Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his mid-teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and authored 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.
Jean-François Regnard, "the most distinguished, after Molière, of the comic poets of the seventeenth century", was a dramatist, born in Paris, who is equally famous now for the travel diary he kept of a voyage in 1681.
Jean-François Revel was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. A prominent public intellectual, Revel was a socialist in his youth but later became a prominent European proponent of classical liberalism and free market economics. He was a member of the Académie française after June 1998. He is best known for his book Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, published in French in 1970.
Jean-François Roger, sometimes called François Roger, was a French politician, journalist, poet and dramatic author. During the Revolution, at 16 years of age, he and his family were imprisoned for seventeen months for singing royalist songs. He was a civil servant, and he entered l' University where he published works of school literature. He was later appointed Professor during the Empire and Restoration. He was elected member of the French Academy, as a replacement for Suard, on 8 August 1817 and received by the duke of Lévis on 30 November next. His election was widely criticized. He was a member of the Commission of the Dictionary where he fought the Lacretelle proposal, accepted Villemain and the count of Holy-Aulaire and voted against Victor Hugo. He was one of the companions of the “Lunch of the Fork”. Of his comic and lyric works, sometimes written in collaboration with Etienne de Jouy, his greatest success is a comedy in verse, in three acts: L'Avocat, played for the first time at the Comédie-Française.
