Notable Deaths on May 20

May 20 has 104 recorded notable deaths across history, from 685 to 2025. This focused page highlights 20 people with the strongest available profile context.

Gilbert du Motier

1834 — Gilbert du Motier

Marquis de Lafayette, French general (born 1757)

By · Wikipedia

Notable Deaths 104 source records 685 – 2025

Major events on May 20

See what else happened on this day in history.

  1. 1802 By the Law of 20 May 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte reinstates slavery in the French colonies, revoking its abolition in the French Revolution. Source
  2. 1948 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek wins the 1948 Republic of China presidential election and is sworn in as the first President of the Republic of China at Nanjing. Source

Did you know about Gilbert du Motier

After returning to France, Lafayette became a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830 and continues to be celebrated as a hero in both France and the United States.

Did you know about Bogd Khan

Born in Tibet, he was the third most important person in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy as the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, below only the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, and therefore also known as the "Bogdo Lama".

Did you know about Bao Zheng

Bao Zheng's appointment from 1057 to 1058 as the prefect of Song's capital Kaifeng, where he initiated a number of changes to better hear the grievances of the people, made him a legendary figure.

Did you know about Max Beerbohm

Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911.

Did you know about Jarno Saarinen

In the early 1970s, he was considered one of the most promising and talented motorcycle road racers of his era until he was killed during the 1973 Nations Grand Prix in Italy.


More major people who died on May 20

Notable people are ranked by substantive profile depth and public notability.

1924 Bogd Khan

Bogd Khan

Mongolian ruler (c. 1869)
Bogd Khan was the khan of the Bogd Khanate of Mongolia from 1911 to 1924, following the state's de facto independence from the Qing dynasty of China after the Xinhai Revolution. Born in Tibet, he was the third most important person in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy as the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, below only the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, and therefore also known as the "Bogdo Lama". He was the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism in the Bogd Khaganate. His wife Tsendiin Dondogdulam, the Ekh Dagina, was believed to be a manifestation of White Tara.
1062 Bao Zheng

Bao Zheng

Chinese magistrate and mayor of Kaifeng (born 999)
Bao Zheng, commonly known as Bao Gong, was a Chinese politician during the reign of Emperor Renzong in China's Song Dynasty. During his twenty-five years in civil service, Bao was known for his honesty and uprightness, with actions such as impeaching an uncle of Emperor Renzong's favourite concubine and punishing powerful families. His appointment from 1057 to 1058 as the prefect of Song's capital Kaifeng, where he initiated a number of changes to better hear the grievances of the people, made him a legendary figure. During his years in office, he gained the honorific title Justice Bao due to his ability to defend peasants and commoners against corruption or injustice. Bao Zheng is depicted as the incarnation of the Astral God of Civil Arts, while famous Northern Song warrior Di Qing is depicted as the Astral God of Military Arts.
1956 Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm

English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist (born 1872)
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.
1973 Jarno Saarinen

Jarno Saarinen

Finnish motorcycle racer (born 1945)
Jarno Karl Keimo Saarinen was a Finnish professional Motorcycle racer. He competed in the FIM Grand Prix motorcycle racing world championships from 1968 to 1971 as Yamaha privateer, before receiving the Yamaha factory's full support in 1972 and 1973. In the early 1970s, he was considered one of the most promising and talented motorcycle road racers of his era until he was killed during the 1973 Nations Grand Prix in Italy. Saarinen's death led to increased demands for better safety conditions for motorcycle racers competing in the world championships. He remains the only Finn to have won a solo motorcycle road racing world championship. Saarinen was inducted into the F.I.M. MotoGP Hall of Fame in 2009.
965 Gero the Great

Gero the Great

Saxon ruler (born c. 900)
Gero I, sometimes called the Great, was a prominent German noble from the Duchy of Saxony in the East Francia, who held several offices during the reign of king and later emperor Otto I (936–973). As one of the most notable counts in northern regions of Otto's realm, Gero was appointed as king's representative (legate) in the Saxon duchy. He was also appointed as margrave, thus ranking above other counts. The nature and scope of his jurisdiction as margrave was indicated in several sources, such as the Thietmar's Chronicle from the beginning of the 11th century, that mentions Gero as Margrave of the East. Since various sources provide data on Gero's continuous and frequent involvement in German expansion towards the lands of Polabian Slavs, that lied to the east of Saxon and Thuringian lands, traditional historiography regarded Gero as margrave over the subdued Slavic regions, thus coining the term March of Gero. Newer scholarly analyses have shown that some charters that contain data on Gero's march should be considered as later forgeries, thus leading modern researchers to question or reject various traditional views regarding the nature and effective scope of such a frontier province in the middle of the 10th century.
1732 Thomas Boston

Thomas Boston

Scottish author and educator (born 1676)
Thomas Boston was a Scottish Presbyterian church leader, theologian and philosopher. Boston was successively schoolmaster at Glencairn, and minister of Simprin in Berwickshire, and Ettrick in Selkirkshire. In addition to his best-known work, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, one of the religious classics of Scotland, he wrote an original little book, The Crook in the Lot, and a learned treatise on the Hebrew points. He also took a leading part in the Courts of the Church in what was known as the "Marrow Controversy," regarding the merits of an English work, The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which he defended against the attacks of the "Moderate" party in the Church. Boston, if unduly introspective, was a man of singular piety and amiability. His autobiography is an interesting record of Scottish life, full of sincerity and tenderness, and not devoid of humorous touches, intentional and otherwise.
1645 Shi Kefa

