Achille Fould

Origins and early life

Achille Fould was born on 17 November 1800 in Paris, into a Jewish banking family of Metz, established there since the second half of the seventeenth century; his father Beer Léon Fould had founded the family bank that Achille's brother Benoît carried on.

Work and career

Achille himself embraced Protestantism — this fiche says so plainly; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish birth and family. Trained in the bank, he entered politics and became the financial pillar of the Second Empire: four times Minister of Finance under Louis-Napoléon, in 1849-52 and again in 1861-67, he restored the credit of the state, and as Minister of State from 1852 he organized the Exposition Universelle of 1855, which showed imperial France to the world.

A member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was one of the most powerful figures of his era's public life — proof, a generation after emancipation, of how far the Jews of France had come. He died at La Loubère, near Tarbes, on 5 October 1867.