David de Rothschild

Origins and early life

David de Rothschild was born in New York on 15 December 1942, son of Baron Guy de Rothschild and of Alix Schey de Koromla, while his family was in exile from a France that had stripped its Jews of their property and their citizenship; he was registered at the French consulate as the first newborn entered as a Free French national.

Work and career

He came back to a country where the family bank had to be rebuilt once, and then again: when the socialist government nationalised it in 1981, he started over in 1982 with a handful of employees and no name to use, and built what became Rothschild & Co, one of the principal advisory banks in France and then in Europe. He directed Rothschild & Cie and N. M. Rothschild & Sons from their reunification in 2003 and stepped back in 2018, when his son Alexandre succeeded him.

Since 2007 he has been president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the body created out of the restitution of property looted from French Jews, which funds research, teaching, the Mémorial de la Shoah and aid to survivors; the money that Vichy and the occupier took is thereby made to serve the memory of what was done. He married Olimpia Aldobrandini in 1974 and they have four children.