← Fame through time1840-1849
The 1840s
Whose names filled the books of the 1840s - 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 1840s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Louis XIV of France37 - 2
Voltaire24 - 3
Louis XVI of France17 - 4
Louis XV of France11 - 5
Molière9.8 - 6
Louis XVIII of France7.6 - 7
Montesquieu7.0 - 8
Louis XII of France6.3 - 9
François Fénelon5.9 - 10
Charles X of France5.0 - 11
Louis Blanc3.5 - 12
Philip V of Spain2.5 - 13
Francis de Sales2.3 - 14
Marie Antoinette2.3 - 15
Francis II of France2.1 - 16
Joan of Arc2.0 - 17
Marie de' Medici1.8 - 18
Victor Hugo1.8 - 19
Pope Julius II1.7 - 20
Odilon Barrot1.7 - 21
Vincent de Paul1.6 - 22
Louis Bonaparte1.6 - 23
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme1.6 - 24
Benjamin Constant1.5 - 25
Camille Desmoulins1.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1840s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 2
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 3
Charles Dickens20 decades - 4
Charles Darwin21 decades - 5
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 6
Richard Wagner19 decades - 7
Hans Christian Andersen18 decades - 8
Andrew Johnson22 decades - 9
Nikolai Gogol19 decades - 10
Napoleon III21 decades - 11
Pope Leo XIII15 decades - 12
Søren Kierkegaard3 decades - 13
Emily Brontë14 decades - 14
Giuseppe Garibaldi11 decades - 15
Joseph Smith22 decades - 16
Mikhail Lermontov15 decades - 17
Robert E. Lee16 decades - 18
Giuseppe Verdi18 decades - 19
Franz Liszt19 decades - 20
John Stuart Mill18 decades - 21
Felix Mendelssohn18 decades - 22
P. T. Barnum17 decades - 23
Robert Schumann19 decades - 24
Jefferson Davis20 decades - 25
Taras Shevchenko13 decades - 26
Anne Brontë1 decades - 27
Benito Juárez16 decades - 28
Alexis de Tocqueville19 decades - 29
Mikhail Bakunin16 decades - 30
David Livingstone17 decades - 31
Alfred Tennyson19 decades - 32
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 33
William Ewart Gladstone18 decades - 34
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow18 decades - 35
Giuseppe Mazzini20 decades - 36
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon8 decades - 37
Alfred de Musset19 decades - 38
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour10 decades - 39
Max Stirner18 decades - 40
William Makepeace Thackeray17 decades - 41
Elizabeth Barrett Browning17 decades - 42
Robert Browning19 decades - 43
Patrice de MacMahon0 decades - 44
Louis Braille14 decades - 45
Alexander Herzen16 decades - 46
Isambard Kingdom Brunel2 decades - 47
Théophile Gautier19 decades - 48
Ivan Goncharov17 decades - 49
Elizabeth Gaskell7 decades - 50
Hannibal Hamlin18 decades - 51
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento18 decades - 52
Samuel Colt18 decades - 53
Adolphe Sax13 decades - 54
Gérard de Nerval18 decades - 55
Vissarion Belinsky15 decades - 56
Eugène Viollet-le-Ducnot measured- - 57
Nikolai Pirogov15 decades - 58
Ferdinand de Lesseps18 decades - 59
Jean-François Millet13 decades - 60
Georges-Eugène Haussmann0 decades - 61
Hong Xiuquan10 decades - 62
Emir Abdelkader0 decades - 63
Antonio Meucci14 decades - 64
William Rowan Hamilton16 decades - 65
Maximilian II of Bavaria0 decades - 66
Jules Grévy15 decades - 67
Maria Christina of the Two Siciliesnot measured- - 68
Frederick VII of Denmark0 decades - 69
Claude Bernard21 decades - 70
Horace Greeley18 decades - 71
Margaret Fuller18 decades - 72
Honoré Daumier13 decades - 73
Emperor Norton0 decades - 74
John Snow21 decades - 75
Princess Sophie of Bavarianot measured- - 76
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.not measured- - 77
Edward Lear15 decades - 78
Isaac Singer0 decades - 79
Kit Carson18 decades - 80
Robert Bunsen9 decades - 81
Albert Pike18 decades - 82
Louis Agassiz16 decades - 83
William Lloyd Garrison19 decades - 84
Éliphas Lévi6 decades - 85
John C. Frémont12 decades - 86
Fanny Mendelssohn10 decades - 87
Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet0 decades - 88
Henry Wilsonnot measured- - 89
Sándor Petőfi0 decades - 90
Stephen A. Douglas18 decades - 91
Mohammad Shah Qajar0 decades - 92
Juan Prim, 1st Marquis of los Castillejos18 decades - 93
Mary Seacole2 decades - 94
Louise of Orléansnot measured- - 95
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly14 decades - 96
Sheridan Le Fanu8 decades - 97
Ferdinand II of the Two Siciliesnot measured- - 98
Jenny von Westphalen9 decades - 99
Princess Ludovika of Bavarianot measured- - 100
Robert Fitzroy1 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.