René Louis de Girardin, Marquis of Vauvray, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's last pupil. He created the first French landscape garden at Ermenonville. It was inspired by Rousseau's ideas. De Girardin was the author of De la composition des paysages (1777), which strongly influenced the style of the modern French landscape garden.
René Depestre is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Américas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry.
René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
René Doumic, French critic and man of letters, was born in Paris, and after a distinguished career at the École Normale began to teach rhetoric at the Collège Stanislas de Paris.
Réné François Rohrbacher was an ecclesiastical historian. He studied for several months at Sarrebourg and Phalsbourg (Pfalzburg) and at the age of seventeen had completed his Classical studies. He taught for three years at the college of Phalsbourg; entered in 1810 the ecclesiastical seminary at Nancy; and was ordained priest in 1812. Appointed assistant priest at Insming, he was transferred after six months to Lunéville. A mission which he preached in 1821 at Flavigny led to the organization of a diocesan mission band. Several years later he became a member of the Congregation of St. Peter founded by Félicité and Jean-Marie de Lamennais, and from 1827 to 1835 directed the philosophical and theological studies of young ecclesiastics who wished to become the assistants of the two brothers in their religious undertakings. When Felicite de La Mennais refused to submit to the condemnation pronounced against him by Rome, Rohrbacher separated from him and became professor of Church history at the ecclesiastical seminary of Nancy. Later he retired to Paris where he spent the last years of his life.
René Fülöp-Miller, born Philip René Maria Müller was an Austrian cultural historian and writer. He was born to an Alsatian immigrant and a Serbian mother in Karánsebes, Austria-Hungary and died in Hanover, New Hampshire.
