Famous people who grew up or lived in and around Paris
20 notable people grew up or lived in and around Paris. Each listing explores the home and neighbourhood, and how the place shaped the person they became.
Camille Saint-Saëns1835–1921
📍 3 Rue du Jardinet, 75006 Paris, France
I was born Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns on the 9th of October 1835 in Paris, the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns, who died two months after my birth, and Françoise-Clémence…
Claude Debussy1862–1918
📍 2 Rue au Pain, 78100 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Île-de-France, France
I was born Achille-Claude Debussy on the 22nd of August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town on the Seine west of Paris famous for its royal château and its forest. My father ran a china…
Edgar Degas1890–1912
📍 37 Rue Victor-Massé, 75009 Paris, France
I was born into a wealthy banking family in Paris, and my father, who loved music and art, let me give up the law to paint. I spent nearly all my life at the foot of Montmartre and around…
Édith Piaf1915–1935
📍 72 rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France
I was born in Belleville, the working-class neighbourhood in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, on the 19th of December 1915, in a building at 72 rue de Belleville — though there is a…
Ernest Hemingway1921–1926
📍 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France
Hadley and I arrived in Paris in December 1921 with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson and almost nothing else. We rented on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, on the Left Bank…
François Truffaut1932–1959
📍 24 Rue de Navarin, 75009 Paris, France
I was born François Truffaut on the 6th of February 1932 in Montmartre, Paris, the illegitimate son of Janine de Monferrand, raised by my maternal grandmother until I was eight. My…
Frédéric Chopin1842–1849
📍 9 Square d'Orléans, 75009 Paris, France
George Sand found the Square d'Orléans and we took neighbouring apartments in the same courtyard — she at number 5, I at number 9, connected by a shared garden that gave us the fiction of…
Jim Morrison1971
📍 17-19 Rue Beautreillis, 75004 Paris, France
My father was a navy officer, later an admiral, so I grew up moving from base to base across America, never staying long enough to belong anywhere. Books became my home: Nietzsche, Rimbaud…
Joséphine Bonaparte1799–1814
📍 Avenue du Château de la Malmaison, 92500 Rueil-Malmaison, France
Napoleon gave me Malmaison before he gave me an empire, and Malmaison outlasted the empire in my heart. After the divorce — when my failure to produce an heir made me politically…
King Louis XIV1682–1715
📍 Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, France
I moved the court from Paris deliberately. A king surrounded by idle nobles in the capital is vulnerable; a king whose nobles must come to him, must petition for apartments at Versailles…
Kylian Mbappé1998–2013
📍 Bondy, Seine-Saint-Denis, France
Kylian Mbappé was born in Paris in December 1998 and grew up in Bondy, a multicultural suburb in Seine-Saint-Denis, north-east of the city. His father, Wilfried, from Cameroon, was a…
Le Corbusier1934–1965
📍 24 Rue Nungesser et Coli, 75016 Paris, France
I was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a high watchmaking town in the Swiss Jura, where I trained to engrave watch cases before my teacher steered me towards…
Louis Pasteur1887–1895
📍 Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
I was born in Dole in the Jura region of France in 1822, but it was Paris and the Institut Pasteur — the research institute I founded in 1887 — that became my true home, and where I spent…
Maria Callas1966–1977
📍 36 Avenue Georges-Mandel, 75116 Paris, France
I was born in New York to Greek parents, and my mother decided early that my voice would be the family's fortune; I sang for her before I can remember choosing to. At thirteen she took my…
Marie Antoinette1774–1789
📍 Petit Trianon, 78000 Versailles, France
I was the fifteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa, raised informally in the palaces of Vienna and Schönbrunn, and at fourteen I was sent to France to marry the future Louis XVI. Versailles…
Marie Curie1914–1934
📍 1 Rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris, France
The Institut du Radium was built for me after my second Nobel Prize — the first person ever awarded the prize in two different sciences, which did not prevent the Académie des Sciences from…
Napoleon Bonaparte1799–1815
📍 Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, France
Of all the places I lived — the Tuileries, the Elysee, the palaces of conquered Europe — it was Malmaison that felt most like home. Josephine found it first, a modest chateau west of Paris…
Pierre-Auguste Renoir1876–1877
📍 12 Rue Cortot, 75018 Paris, France
I grew up in a crowded apartment near the Louvre, the son of a tailor, and at thirteen I was painting flowers on porcelain in a factory, which taught me lightness of touch. In 1875, poor…
Sylvie Guillem1965–1976
📍 Le Blanc-Mesnil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France
Sylvie Guillem was born in Paris in February 1965 and grew up in the working-class suburbs of the city. Her father was a car mechanic, and her mother was a gymnastics teacher, who coached…
Victor Hugo1832–1848
📍 6 Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris, France
As a boy I was dragged between my soldier father's postings in Italy and Spain and my mother's rooms in Paris, where the overgrown garden of an old convent became my first kingdom. In 1832…