Gustave Adolphe Lefrançais (1826–1901) was a French teacher and journalist, known for participating in the Paris Commune, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) and Jura Federation.

Gustave Adolphe Lefrançais was born on 30 January 1826, in Angers, the son of a workshop head at the local Arts et Métiers school.

During his time at the École Normale, Lefrançais' schoolmaster influenced him to adopt a revolutionary political ideology, which caused him difficulty when he attempted to find work as a teacher.

Together with his colleagues Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroin, he published a programme for progressive education, which attracted the attention of the French authorities.

Following the 1851 French coup d'état, he fled into exile in London, where he lived in poverty together with Joseph Déjacque, with whom he established a cooperative restaurant.

He then returned to activism as a popular speaker at a number of political clubs, where he advocated for collectivism and the abolition of marriage and inheritance, for which he was imprisoned in 1869 and fined in 1870.

[1] After the passage of a general amnesty for Communards in 1880, Lefrançais returned to Paris and resumed his political activism, criticising universal suffrage as insufficient without representative recall.