Rejected three times by the academy and accused of faking his first masterpiece, he turned a career of scandals into modern sculpture itself.

A condemned general with no army told a defeated France it had not surrendered — then spent thirty years making the nation ratify the claim.

He served six regimes and betrayed most of them — yet twice, when France lay beaten, the turncoat was the only man who could save it.

A serial betrayer and convicted machine boss who also broke France’s fifty-year silence over Vichy — and his country loved him for both.

A medical-school dropout with no science degree built a wire-and-weight machine that let a Paris crowd watch the Earth turn.

He staged the demonstrations that founded microbiology — and his notebooks, opened a century later, tell a messier story than the myth.

The Revolution’s heir who crowned himself, re-enslaved the Caribbean, and from a South Atlantic rock wrote the legend we still argue over.

Beaten by a nobleman’s servants with no recourse, he spent fifty years building the fortune and the border-side fortress from which a commoner could finally strike back.