← Fame through time1800-1809
The 1800s
Whose names filled the books of the 1800s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in French books during the 1800s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire50 - 2
Louis XIV of France32 - 3
Louis XVI of France19 - 4
Molière13 - 5
Louis XV of France11 - 6
Montesquieu8.6 - 7
Louis XII of France5.1 - 8
Philip V of Spain3.0 - 9
Olivier de Serres2.0 - 10
Marie de' Medici1.9 - 11
Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon1.8 - 12
Pierre de Marivaux1.6 - 13
Francis II of France1.6 - 14
Pope Julius II1.3 - 15
François Fénelon1.2 - 16
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme1.1 - 17
Marie Antoinette1.1 - 18
Francis de Sales1.1 - 19
Gustav III of Sweden0.93 - 20
Louis XVIII of France0.92 - 21
Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Marquise de Montespan0.80 - 22
Claude Michel0.74 - 23
Johann Bernoulli0.68 - 24
Anne of Brittany0.66 - 25
Pope John XXII0.61
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1800s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Napoleon22 decades - 2
Ludwig van Beethoven21 decades - 3
Andrew Jackson22 decades - 4
John Quincy Adams22 decades - 5
William Henry Harrison22 decades - 6
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel21 decades - 7
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellingtonnot measured- - 8
William Wordsworth22 decades - 9
Walter Scott22 decades - 10
Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor22 decades - 11
Louis Philippe I19 decades - 12
Alexander von Humboldt8 decades - 13
Samuel Taylor Coleridge19 decades - 14
Caspar David Friedrich11 decades - 15
Klemens von Metternich0 decades - 16
Muhammad Ali of Egypt0 decades - 17
Joachim Murat21 decades - 18
François-René de Chateaubriand11 decades - 19
John Dalton22 decades - 20
Joseph Bonaparte22 decades - 21
Pope Gregory XVI19 decades - 22
Germaine de Staël10 decades - 23
Thomas Robert Malthus8 decades - 24
Frederick William III of Prussianot measured- - 25
Joseph Fourier11 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.