Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard

Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard

Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard (born October 11, 1770 in Moulins d'Antières near Clisson , † October 1846 in London ) was a French merchant, banker and stock market speculator.

Life

Rise in the Revolutionary Period (1789–1799)

Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard was the son of the operator of a paper mill and, after his time at the college, did an apprenticeship as a grocer in Nantes in 1788 . After his first founding , also wholesaling colonial goods , he dared to speculate with the acquisition of the delivery contracts of all the paper mills in the surrounding area and made a profit of 300,000 francs at the age of nineteen. His principle of only doing the en bloc business and leaving the part of the profit that was to be made with the detailed implementation to other merchants was already evident here. In connection with a trading house in Bordeaux , he then did business in sugar, coffee and cotton, but his success earned him the reputation of being "the more expensive food of the people", which in Nantes under the reign of terror of Jean-Baptiste Carrier one The death sentence. Ouvrard left for Paris and, after a period in the military, managed to set up his own bank there in 1794.

He frequented Madame Tallien's salon and in 1795 met Paul de Barras, a member of the board of directors . He submitted proposals to him to restore creditworthy paper money, Barras recognized Ouvrard's talent and a meeting came about, after which his banking and trading operations soon subordinated to those of the supplier:

“On that day, my business relations with the government began. They gave my entire work a new direction. "

From September 1797 he was General Provisioner and for three years was responsible for the provisions of the French Navy, with a total supply budget of 64 million francs . In addition, there was soon a similar order for a Spanish naval association in Brest .

Annoyance under Napoleon (1800–1815)

Napoleon's dislike of merchants was not inexplicable, and Ouvrard recorded the fundamental difference of opinion in his memoir:

“Basically, Napoleon knew no other sources of income than fiscal and conquest. To him credit was an abstraction; he saw nothing in it but ideology, empty phantoms of economists. "

After a critical moment in 1800, when Napoleon ordered an inspection of the naval deliveries, Ouvrard was briefly imprisoned and then decided to pay 14 million francs, but he stayed in the business and together with the grain dealer and general supply master Ignace-Joseph Vanlerberghe received the Order for the army supplies during the reconquest of Italy ( Marengo campaign ). Ouvrard could not refuse a new six-year contract for marine supplies. The landing army planned for the invasion of England turned out to be a losing business for him and Vanlerberghe, and poor payment behavior forced him to sell many of his properties. After a bankruptcy in 1806, he finally had to sell the Château du Raincy , which he had furnished with every imaginable convenience since 1797 . The palace had not served him for his own well-being, but was a means of corrupting influential personalities - Napoleon's general and war minister Louis-Alexandre Berthier lived in a hunting lodge in the park.

The decline began after Napoleon sent Ouvrard to Spain in 1804 as state commissioner to collect subsidies owed . With the elimination of a famine, he acquired Charles IV 's trust there to restore the Spanish budget. To this end, he founded a consolidation fund and a private company which, instead of Spain, would pay the subsidies to France and receive commissions and trade concessions in return for the transfer of Spanish silver coins from a Mexican depot to Europe . Napoleon had forced Spain to partake in the Franco-English War, which placed restrictions on Spain's maritime trade. Ouvrard therefore commissioned the Dutch trading house Hope & Co. to carry out the execution of his Spanish contract . With the help of the English trading house Baring , goods were to be obtained for the Mexican silver in North America, which would then be converted into money in Europe when brought across the Atlantic.

The part of the trade that provided for payments to France was made easier for Ouvrard by the fact that his representative in the management of the Society of United Merchants , Médard Desprez , had been appointed by Napoleon to head the Bank of France . Contrary to the regulations, however, Desprez began not only to include payment instructions from the individual administrative authorities, but also bills of exchange and private bonds . The lending of money to questionable companies and extensive pre-financing then led to the bank's temporary illiquidity in 1805 , which, however, resulted in the collapse of the Spanish consolidation fund and thus the entire silver treasure business. Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz softened the anger of the cheated bank customers, but after their return at the end of January 1806, his anger hit the Society of United Merchants, 141 million francs were to be repaid.

Although Ouvrard was able to regain commercial freedom of action through an agreement with his private creditors in 1808, the liquidation forced by Napoleon was a catastrophe for him. In 1809 he was imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie for three months for unpaid debts, but was released after paying bail. Since, in his opinion, only a peace on the oceans could bring economic growth back, he persuaded Louis Bonaparte and Joseph Fouché to support him in an attempt to secretly negotiate peace with England, which earned him three years in prison.

New Chances and Crash (1816–1846)

The perplexity after the end of the Napoleonic era offered the optimistic businessman the opportunity to point out a feasible way out of the misery. The second Paris Peace of November 1815 imposed an obligation on France to pay 700 million francs in war compensation in five annual installments to the Allied powers , to which the maintenance of their 150,000 troops, which would occupy the country for five years, had to be added. In 1816 the possibilities for obtaining cash were exhausted and the treasury threatened to have to stop its payments.

