Guy de Rothschild

Origins and early life

Guy de Rothschild was born in Paris on 21 May 1909 and died at Ferrières-en-Brie on 12 June 2007, at ninety-eight.

Work and career

He fought in 1940, joined the Free French, and was decorated with the Croix de guerre; meanwhile Vichy stripped his family of its bank, its house and its citizenship under the laws on Jews, and the family collections were looted. He came back to a firm that had to be rebuilt, was managing partner of Rothschild Frères from 1945 to 1967 and then president of the Banque Rothschild in Paris, and sat on the boards of the family houses in London and New York.

What matters as much is what he did with the rest of his time: he was president of the Fonds social juif unifié from 1950 to 1982 and of the Central Consistory of French Jewry from 1949 to 1962, which is to say that he presided over the material reconstruction of a community that had lost a quarter of its number and most of its institutions, and over its absorption of the Jews who arrived from North Africa in the 1960s.

When the socialist government nationalised his bank in 1981 he wrote the sentence that followed him ever after: a Jew under Pétain, a pariah under Mitterrand, that is enough for me. He gave the château de Ferrières to the University of Paris in 1975, bred racehorses and collected paintings.