Guy de Rothschild

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Guy de Rothschild, 1964

Baron Guy Édouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild (born May 21, 1909 in Paris , France , † June 12, 2007 ibid) was a French banker and industrialist and a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty . From 1967 to 1979 he headed the family bank Banque Rothschild , based in Paris, which was nationalized in 1941 and 1981. He also maintained close relationships with the French presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou .

life and work

Guy de Rothschild was a son of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild and, as a member of the French branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty, part of the Parisian Jewish upper class.

At the beginning of the Second World War he fought as captain of the reserve for France, while the family property was expropriated by the so-called Vichy regime , which was active in the part of France that was unoccupied by Nazi Germany . Many members of his family then fled into exile, including his father Édouard de Rothschild and his brother. In the fall of 1941 he also went into exile and moved to the United States, but went to Great Britain in 1943, where he joined General Charles de Gaulle's resistance movement, Forces Françaises Libres . In 1944, de Gaulle nationalized part of the Rothschild property in the areas of electricity and insurance.

After the war, he rebuilt the Rothschild banking system and was head of the Rothschild Banque from 1967 to 1979 , which soon controlled industrial sectors, the mining group Rio Tinto Zink , a shipping company, oil companies and hotels around the world. He became an influential banker with a wide network of relationships. He maintained good relations with the future French President and Prime Minister Georges Pompidou , who worked for the family bank for five years. Guy de Rothschild also became an influential government advisor in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 he donated the Ferrières Castle , where he grew up, to the University of Paris. In 1978/79 he passed the chairmanship of the bank on to his son David and for the next three years he was committed to the socialists under François Mitterrand . After Mitterrand's election victory, Banque Rothschild was nationalized in 1981; the Rothschilds were compensated with 504 million francs .

After the nationalization Guy de Rothschild left France and settled in New York , where he, the investment bank Rothschild Inc. founded. He returned to his home country in the 1980s after getting permission to open a new bank.

From 1949 to 1962 he was president of the Consistoire central israélite , the highest organization of Judaism in France.

Rothschild was first married to Alix Schey de Koromla (1911–1982; from the Rothschild branch "von Worms"); from this relationship comes the son David de Rothschild (* 1942). In his second marriage he was married to Marie-Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt (1927-1996). Their son Édouard de Rothschild also became a banker. Rothschild was passionately involved in equestrian sports and won numerous international awards with his gallop racehorses.

literature

  • Guy de Rothschild: Money is not everything . Albrecht Knaus, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-8135-0309-7 (Original title: Contre bonne fortune . Translated by Hermann Stiehl).

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