Isaac Pereire

Origins and early life

Isaac Pereire was born at Bordeaux on 25 November 1806, six years after his brother Émile, into the same Sephardi Jewish family of the Nation Portugaise of Bordeaux, sons of Isaac Pereire and Rebecca Henriette Lopès Fonseca of Bayonne and grandsons of Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, interpreter to Louis XV; neither brother converted, and Isaac was a member of the consistory of the Paris Jewish community and financed its institutions.

Work and career

He was the theorist of the pair, where Émile was the builder: a Saint-Simonian who argued in a long series of books and pamphlets that credit should be democratised, that savings should be mobilised for productive investment, and that the monopoly of the Bank of France was an obstacle to it. With Émile he founded the Crédit Mobilier in 1852, the first modern investment bank, whose model was copied across Europe; he ran the Compagnie du chemin de fer du Midi, and the two of them financed the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the gas companies of Paris, and railways in Spain, Austria, Switzerland and Russia.

He bought and directed the newspaper La Liberté. Their public rivalry with James de Rothschild, fought out over railway concessions and the money market, ended in the collapse of the Crédit Mobilier in 1867, in which he lost most of his fortune. He continued to write on economic policy and to sit as a deputy for the Pyrénées-Orientales. He died at Armainvilliers on 12 July 1880.