comic, and a four-volume collection of songs for solo voice, Choix de chansons mises en musique illustrated by Jean-Michel Moreau. Many of the songs from the collection were later published individually through the efforts of the English folksong collector Lucy Etheldred Broadwood. His Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne was published in 1780. La Borde was guillotined during the French Revolution in 1794.
Jean-Christophe Rufin is a French doctor, diplomat, historian, globetrotter and novelist. He is the president of Action Against Hunger, one of the earliest members of Médecins Sans Frontières, and a member of the Académie française.
Jean-Claude Carrière was a French novelist, screenwriter and actor. He received an Academy Award for best short film for co-writing Heureux Anniversaire (1963), and was later conferred an Honorary Oscar in 2014. He was nominated for the Academy Award three other times for his work in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). He also won a César Award for Best Original Screenplay in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983).
Jean-Claude Corbeil, was a Canadian linguist and lexicographer. He served as head of the linguistic department at the Office québécois de la langue française from 1971 to 1977 and oversaw the introduction of Quebec's language laws during that decade. He also co-authored several visual dictionaries for Scholastic Corporation, Macmillan Publishers, Firefly Learning, and Merriam-Webster.
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis. In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Jean-Claude Passeron is a French sociologist and leader of social science studies. As part of a mixed interdisciplinary team involving sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, he led the magazine Enquêtes.
