Émile Pereire

Origins and early life

Émile Pereire was born at Bordeaux on 3 December 1800 into the Sephardi Jewish community of the city, the Nation Portugaise descended from Jews who had fled the Iberian Inquisitions; his parents Isaac Pereire and Rebecca Henriette Lopès Fonseca were both Sephardi Jews of Bayonne, and his grandfather Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, born in Spain, had been the interpreter of Louis XV and the inventor of a method for teaching deaf-mutes to speak.

Work and career

Neither he nor his younger brother Isaac converted. Left fatherless at six and poor, he went to Paris at twenty-two, worked in banking and wrote on economics for the Saint-Simonian press, becoming with his brother one of the leading figures of Saint-Simonism, which held that credit and public works were the instruments of social progress. He built the first passenger railway in France, from Paris to Saint-Germain, opened in 1837 against widespread scepticism, and went on to create the Paris to Saint-Germain and Paris to Rouen lines and, in 1852, the Compagnie du chemin de fer du Midi.

In the same year the brothers founded the Crédit Mobilier, an investment bank that raised money from the public to finance railways, gas, transport and construction across Europe, a new form of finance that made them the great rivals of the Rothschilds. They developed Arcachon and the Plaine Monceau in Paris, and financed the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. The Crédit Mobilier collapsed in 1867. He died in Paris on 6 January 1875.