The first attempt by the Duke of Richelieu , Prime Minister under Louis XVIII. , skimming off cash from wealthy citizens with a forced loan of 100 million francs, had mainly led to a loss of confidence. Then he followed the advice Ouvrard, a major French pension bond by major banks as the English Baring emit to leave. Buyers were to be the Allies, to the surprise of the Cabinet. The trust that was regained in this way made the new pension a success, the treasury filled, the war indemnity paid, and extraordinary political complications averted. Thanks to the payments, the Prime Minister was able to bring forward the withdrawal of foreign troops planned for 1820. According to the Aachen Convention , the allied troops left French soil by the end of November 1818. Ouvrard did not do any business with the renovation work; on the contrary, he was accused of attempting to cheat and cut the promised commissions.

In 1823, without the knowledge of the War Minister Duke of Belluno , Ouvrard was confirmed by the Generalissimo Duke of Angoulême as General Provisioner for the invasion of Spain . The budget provided, however, only covered half of the cost of the campaign, Ouvrard faced allegations of bribery and was in custody for two years. In a memorandum presented to the royal council in 1826, he wrote:

“I have been accused of wasting public property; but isn't there something ridiculous about it? Was I responsible for the public property? No, I was a speculator, I sold groceries, I made my price ... Selling too dearly is not a crime ... It was up to the buyer to be familiar with it. "

Unpaid bills from the time of the silver treasure speculation kept him in prison until the end of 1829. He died in London in 1846.

The marriage with Elisabeth-Jeanne Tébaud, a daughter of the Nantes merchant Jean Babtiste Tébaud, had three children in 1794. Ouvrard's wife died in 1818. During the time he was using the Château du Raincy estate , Madame Tallien was his mistress and had given him four children. Expression of his temporarily high reputation was in 1822 at the wedding of his daughter Elisabeth (1795–1857) with Count de Rochechouart , chamberlain of Louis XVIII. and nephew Richelieu , the signing of the marriage contract by the king himself. Only his illegitimate son Dr. Jules Adolphe Edouard Cabarrus (1801–1870), his legitimate son Julien Ouvrard (1798–1861) later held an administrative position in the Parliament's Finance Committee and was a member of the Côte-d'Or department .

Works

• Mémoires de G.-J. Ouvrard sur sa vie et ses diverses opérations financières , first edition of vol. I / II Paris 1826, vol. III 1827, fourth edition Paris 1827

literature

• Louis-Victor-Léon Comte de Rochechouart , Souvenirs sur la Révolution, l'Empire, et la restauration, publiés par son fils , Paris 1889, p. 484 u. Pp. 494-498
• Wilhelm Berdrow, Gabriel Julien Ouvrard, the financial king of the Napoleonic era , in ders .: Book of famous merchants. Men of energy and entrepreneurship , Verlag von Otto Spamer, 2nd edition Leipzig 1909 (reprint Reprint-Verlag-Leipzig, ISBN 3-8262-0208-2 ), pp. 151-178
• Arthur Lévy , Un grand profiteur de guerre sous la Révolution, l'Empire et la Restauration, G.-J. Ouvrard , Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1929
• Otto Wolff , The business of Mr. Ouvrard. From the life of a brilliant speculator , Rütten & Loenig Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1932
• Maurice Payard, Le financier G.-J. Ouvrard. 1770 - 1846 , Académie nationale de Reims, Reims 1958
• Marcel Pollitzer, Le règne des financiers. Samuel Bernard, J. Law, G.-J. Ouvrard , Nouvelles Éditions Latines, Paris 1978, pp. 113-254

Remarks

1. ↑ William Berdrow: book of famous merchants. Leipzig 1909, p. 158.
2. ↑ Quoted from Otto Wolff: The business of Mr. Ouvrard. Frankfurt a. M. 1932, p. 52.
3. ↑ Quoted from Wilhelm Berdrow: Book of famous merchants. Leipzig 1909, p. 164.
4. ↑ Otto Wolff assumed, contrary to the historiography that was valid up to his time, that it was not Joseph Fouché but Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard who wanted to bring movement into the cause of the peace negotiations, since this had resulted directly and informally from all of Ouvrard's business ( The business of Mr. Ouvrard , p. 152 f.). The depiction by Stefan Zweig ( Joseph Fouché. Portrait of a political man , Frankfurt am Main 1957, p. 147 f.) Looked different, in which Fouché defended himself when confronted by Napoleon, “Ouvrard, that was such an intrusive A person who likes to get involved in all kinds of things ”, but Fouché had him“ tight on the curb ”and Ouvrard had acted in good faith that“ Fouché was acting on behalf of the emperor ”.
5. ↑ quoted from Arthur-Lévy, Un grand profiteur de guerre , Paris 1929, p. 2
6. ↑ Among them came Ouvrard's daughter Clémence Isaure Theresia Cabarrus (1800-1884), who founded an order in 1842 and about the 1935 by Jehanne Aubry the biography Une fille de madame Tallien. La baronne de Vaux appeared. For details on Ouvrard's descendants, Maurice Payard, Le financier G.-J. Ouvrard. 1770-1846 , Reims 1958, pp. 300-303