François Jullien is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.

François Just Marie Raynouard was a French dramatist and linguist.

François le Métel de Boisrobert was a French poet, playwright, and courtier.

François Lenormant was a 19th-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist and archaeologist.

François Maspero was a French author and journalist, best known as a publisher of leftist books in the 1970s. He also worked as a translator, translating the works of Joseph Conrad, Mehdi Ben Barka, and John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, among others. He was awarded the Prix Décembre in 1990 for Les Passagers du Roissy-Express.

François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française, and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.

François Nodot was a mercenary soldier and author of works in Latin and French. He is best known as author of spurious supplements to the text of the Satyricon of Petronius.

François Ponsard was a French dramatist, poet and author and was a member of the Académie française.

François Quesnay was a French economist and physician of the Physiocratic school. He is known for publishing the "Tableau économique" in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats. This was perhaps the first work attempting to describe the workings of the economy in an analytical way, and as such can be viewed as one of the first important contributions to economic thought. His Le Despotisme de la Chine, written in 1767, describes Chinese politics and society, and his own political support for enlightened despotism.

François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs.