From De Beauvoir to Foucault, Rousseau to Sartre, a roundup of les grands penseurs and things you’re unlikely to hear them say

René Descartes France’s national philosopher, whose Discourse on Method defined thought as the essential human quality (“I think, therefore I am”) and exemplified one of the classic traits of the French style of thinking: the deductive mode of reasoning, which starts with a general, abstract proposition and then works towards a specific conclusion.

Least likely to say: “We see well only with the heart” (Saint-Exupéry)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Portrait of Voltaire, c1740. Illustration: Getty Images

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) A caustic and playful writer whose Candide savaged the complacent optimism of his age; his prolific oeuvre embodied the 18th-century ideals of enlightened despotism, cosmopolitan elitism and cultural elevation; he campaigned vigorously for religious toleration.

Least likely to say: “All for one, one for all” (Dumas, The Three Musketeers)

From Left Bank to left behind: where have the great French thinkers gone? Read more

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Swiss-born but appropriated by the French as the intellectual father of their 1789 revolution: his writings on human freedom, equality, popular sovereignty and the return to nature challenged the social and political conventions of 18th‑century French society, and founded the radical republican tradition.

Least likely to say: “Enrich yourselves” (Guizot)

Auguste Comte The founder of positivism, a doctrine that asserted all knowledge should be based on scientific observation and theoretical coordination; he believed that the advances of the scientific age would herald a spiritual reorganisation of society, reconciling the conservative idea of order with the liberal notion of progress; he created his own neo-religious cult which idealised the dead and advocated abstinence and chastity.

Least likely to say: “All the misery of men comes from hope” (Camus)

Jules Michelet Greatest French historian of his time, whose blistering account of the French revolution dwelled on the importance of emotions, myths and symbols; he championed the cause of “the people”, arguing that history is decisively shaped by the interventions of the masses.

Least likely to say: “Let them eat cake” (Marie Antoinette)

Alexis de Tocqueville The aristocratic liberal thinker who despaired of 19th‑century France’s endemic political instability; his writings on American society and revolutionary France sounded a strong warning against the perils of the new democratic and egalitarian age.

Least likely to say: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau)

Jean-Paul Sartre The theorist and living embodiment of the public intellectual, who confronted all the powerful institutions of his time (the bourgeois state, the Communist party, the university system); his writings on existentialism and Marxism in the post-second world war decades marked the pinnacle of the French traditions of republican universalism and philosophical radicalism. The companion of Simone de Beauvoir.

Least likely to say: “The world began without man and will end without him” (Lévi-Strauss)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simone de Beauvoir. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Simone de Beauvoir Writer whose oeuvre ranged widely across philosophy, politics and social issues. Her seminal work was The Second Sex (1949), which drew on existentialist philosophy to offer a ground-breaking account of women’s oppression, thus charting the path for modern feminism.

Least likely to say: “The best government is a benevolent tyranny” (Voltaire)

Claude Lévi-Strauss. An ethnologist who became the most important exponent of structuralism, a philosophical movement that challenged the linearity of Cartesian rationalism by questioning its assumptions about progress and the fixed nature of meaning, and stressing the importance of dissonances and the unconscious in human thinking.

Least likely to say: “The perfectibility of man is truly indefinite” (Condorcet)

Michel Foucault The most innovative and influential French thinker of the contemporary era; his work explored the ways in which modern societies imposed various forms of intellectual and physical control on their citizens, ranging from dominant norms and coercive state controls to medical and sexual practices.

Least likely to say: “Prison works” (Michael Howard)