The BBC has reported that Claude Chabrol, one of the major Frence film directors of the last 50 years has died. Some have described him as the French Hitchcock, but I think that although some of his films were thrillers, they were not what I would call Hitchockian. If I were to make comparisons with more recent French film, films such as Swimming Pool (Francois Ozon) and The Page Turner (Debis Dercourt) come to mind.
 
From the BBC:

French New Wave film-maker Claude Chabrol dies

One of France's best-known film directors, Claude Chabrol, has died at the age of 80, according to the AFP news agency.

Chabrol is best known for 1960s and 70s thrillers, such as The Unfaithful Wife, The Butcher and This Man Must Die.

He was a member of the French New Wave movement, which included contemporaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette.

Chabrol made more than 50 films during his career.

His final film, Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu, was released in 2009.

Paris deputy mayor Christophe Girard broke the news to AFP.

He described the director as "an immense French film director, free, impertinent, political and verbose".

Mayor Bertrand Delanoe hailed Chabrol as "the inventor of inspired, rich and profoundly human movies.

Bourgeois repression

"Claude Chabrol produced an immense and particularly inspired body or work that stands today as a monument of French cinema," he added.

Chabrol was a critic for the influential French film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema, along with Godard and Francois Traffaut.

His film Les Cousins won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1959.

The Acadamie Francaise awarded Chabrol the Rene Clair Prize in 2005.

Two of his films were also nominated for Canne's Palme d'Or - Violette in 1978 and Poulet au Vinaigre in 1985.

He was born in Paris in 1930 and was a pharmacology student at the University of Paris before deciding to embark on a career in film.

A common theme running through most of his films was the tension between bourgeois repression and the expression of violence often simmering beneath.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Chabrol began making television films and ventured into international collaborations.

The acclaimed 1978 movie, Violette Noziere, was based upon the true story of a 19-year-old girl who was convicted of poisoning her father and attempting to kill her mother.

French actress Isabelle Huppert starred in several of Chabrol's films, including Violette Noziere and Une Affaire de Femmes in 1988, a movie about an abortionist who becomes the last woman to be guillotined in France.

She also starred in 1991's Madame Bovary and the 1995 psychological thriller, La Ceremonie.

Chabrol's second wife, Stephane Audran, also starred in many of his films, including La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher and Juste Avant La Nuit, in 1970.

He married his third wife, Aurore Pajot, in 1983, and is survived by four children.