Francis Gérard was a French academic, professor at the European Institute of Advanced International Studies (University of Nice) in the early 1970s. A specialist in international relations, he is the author of L'homme et l'espace (1972), a wide-ranging synthesis on the conquest of space commissioned by the Banque Nationale de Paris, for which he wrote the entire text, the astronomical section being directed by the astronomer Marcel Golay. His dates of birth and death could not be established with certainty.