Monte-Carlo Casino
Coordinates: 43 ° 44 ′ 21 ″ N , 7 ° 25 ′ 41 ″ E
The Monte-Carlo casino is one of the most famous casinos in the world and is located in Monte-Carlo , a district of Monaco .
history
Beginnings
The history of the casino in Monte-Carlo goes back to 1854, when Monaco started thinking about new sources of income. On April 26, 1856, the then Prince Florestan awarded the first license to the French Napoléon Langlois and Albert Aubert. It was not until December 14, 1856, until the game was opened in a villa on the harbor.
Due to unsuccessfulness, the concessionaires passed their rights on to Peter August Daval a year later, on December 26, 1857. On May 13, 1858, the foundation stone for the new casino building on the Spelugues was laid with the participation of the ten-year-old Crown Prince Albert . The following year, on May 11, 1859, Daval presented a balance sheet showing a loss of over 1 million francs .
On May 29, the concession was transferred to François Léon Lefèbvre, who headed a society backed by the Duke of Valmy . Since this remained unsuccessful, Prince Charles III stretched out . his feelers in the direction of the Rhenish casinos, especially Bad Homburg . In the meantime, the new casino was opened on February 18, 1863.
Building the infrastructure
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On April 1, 1863, François Blanc , who had already founded the Bad Homburg casino and made it a success, took over the concession for an initial 50 years. To this end, he founded the Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers à Monaco (SBM), which still exists today . Probably for this reason it is often wrongly claimed that he founded the casino. Blanc recognized immediately that the previous problems were due not least to the poor transport connections and the lack of hotels . Blanc therefore pushed ahead with the construction of hotels, the quayside and the railway line. On July 1, 1866, the area around the casino was named Quartier de Monte Carlo . In October 1868, the railway line opened, causing a dramatic increase in visitors, and on February 8, 1869, Charles III made it. all direct taxes. From then on, the national budget of Monaco was covered solely by the casino for several decades.
Due to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, the casino was closed on September 6, 1870. As a result, numerous business people from Nice (20 km west, France) campaigned to reopen the casino, as the closure had devastated their businesses. Before and later, Nice citizens and a number of newspapers had always spoken out against the casino for moral reasons. Casino operations were resumed on December 1, 1870. In 1873 the British engineer Joseph Jagger carried out a private investigation into whether the roulette games behaved as expected or whether there were statistically significant deviations due to inadequate calibration. As an engineer, he knew that mechanical systems could be imprecise. For this purpose, he hired six people who each wrote down all the results of a day at a roulette game. While he found no deviations in five games, in the sixth game of roulette he was able to determine nine numbers that fell more frequently than statistically expected. With this knowledge, Jagger won up to $ 450,000. Despite countermeasures by the casino that put Jagger on a losing streak, he last had $ 325,000 in profit. After François Blanc's death on July 27, 1877, his widow Marie Blanc took over the management of the casino. However, she died on July 25, 1881 at the age of only 47. One by one, Blanc's descendants said goodbye to the management of the company.
Basil Zaharoff
The next distinctive personality in the history of the casino appeared towards the end of the First World War . The casino's winnings had plummeted, leaving the Grimaldis short of money. Since Prince Albert I was not expecting help from Camille Blanc, a son of François Blanc, who was still director, he turned to the Greek arms dealer Basil Zaharoff . Zaharoff granted Albert I. a loan of one million pounds sterling, for which the latter granted him the right to take over the casino at any time. From then on, Zaharoff bought through straw men all attainable shares in the Société des Bains de Mer , which operates the casino, among other things. On May 16, 1923, he announced that he now wanted to exercise his option on the casino, having previously made sure that France had no intention of annexing Monaco .
At a special meeting on May 18, a deputy Zaharoff presented 23,000 shares. Camille Blanc was deposed and Alfred Delpierre became president. After the death of his wife Maria del Pilar, Duchess of Villafranca de los Caballeros, in 1926, whom he had married only 18 months earlier, Zaharoff lost his interest in the casino and sold his shares at a high profit to a syndicate that the Pariser owned Bankhaus Dreyfus & Company belonged to.
