1908 in France

Incumbents

• President: Armand Fallières
• President of the Council of Ministers: Georges Clemenceau

  Events

• 12 January – A long-distance radio message is sent from the Eiffel Tower for the first time.
• 21 March – Henri Farman pilots the first passenger flight.

  Arts

• Pierre Bonnard - Nu à contre-jour
• Georges Braque
• * Le Compotier
• * Maisons à l'Estaque
• Raoul Dufy - Arbres à L'Estaque
• Roger de La Fresnaye - Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne
• Henri Matisse
• * Les Baigneuses à la tortue
• * La Desserte rouge
• * Les Joueurs de boules
• * Portrait de Greta Moll
• Jean Metzinger - Baigneuses
• Claude Monet
• * Le Palais Ducal vu de Saint-Georges Majeur
• * Le Grand Canal
• * ''Le Palais Ducal''

  Film

• Charles le Bargy & André Calmettes - L'Assassinat du duc de Guise
• Albert Capellani - L'Arlésienne
• Segundo de Chomón - Excursion dans la lune
• Émile Cohl - Fantasmagorie
• Georges Méliès
• * Le Mariage de Thomas Poirot
• * La Toile d'araignée merveilleuse
• * La Photographie électrique à distance
• * Le Nouveau Seigneur du village
• * ''Hallucinations pharmaceutiques ou le Truc du potard''

  Literature

• Henri Barbusse - L'Enfer
• Anatole France - L'île des Pingouins
• Jean de La Hire - La Roue fulgurante
• Maurice Leblanc - Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes
• Gaston Leroux - Le parfum de la dame en noir
• Maurice Renard - ''Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu''

  Music

• Isaac Albéniz - Iberia, Livre 4
• Claude Debussy
• * Children's Corner
• * Images, 2e série
• Gabriel Fauré - Sérénade, Op. 98
• Jules Massenet - Espada
• Gabriel Pierné - Ramuntcho
• Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
• Camille Saint-Saëns - ''L'Assassinat du duc de Guise''

  Sport

• 13 July – Tour de France begins.
• 9 August – Tour de France ends, won by Lucien Petit-Breton.

  Births

January to March

• 9 January – Simone de Beauvoir, author and philosopher
• 12 January – Jean Delannoy, actor, screenwriter and film director
• 26 January – Stéphane Grappelli, jazz violinist
• 31 January – Simonne Mathieu, tennis player
• 11 February – Pierre Hornus, footballer
• 12 February – Jean Effel, painter, illustrator and journalist
• 26 February – Jean-Pierre Wimille, motor racing driver and resistance member
• 27 February – Pierre Brunet, rowing coxswain and Olympic medallist
• 29 February – Balthus, artist
• 5 March – Christian Boussus, tennis player
• 8 March – Raymond Dronne, politician
• 14 March – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological philosopher
• 20 March – Roger Trinquier, army officer
• 25 March – Henri Rochereau, politician and European Commissioner

  April to June

• 9 April – Paula Nenette Pepin, composer, pianist and lyricist
• 12 April – André Martinet, linguist
• 21 April – Louis Hostin, weightlifter and Olympic champion
• 5 May – Jacques Massu, General
• 29 May – Pierre-Henri Teitgen, lawyer, professor and politician
• 30 May – André Cheuva, soccer player
• 2 June – Marcel Langiller, international soccer player

  July to September

• 2 July – Léon Arthur Elchinger, Bishop of Strasbourg
• 5 July – Henri, comte de Paris, Orléanist claimant to the French throne
• 12 July – Alain Cuny, actor
• 25 July – Robert-Ambroise-Marie Carré, priest and author
• 5 August – Shlomo Pines, French-born Israeli scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy
• 18 August – Edgar Faure, politician, essayist, historian, and memoirist
• 22 August – Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographer
• 28 August – Robert Merle, novelist
• 2 September – Fania Fénelon, pianist, composer and cabaret singer
• 8 September – Luc Étienne, writer.
• 19 September – Paul Bénichou, writer, critic and literary historian
• 19 September – Robert Lecourt, jurist, fourth President of the European Court of Justice
• 25 September – Jacqueline Audry, film director
• 25 September – Roger Beaufrand, Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist

  October to December

• 30 October – Marcel Béalu, writer
• 1 November – Sylvia Bataille, actress
• 4 November – Pauline Trigère, fashion designer
• 6 November – Françoise Dolto, physician and psychoanalyst
• 16 November – Emmanuelle Cinquin, religious sister
• 19 November – Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, organist and composer
• 24 November – Simone de la Chaume, golfer.
• 10 December – Olivier Messiaen, composer, organist and ornithologist
• 17 December – Raymond Louviot, cyclist
• 31 December – Pauline de Rothschild, fashion icon and tastemaker

  Full date unknown

• Gilbert Degrémont, water treatment expert
• Célestin Lainé, Breton nationalist and collaborator

  Deaths

• 29 January – François-Marie-Benjamin Richard, Archbishop of Paris
• 13 April Victor André Cornil, pathologist
• 7 May – Ludovic Halévy, author and playwright
• 14 August – Jules Liégeois, jurist, member of the Nancy School of Hypnosis
• 25 August – Henri Becquerel, physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 14 November – Denis Jean Achille Luchaire, historian
• 20 November – Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier, classical scholar
• 27 November – Jean Albert Gaudry, geologist and palaeontologist
• 5 December – Ernest Hébert, painter
• Full date unknown – Jacques-Eugène Feyen, painter