← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Marquis de Sade12 decades - 2
Montesquieu22 decades - 3
Jeremy Bentham22 decades - 4
Denis Diderot21 decades - 5
Pierre-Simon Laplace2 decades - 6
Joseph-Louis Lagrange0 decades - 7
Marquis de Condorcet1 decades - 8
Henry Cavendish22 decades - 9
Joseph de Maistre21 decades - 10
Henri de Saint-Simonnot measured- - 11
Jean le Rond d'Alembert7 decades - 12
Lazare Carnot14 decades - 13
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot2 decades - 14
Adrien-Marie Legendre0 decades - 15
Gaspard Monge22 decades - 16
Abraham de Moivre0 decades - 17
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuisnot measured- - 18
François Quesnay14 decades - 19
Johann Heinrich Lambert2 decades - 20
Claude Adrien Helvétius0 decades - 21
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac1 decades - 22
Louis de Bonald7 decades - 23
Pierre André Latreille1 decades - 24
Constantin-François Chassebœufnot measured- - 25
Alexis Clairaut0 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.