← Fame through time1850-1859
The 1850s
Whose names filled the books of the 1850s - 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 1850s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Louis XIV of France37 - 2
Voltaire32 - 3
Louis XVI of France14 - 4
Molière11 - 5
François Fénelon11 - 6
Louis XV of France9.7 - 7
Montesquieu7.5 - 8
Louis XVIII of France6.2 - 9
Louis XII of France5.1 - 10
Charles X of France4.7 - 11
Francis de Sales3.0 - 12
Vincent de Paul2.8 - 13
Louis Blanc2.8 - 14
Victor Hugo2.5 - 15
Philip V of Spain2.4 - 16
Marie Antoinette2.3 - 17
Marie de' Medici2.1 - 18
Joan of Arc2.1 - 19
Francis II of France1.9 - 20
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme1.8 - 21
Camille Desmoulins1.5 - 22
Pope Julius II1.5 - 23
Benjamin Constant1.4 - 24
Napoleon III1.3 - 25
Odilon Barrot1.3
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1850s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Karl Marx17 decades - 2
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 3
Queen Victorianot measured- - 4
Otto von Bismarck16 decades - 5
Ulysses S. Grant16 decades - 6
Florence Nightingale17 decades - 7
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 8
Ada Lovelace3 decades - 9
Rutherford B. Hayes16 decades - 10
Charlotte Brontë17 decades - 11
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 12
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 13
Walt Whitman17 decades - 14
Alexander II of Russia17 decades - 15
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 16
Charles Baudelaire17 decades - 17
George Eliot19 decades - 18
Herman Melville18 decades - 19
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 20
Gregor Mendel12 decades - 21
Gustave Flaubert17 decades - 22
John Ruskin18 decades - 23
Susan B. Anthony16 decades - 24
Rani of Jhansi8 decades - 25
William Tecumseh Sherman14 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.