- Industry: Library & information science
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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
A French mathematician and philosopher, born in Provence; declared against scholastic methods out of deference to the empirical; controverted the metaphysics of Descartes; became the head of a school opposed to him; adopted the philosophy of Epicurus and contributed to the science of astronomy, and was the friend of Kepler, Galileo, and Hobbes; was a great admirer of Bayle, the head of his school, a school of Pyrrhonists, tending to materialism (1592-1655).
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A French mathematician, born near Montauban; made important discoveries in the properties of numbers, and with his friend Pascal invented a calculus of probabilities; was held in high esteem by Hallam, who ranks him next to Descartes (1601-1665).
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A French novelist and writer of fables; was the friend of Voltaire, from whom he received his first literary impulse; was the author of several romances plays, etc., but his finest work is found in his Fables, in which department of literature he ranks next La Fontaine (1755-1794).
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A French painter, born at Lyons; was a pupil of Ingres; represented the religious movement in art in the 19th century (1809-1864).
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A French patroness of letters, born at Paris, the daughter of a valet-de-chambre; in her fifteenth year she married a wealthy merchant, whose immense fortune she inherited; her love of letters—which she cherished, though but poorly educated herself—and her liberality soon made her salon the most celebrated in Paris; the encyclopédists, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Marmontel, received from her a liberal encouragement in their great undertaking; Walpole, Hume, and Gibbon were among her friends; and Stanislas Poniatowsky, who became king of Poland, acknowledged her generosity to him by styling himself her son and welcoming her royally to his kingdom (1699-1777).
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A French physicist, born in Paris; distinguished for his studies in optics and problems connected with light; demonstrated the rate of the rotation of the globe by the oscillation of a pendulum (1819-1868).
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A French Protestant, celebrated for his filial piety; he took the place of his father in the galleys, who had been condemned to toil in them on account of his religious opinions (1727-1797).
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A French republican leader, born at Cahors, of Italian descent; intended for the Church, to which he evinced no proclivity; he early showed a penchant for politics and adopted the profession of law, in the prosecution of which he delivered a speech which marked him out as the coming man of the French republic, from the spirit of hostility it manifested against the Empire; at the fall of the Empire he stood high in public regard, assumed the direction of affairs, and made desperate attempts to repel the invading Germans; though he failed in this, he never ceased to feel the shame of the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and strove hard to recover them, but all his efforts proved ineffectual, and he died in Dec. 31, to the grief of the nation (1838-1882).
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A French Republican statesman, born at Lyons; called to the Paris bar in 1830; a strong Republican, he joined the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848; held office as Minister of the Interior in the New Republic, and disapproving of the coup d'état, resumed practice at the bar; defended the Italian conspirator Orsini, and in 1870, on the dissolution of the Empire, became Minister of Foreign Affairs; mistakes in his negotiations with Bismarck led to his resignation and resumption of his legal practice (1809-1880).
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A French Revolutionary, a Girondin; blessed the National tricolor flag; "a man of Te Deums and public consecrations"; was a member of the first parliament; stripped of his insignia, lamented the death of the king, perished on the scaffold (1744-1793).
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