← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th century - 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 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire23 - 2
Louis XIV of France15 - 3
Molière12 - 4
Stendhal10 - 5
Victor Hugo9.4 - 6
Louis XVI of France7.0 - 7
Montesquieu6.4 - 8
Louis XV of France6.2 - 9
François Fénelon4.6 - 10
Joan of Arc4.0 - 11
Napoleon III3.6 - 12
George Sand3.4 - 13
Louis XVIII of France3.1 - 14
François Mitterrand2.3 - 15
Pierre de Marivaux2.2 - 16
Anatole France2.2 - 17
Marie Antoinette2.1 - 18
Francis de Sales2.0 - 19
André Gide1.9 - 20
Léon Blum1.9 - 21
Jacques Chirac1.8 - 22
Charles X of France1.8 - 23
Paul Valéry1.7 - 24
Auguste Comte1.7 - 25
Marcel Proust1.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Keanu Reeves3 decades - 2
James Cameron7 decades - 3
Christopher Plummer7 decades - 4
Donald Sutherland7 decades - 5
Leonard Cohen5 decades - 6
Mike Myers3 decades - 7
Neil Young5 decades - 8
William Shatner5 decades - 9
Jordan Peterson0 decades - 10
Bryan Adams3 decades - 11
Margaret Atwood5 decades - 12
Catherine O'Hara0 decades - 13
Leslie Nielsen5 decades - 14
Pierre Trudeau6 decades - 15
Wayne Gretzky4 decades - 16
Joni Mitchell5 decades - 17
Stephen Harper2 decades - 18
David Cronenberg4 decades - 19
Dan Aykroyd4 decades - 20
Mary Pickford11 decades - 21
Martin Short3 decades - 22
Anne Carsonnot measured- - 23
Kim Cattrall1 decades - 24
Margot Kidder3 decades - 25
Jean Chrétien8 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.