François Fontan (7 February 1929 – 19 December 1979) was a French politician. He was born into a family which came from Gascony (region of Bordeaux). Raised in a monarchic family, he first joined a political party : the when he was about 15, but he quickly gave up monarchism and became closer to anarchism, and, then, to communists, but he got fed up with their stalinism.He moved to Nice and created the Occitan Nationalist Party there.From 1962, Fontan often met professor Guy Héraud and developed the first clarification of the linguistic border between Occitan and .He died in Cuneo.