Shi Kefa

Chinese general and calligrapher (born 1601)
Shi Kefa, courtesy names Xianzhi and Daolin, was a government official and calligrapher who lived in the late Ming dynasty. He was born in Xiangfu and claimed ancestry from Daxing County, Shuntian Prefecture. He was mentored by Zuo Guangdou (左光斗). He served as the Minister of War in Nanjing during the early part of his career. He is best remembered for his defence of Yangzhou from the Qing dynasty and was killed when Yangzhou fell to Qing forces in April 1645. After his death, the Southern Ming granted him the posthumous name "Zhongjing". Nearly a century later, the Qianlong Emperor of Qing granted Shi Kefa another posthumous name, "Zhongzheng" His descendants collected his works and compiled them into a book titled Lord Shi Zhongzheng's Collections (史忠正公集).
2013 Denys Roberts

Denys Roberts

English judge and politician (born 1923)
Sir Denys Tudor Emil Roberts was a British colonial official and judge. Joining the colonial civil service as a Crown Counsel in Nyasaland in 1953, he became Attorney General of Gibraltar in 1960. In 1962, he was posted to Hong Kong as Solicitor-General, and was successively promoted to Attorney-General in 1966, Colonial Secretary/Chief Secretary in 1973 and Chief Justice in 1979. He was the first and only Attorney-General to become both Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong. Never having been a judge before, he was appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1979 and was the first and only Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong to receive such appointment.
1449 Infante Pedro

Infante Pedro

Duke of Coimbra (born 1392)
Dom Peter, Duke of Coimbra, KG was a Portuguese infante (prince) of the House of Aviz, son of King Dom John I of Portugal and his wife, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt. In Portugal, he is known as Infante Dom Pedro das Sete Partidas [do Mundo], "of the Seven Parts [of the World]" because of his travels. Possibly the best-travelled prince of his time, he was regent between 1439 and 1448. He was also 1st Lord of Montemor-o-Velho, Aveiro, Tentúgal, Cernache, Pereira, Condeixa and Lousã.
2013 Flavio Costantini

Flavio Costantini

Italian painter and illustrator (born 1926)
Flavio Costantini was an Italian painter and illustrator. Costantini created portraits of writers and artists for newspapers, and illustrated several novels. His early works were inspired by the novelist Franz Kafka, and by literary, utopian, and anarchist ideals. His later work presented a pessimistic view of civilization. He created series of paintings exploring historical themes: anarchy, the wreck of the Titanic, alchemy, Mozart, the French Revolution and its victims, Yekaterinburg, and the murder of Nicholas II and his family. His last series offered a dark reading of Pinocchio, which he considered one of the three or four greatest Italian novels.
2012 Leela Dube

Leela Dube

Indian anthropologist and scholar (born 1923)
Leela Dube was a renowned anthropologist and feminist scholar, fondly called Leeladee by many. She had been married to the renowned anthropologist and sociologist Late Shyama Charan Dube. Leela Dube was the younger sister of the late classical singer Sumati Mutatkar. Her elder son Late Mukul Dube was an avid photographer. She is survived by her younger son, Saurabh Dube. Known for her work on kinship and in women's studies, she wrote several books including Matriliny and Islam: religion and society in the Laccadives and Women and kinship: comparative perspectives on gender in South and South‑east Asia.
1793 Charles Bonnet

Charles Bonnet

Swiss botanist and biologist (born 1720)
Charles Bonnet was a Genevan naturalist and philosophical writer. He is responsible for coining the term phyllotaxis to describe the arrangement of leaves on a plant. He was among the first to notice parthenogenetic reproduction in aphids and established that insects respired through their spiracles. He was among the first to use the term "evolution" in a biological context. Deaf from an early age, he also suffered from failing eyesight and had to make use of assistants in later life to help in his research.
1942 Hector Guimard

Hector Guimard

French Architect (born 1867)
Hector Guimard was a French architect and designer prominent for his Art Nouveau style designs. He achieved early fame with his design for the Castel Béranger, the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris, which was selected in an 1899 competition as one of the best new building facades in the city. He is best known for the glass and iron edicules or canopies, with ornamental Art Nouveau curves, which he designed to cover the entrances of the first stations of the Paris Métro.
1864 John Clare

John Clare

English poet (born 1793)
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and his sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self."
2005 Paul Ricœur

Paul Ricœur

French philosopher and academic (born 1913)
Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."
1989 John Hicks

John Hicks

English economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1904)
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
794 Æthelberht II

Æthelberht II

king of East Anglia
Æthelberht, also called Saint Ethelbert the King was an 8th-century saint and a king of East Anglia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Little is known of his reign, which may have begun in 779, according to later sources, and very few of the coins he issued have been discovered. It is known from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that he was killed on the orders of Offa of Mercia in 794.
2002 Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

American paleontologist, biologist, and academic (born 1941)
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
2022 Susan Roces

Susan Roces

Filipino actress (born 1941)
Jesusa Purificación Levy Sonora-Poe, known professionally as Susan Roces, was a Filipino actress. She rose to fame in mid-1950s and became the biggest box-office star of the 1960s. Known for playing wholesome and sweet characters in romantic comedies and musicals during her youth, she dabbled into horror and drama in the succeeding decades. She was dubbed the "Queen of Philippine Movies" and appeared in more than 130 films throughout her career that spanned over six decades.

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