Who is known as the spiritual godfather for the French New Wave?

Explanation

Jean-Luc Godard's 'A Bout de Souffle' and Francois Truffaut's 'The 400 Blows' started the New French Wave in the late 1950s, the idea of which was that the camera should act as an author's pen. This gave rise to the term 'auteurs' whereby the vision of a given director would run through the entire film. Many of the directors in the Wave had met each other whilst writing for 'Cahiers du Cinema' in Paris. The New Wave was inspired by a 1954 article by Jean Renoir, the godfather of the Wave.