'Manuel Benítez 'El Cordobés' (born Manuel Benítez Pérez in 1936) was a famous matador of the 1960s, noted for bringing a much more acrobatic and theatrical style to the bullring.
Djamila Bouhared (born 1935) joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) while a student. She was injured in a shootout and captured by French troops In 1957. Convicted of terrorism, she was sentenced to death, but her execution was blocked after a media campaign led by her French lawyer. She was released in 1962 and was regarded as a hero in Algeria. She is portrayed in the film, La battaglia di Algeri (1966).
Francis Jeanson (born 1922) is a French philosopher, He served in the French army of liberation during the Second World War and also took an active part during the Algerian war on the side of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN).
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930) was a Futurist poet in Russia. He became known as the Poet of the Revolution. He committed suicide in April 1930.
Andrei Sinyavsky was one of the most important figures in the Soviet literary dissident movement. He was a literary scholar working at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, and a prominent specialist in the literature of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. His first writings, under a pseudonym, reached the West in the late 1950s.
Pierre Mendès-France (1907 - 1982) was a French politician. He was Premier of France from 1954-1955. He was a noted political figure throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
André Malraux (1901 - 1976) was a dominant figure in French politics and culture throughout his life. He was the Minister for Cultural Affairs from 1959-69.
Paul Nizan (1905 - 1940) was a French philosopher and writer. Killed at the battle of Dunkirk in 1940.
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772 - 1801) published poetry under the pseudonym of Novalis. He was part of the early German Romantic Movement.
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 - 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Giorgio Strehler (1921 -1997) was an Italian opera and theatre director, noted for his interpretations the works of Bertolt Brecht.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 -1961) was a French philosopher, closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
René Arthaud (1915 - 2007) was a French politician, a prominent member of the French Communist party. He served in several positions in various French governments.
Francisco Sanchez Way (b. 1940), better known as Paco Camino, is a Spanish bullfighter of the 1960s and 1970s, considered to be one of the most skillful of his time.
Roger Planchon (1931 - 2009) was a celebrated French stage director, noted for his work with the plays of Bertolt Brecht and his neo-Marxist views.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888 -1938) was a noted and influential Marxist theoretician, revolutionary, and Soviet politician. At various times, he held significant posts in the Soviet Union e.g. member of the Politburo and Central Committee, chairman of Communist International, and the editor-in-chief of Pravda, the journal Bolshevik, and Izvestia, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871 - 1919) was a Jewish-German Marxist theorist, philosopher, and revolutionary. She was executed in Berlin during the Spartacist uprising of 1919.
Louis Aragon (1897 - 1982), was a French poet and novelist, and a noted political supporter of the Communist Party.
Antoine Bourseiller (b. 1930) is an actor and theatre director. In the early 1960s, he managed theatres in Paris.