Georges Wormser

Origins and early life

Georges Wormser was born in the fourth arrondissement of Paris on 14 January 1888, of Alsatian Jewish descent; his uncle Gaston had been secretary to Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

Work and career

He passed through the École normale supérieure, took the agrégation in literature, and taught in the lycées of Aurillac, Saint-Étienne and Rennes before the First World War, in which he was wounded twice and won the Croix de guerre. Clemenceau took him as chief of his private office in 1919 and 1920, and he was secretary of the French delegation at the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, standing at the centre of the settlement of Europe at thirty-one.

He founded the Banque d'Escompte in 1936, later Banque Wormser Frères, and wrote the history of the man he had served: La République de Clemenceau, published in 1961, drew a letter of commendation from de Gaulle. He was president of the Consistory of Paris from 1949 to 1953 and sat on the central committee of the Alliance israélite universelle. He first opposed the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr planned in 1952, calling a separate monument a form of racial segregation, a position that belonged to the French Jewish tradition he came from; by 1963, with the book Français, Israélites, he had thought his way to a different position. He died in Paris on 16 February 1978, at ninety.