Gérard Lhéritier

Gérard Lhéritier (born June 21, 1948 in Nancy ) is a French manuscript dealer and entrepreneur . He bought the Marquis de Sades manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom around 2004 . In 2012 he won the biggest ever paid in France Euro Millions - Jackpot . In March 2015 he was temporarily arrested by the French police as part of a preliminary investigation on suspicion of a fraudulent pyramid scheme.

youth

Lhéritier is the son of a plumber from Lorraine . He grew up in Void-Vacon in the Meuse department and lived in Strasbourg until 1984 before moving to Nice .

Career

A balloon postcard from 1870 during the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War

Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits

Lhéritier served in the French army and then worked as an asset manager .

In the early 1980s he accidentally found a letter marked par ballon monté ( French : by balloon mail ) in a stamp shop when he was looking for a rare stamp for his son. He then conducted research on balloon mail and wrote several books on it, including the novella Les Ballons de la liberté (The Ballons of Freedom, 1995).

In 1990 he founded the Aristophil company in Nice, which acquired historical manuscripts, letters and other documents and sold shares in these objects to investors.

Lhéritier is a sponsor of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . Around 2004 he bought the original manuscript of the Marquis de Sades The 120 Days of Sodom , written on a 12 m long parchment scroll, for € 7 million .

In the same year, 2004, he founded the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits at 8 Rue de Nesle in Paris, which moved to 222 Boulevard Saint-Germain in 2010. It was closed in 2015/16; his collection was confiscated by the French authorities.

In March 2015, Lhéritier was taken into police custody in Paris and only released on bail of € 2 million. An investigation is ongoing against him because of the suspicion of a fraudulent Ponzi or pyramid system.

Business model

One of Lhéritier's earliest acquisitions was the 2002 Einstein - Besso correspondence, 54 pages of calculations on general relativity for $ 559,500 at Christie's New York . He divided this into 400 "shares" which he sold to investors. As a result, the arithmetical value rose to € 12 million, almost 24 times what he had spent himself, allegedly because the demand for Einstein manuscripts, among other things due to his spectacular purchase, had increased. His company, Aristophil, reserved the right to repurchase the shares at an attractive percentage rate, but made no commitments.

According to a statement by his lawyer Francis Triboulet, nobody can say with certainty that he has lost money because the manuscripts have not yet been sold and their real value is therefore unknown. The art dealer Frederic Castaing pointed out that a true collector is not interested in the financial value of a document, but wants to be able to touch it in order to feel close to a well-known author. Lhéritier, on the other hand, has turned part of the cultural heritage into stocks and shares in a hideous way.

Lottery win

In 2012 Lhéritier won the € 170 million jackpot of the EuroMillions lottery, the highest lottery prize ever paid out in France. Lhéritier's lawyer, Francis Triboulet, said Lhéritier immediately invested € 40 million in his Aristophil company, which is a sign of their integrity.

collection

His Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits contained a collection of nearly 136,000 original manuscripts and letters, including Dwight D. Eisenhower's armistice order of May 7, 1945, poems by Paul Éluard and a love letter by Théodore Géricault . Other notable pieces are from the following people:

• Writers: René Descartes , François de La Rochefoucauld , Voltaire , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Denis Diderot , the Marquis de Sade , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , François-René de Chateaubriand , Stendhal , Gérard de Nerval , Alfred de Musset , Théophile Gautier , Charles Baudelaire , Gustave Flaubert , Edmond de Goncourt , Jules Verne , Leo Tolstoy , Émile Zola , Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , Paul Verlaine , Marcel Proust , Guillaume Apollinaire and Louis-Ferdinand Céline .
• Painters and artists: Jacques-Louis David , Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres , Édouard Manet , Edgar Degas , Nadar , René Magritte and Balthus .
• Composers and musicians: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Ludwig van Beethoven , Frédéric Chopin , Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt .
• Scientists and engineers: Isaac Newton , the Montgolfier brothers , Louis Pasteur , Ferdinand de Lesseps , Marie Curie , Rudolf Diesel and Gustave Eiffel .
• Royal families: Charles VI. , Charles VIII , Francis I of France , Caterina de 'Medici , Francis II of France , Henry IV of France , Catherine the Great and Napoleon .
• Politicians: Leon Trotsky , Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , Winston Churchill , Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle .

Publications

• Les ballons montés - Boules de Moulins - pigeongrammes - papillons de Metz - historique évaluation classification cotation , édition Valeurs Aristophil. Vol. 1: 1990, Vol. 2: 1992, Vol. 3: 1994.
• Les ballons montés , Plon, 1995. ISBN 2259182305
• Les Ballons de la liberté , 1995.
• Intime corruption, l'affaire des timbres rares de Monaco , L'Archipel, 2006. ISBN 2-84187-817-1
• Livre des valeurs et cotations (1870-1871) , Plume, 2008.
• Valeurs et références - Collection 1870 - Ballons montés - Boules de Moulins , 2000, Aristophil.

Web links

Commons : Musée des lettres et manuscrits  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Angelique Chrisafis Paris: France's 'king of manuscripts' held over suspected pyramid scheme fraud . In: The Guardian , March 6, 2015. Retrieved March 9, 2016. 
2. ^ Guy Boudet: Gérard Lhéritier, le chevalier des lettres . Retrieved April 16, 2016.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Thierry Fedrigo: L'intime de Verlaine Hugo, Berlioz et des autres. (No longer available online.) In: Le Republicain Lorrain. June 5, 2011, archived from the original on March 8, 2013 ; accessed on April 15, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Gérard Lhéritier . Retrieved April 15, 2016.
5. ^ In France, Fears that Rare Book and Manuscript Fund is a € 500m Fraud . November 19, 2014. Retrieved March 16, 2016.
6. ↑ Gérard Lhéritier, founder of Aristophil, fights to clear name after police raid . Archived from the original on March 3, 2015. Retrieved March 17, 2015.
7. ↑ Kim Willsher: Original Marquis de Sade scroll returns to Paris . In: The Guardian . Retrieved June 2, 2015. 
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Were investors conned into buying rare manuscripts? , Hugh Schofield, BBC Magazine, Retrieved March 15, 2016
9. ↑ French police widen net in manuscripts investigation. ( Memento of the original from April 22, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper , March 17, 2015. Retrieved April 22, 2016. 
10. ↑ Albert Einstein Memorabilia: Top 10 Most Valuable Items.
11. ↑ Jürgen Renn: The Genesis of General Relativity: Sources and Interpretations. Springer Science & Business Media, 2007. pp. 791-793.