Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that period. His stories are violent explorations of the human condition and French society. Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture.
Jean-Paul Charles Belmondo was a French actor. Initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s, he was a major French film star for several decades from the 1960s onward. His best known credits include Breathless (1960), That Man from Rio (1964), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Borsalino (1970), and The Professional (1981). He was most notable for portraying police officers in action thriller films and became known for his unwillingness to appear in English-language films despite being heavily courted by Hollywood. An undisputed box-office champion like Louis de Funès and Alain Delon of the same period, Belmondo attracted nearly 160 million spectators in his 50-year career. Between 1969 and 1982 he played four times in the most popular films of the year in France: The Brain (1969), Fear Over the City (1975), Animal (1977), Ace of Aces (1982), being surpassed on this point only by Louis de Funès. The popularity of Jean-Paul Belmondo as actor is mainly due to the characters he interpreted in his movies, loving to highlight the virile man, fighter, but also brave and heroic, which appealed to a wide audience in France and also abroad.
Brother Jean-Paul Desbiens, Frère Pierre-Jérôme, F.M.S., OC was a Quebec writer, journalist, teacher and member of the Catholic institute of Marist Brothers.
Jean-Paul Dubois is a French journalist and author. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2019 for Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon, a novel told from the perspective of a prisoner looking back on life. The jury compared Dubois to John Irving and William Boyd, who wrote books that were both popular and critical successes.
Jean-Paul Marat was a Swiss-born French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Jean-Paul Willaime is a French sociologist specialized in contemporary Protestantism, Christian ecumenism, Secularism and religions, theories and methods in the sociology of religions.