Second World War
The casino wheels never stood still during World War II . Since the defeat of France, Monte-Carlo has become the preferred playground for a mixture of French collaborators , German and Italian business people, Wehrmacht officers on vacation and adventurers of unknown origin. Many of these new visitors made huge efforts. In the first year of the war the casino made a loss of five million francs, in 1941 the profit was again six million francs and rose in the following years to 106 million.
Aristotle Onassis
After the end of the war, business deteriorated, the SBM and with it the casino got into financial difficulties again. In this situation, the Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis visited Monaco in 1952. He noticed the vacant “Winter Sporting Club” building near the casino. He wanted to rent the building from SBM, but was turned away. Two offers to buy were also turned down. The angry Onassis then began buying up SBM's shares through middlemen. Of the 1 million shares, 200,000 belonged to the prince, now Rainier III. who was also dissatisfied with the way the company was run. Onassis managed to acquire 300,000 shares.
As his compatriot Zaharoff already demonstrated, he too was represented at the annual meeting on January 15, 1953 and brought a shop steward to the head of the company. Instead of just one building, Onassis was now in control of the whole company, including the casino and a few hotels. He invested large sums of money again and the business began to flourish again at the latest after the wedding between Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly . In the 1960s there were differences between Rainier and Onassis about how the future development of Monaco should look. While Onassis continued to prefer a millionaires' paradise, Rainier wanted his country open to a wider influx of tourists. On July 7, 1965, Der Spiegel even reported that Rainier had threatened to nationalize the SBM. Onassis subsequently withdrew from the SBM.
Since 2000
Thus the last heyday of the casino was over. It now accounts for around 5 percent of Monaco's national budget and has made losses in several years. On January 28, 2003, the state treaty with the SBM was extended for another 20 years. By 2005, the SBM only had to surrender 13 percent of its profits to the state instead of the planned 20 percent, and then more gradually. Today, the SBM is predominantly a hotel and restaurant company , including the casino, twelve top restaurants , four luxury hotels , the Monte Carlo Sporting Club , the Kurhaus Thermes Marins , discos , the cabaret, the Opéra de Monaco and the famous Beach Club .
In July 2004, reports surfaced that the SBM would build a floating mega-casino together with the US casino billionaire Steve Wynn in the Bay of Monaco.
In September 2011, SBM reported a loss of 17.3 million euros for the 2010/2011 financial year, the first year of losses since 1996/97. In June 2014, the SBM named a loss of 11.8 million euros for the casino compared to 32.7 million euros in the previous year. In the 2018/19 season it was reduced to 8 million euros. In addition to the classic players from Eastern Europe and Italy, more customers came from the Middle East and China .
A modernization in the style of Las Vegas casinos is planned for 2020 . The historic decor from the 19th century with wood paneling and gilding scares too many new players off.
literature
- Egon Caesar Conte Corti: The Magician of Homburg and Monte Carlo ; Scheffler Verlag Frankfurt am Main.
- George W. Herald, Edward D. Radin: Casino, Monte Carlos glamorous time , original title: The Big Wheel - Monte Carlo's opulent Century ; Vier Falken Verlag, Berchtesgaden.
- Bernd Ruland: Mephisto smiles, 100 years of the Monte Carlo World Theater ; Swiss printing and publishing house in Zurich, 1964.
- Paul-Marie de la Gorce: Monaco ; Editions Rencontre.
Web links
- Official website of the casino (German)
- Official website of Monaco
- Website of the Société des bains de mer (SBM) (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Monaco newspaper: SBM presents renovation program ( Memento from February 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) SBM presents renovation program.
- ^ Monaco newspaper: Light at the end of the tunnel ( Memento from June 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Monaco: la SBM va réaménager son casino historique de Monte-Carlo carnetsduluxe.com , September 23, 2019, accessed on February 3, 2020 (French)
- ↑ Monaco: la Société des bains de mer affiche après 7 ans de pertes des résultats financiers positifs france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr , June 13, 2019, accessed on February 3, 2020 (French)