← Fame through time1900-1909
The 1900s
Whose names filled the books of the 1900s - 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 1900s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Louis XIV of France20 - 2
Voltaire20 - 3
Victor Hugo13 - 4
Molière13 - 5
Louis XVI of France11 - 6
Louis XV of France9.0 - 7
François Fénelon5.5 - 8
Louis XVIII of France5.0 - 9
Montesquieu4.8 - 10
Joan of Arc4.7 - 11
Napoleon III4.2 - 12
George Sand3.6 - 13
Stendhal3.6 - 14
Marie Antoinette3.0 - 15
Auguste Comte2.8 - 16
Louis XII of France2.5 - 17
Francis de Sales2.4 - 18
Charles X of France2.2 - 19
Vincent de Paul2.1 - 20
Jules Ferry1.9 - 21
Jules Simon1.8 - 22
Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle1.7 - 23
Anatole France1.7 - 24
Benjamin Constant1.6 - 25
Louis Blanc1.6
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1900s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Winston Churchill13 decades - 2
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 3
Mahatma Gandhi10 decades - 4
Marie Curie4 decades - 5
George V16 decades - 6
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 7
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 8
Nicholas II of Russia14 decades - 9
Sun Yat-sen12 decades - 10
Calvin Coolidge11 decades - 11
Warren G. Harding11 decades - 12
Rudyard Kipling13 decades - 13
Frank Lloyd Wright12 decades - 14
Rosa Luxemburg13 decades - 15
Neville Chamberlain16 decades - 16
H. G. Wells16 decades - 17
Bertrand Russell13 decades - 18
Harry Houdini7 decades - 19
Marcel Proust12 decades - 20
Henri Matisse12 decades - 21
Sergei Rachmaninoffnot measured- - 22
Robert Frost13 decades - 23
W. B. Yeats12 decades - 24
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 25
Beatrix Potter10 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.