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Pasqua Charles (b. 1927-04-18 / d. 2015-06-29)
He was a French businessman and Gaullist politician. He was Interior Minister from 1986 to 1988, under Jacques Chirac's cohabitation government, and also from 1993 to 1995, under the government of Edouard Balladur.
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72
Born 1951-02-14. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was a Corsican French businessman who was the director of Pommery and the owner of an inherited historic hôtel particulier in Paris used as a function hall. Philippe di Borgo became a quadriplegic in 1993 following a paragliding accident. Because of his disability, he attempted to commit suicide by wrapping an oxygen tube around his neck. The story of Philippe and his Algerian attendant, Abdel Sellou, was told in a 2003 documentary, A la vie, ŕ la mort. Their story was also adapted in the biographical movies The Intouchables (2011), and the Indian, Argentine, and American re-makes, respectively, Oopiri (2016), (Spanish article) Inseparables (2016), and The Upside (2017). These movies were based on his 2001 memoir, A Second Wind.
88
Born 1930-09-01. Domain:Philosophy. Cause of death:Age
Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works are notable for discussing subjects like death, angels and time. They are also noted for incorporating prose and multifaceted perspectives. Serres had a unique approach to translating his works from accounts rather than from authoritative singular translations.
71
Born 1936-08-01. Domain:Society. Cause of death:cancer (brain)
The son of an insurance company president, Yves Saint-Laurent was born in Oran, in what was then French Algeria. Saint Laurent left home at the age of 17 to work for the French designer Christian Dior. Following Dior's death in 1957, Yves, at the age of 22, was put in charge of the effort of saving the Dior house from financial ruin.
Shortly after this success, he was conscripted to serve in the French army during the Algerian War of Independence. After 20 days, the stress of being hazed by fellow soldiers led the fragile Saint Laurent to be institutionalized in a French mental hospital, where he underwent psychiatric treatment, including electroshock therapy, for a nervous breakdown.
In 1962, in the wake of his nervous breakdown, Saint Laurent was released from Dior and started his own label, YSL, financed by his companion, Pierre Bergé. The couple split romantically in 1976 but remained business partners.
32
Born 1957-09-30. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:AIDS
60
Born 1913-05-03. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Suicide
During the early 1970s, Inge lived in Los Angeles, where he taught playwriting at the Irvine campus of the University of California. His last several plays attracted little notice or critical acclaim, and he fell into a deep depression, convinced he would never be able to write well again. He committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1973.
88
Born 1880-06-27. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Age
Helen Adams Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating "that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his." Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left the child deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Helen had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family. In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. He subsequently put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, Sullivan evolving into governess and then eventual companion. Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll. Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world. Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons". Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter. Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles.
56
Born 1906-03-19. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
Eichmann was hanged a few minutes after midnight on June 1, 1962, at Ramla prison. This remains the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel, which has a general policy of not using the death penalty. Eichmann allegedly refused a last meal, preferring instead a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine. He consumed about half of the bottle. He also refused to don the traditional black hood for his execution.
According to an official account, there were supposedly two people who would pull the lever simultaneously, so neither would know for sure by whose hand Eichmann died.
Eichmann's last words were, reportedly, "Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready."
Shortly after the execution Eichmann's body was cremated. The next morning his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean, in international waters. This was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no nation would serve as Adolf Eichmann's final resting place.
80
Born 1861-12-29. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Kurt Wilhelm Sebastian Hensel was a German mathematician born in Königsberg. He was the brother of philosopher Paul Hensel. Kurt and Paul's paternal grandparents were painter Wilhelm Hensel and composer Fanny Mendelssohn.