Marcel G. Cohen de Mehrez

The name and the origins

Marcel George Cohen — Marcel George Cohen de Mehrez in the French registers, the old compound name of a Cohen line — was born on 30 September 1949 in Oujda, in eastern Morocco, into a Moroccan Jewish family. A shopkeeper at fourteen, selling clothes in Morocco, he arrived in France in 1971, at twenty-one, as he told the entrepreneurial press. His card appears in this directory as a personal tribute: its family facts were given to the site by his own.

The father, Henri Cohen

Marcel George Cohen dedicated his Légion d'Honneur to his father. Henri Cohen, born in 1915 at Debdou in Morocco, presided for thirty-five years over the Jewish community of Oujda and its region, and was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite in 1984 — for his altruism and his self-denial, as his son said in the speech he gave on receiving his own cross. All his life, the son told the room, his father gave his time and his help to anyone at all, of whatever colour, race or religion; he had assisted him from his earliest years.

His mother, Émélie, raised ten children. From the two of them comes, he said, the moral code in which he finds the taste for effort and the respect for a word given, and the triple Franco-Judeo-Moroccan culture he calls the source of his energy. I shall never forget where I come from, he added.

Adam & Eve, at fourteen

At fourteen he was given charge of Adam & Eve, a clothing business in Oujda which at the time imported the most prestigious French labels for the whole of Morocco; he ran it alone until he was twenty. Nicolas Sarkozy made a joke of it in 2006: you will have to explain to us, he said, what qualities a man has at fourteen. General Bernard Thorette, decorating him in 2014, saw in it a first working life, lived out in Morocco until 1971.

The Canton fair

Once in France he set out, in his own phrase, to conquer Asia — with no means and no introductions. He meant to reach the Canton fair, which had been China's trading window on the outside world since 1957 and was then opening more widely to the West; he spent whole days at the Chinese embassy, he recalled, until the visa was granted. He used the journey to cross Asia for three months — Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan, Jakarta, Bombay — looking for markets, and what he found was a world he called extraordinarily quick, competitive and inventive, and itself looking for openings westward. Italy, Romania, India and Pakistan followed, for textiles.

A four-square-metre shop

A former clothes seller, in 1981 he opened a shop of four square metres on the corner of the passage de l'Industrie and the boulevard de Strasbourg, in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, selling hair products to professionals; after a trip to the United States where he discovered the products made for Black hair, he turned to ethnic beauty, and that choice became the business of his life. The spark, he said, came on the flight home, leafing through an issue of Ebony given over to Black and mixed-race beauty.

Nobody believed in it; the queue formed an hour before opening, and he made a point of putting an African woman in charge of the shop, which, he said, was hardly done at the time. 'I am the one who made the boulevard de Strasbourg', he liked to say — the press that walked the quarter in 2015 presented him as the pioneer of afro cosmetics in Paris, shop after shop around Château-d'Eau.

MGC International

The house he started on it in 1981 and registered in 1982, MGC International, became the French leader in ethnic cosmetics — 'the number one of cosmopolitan beauty', as the firm itself put it after thirty-seven years — with twelve points of sale in Paris, a brand of its own carried in some 1,500 French shops, and a presence the entrepreneurial press counted in 88 countries, Africa taking half of the exports and forty-five people working in the house by 2014.

A business school turned the company into a case study, presenting its founder as the very image of the self-made man. In October 2018, closing its shops — those of the boulevard de Strasbourg and the one on the rue de Rennes, the house took its leave of its customers in a letter recalling those thirty-seven years of success.

A family house

MGC was, in the words of the press headline that visited it, a real family that grows. His son Yohann was the managing director, his son Kevin served as deputy managing director, his son Norman ran the export house, his daughter Laura joined the house in communication, and the company is presided over today by Padremar, the family holding that gathers his five children — Yohann, Kevin, Jordan, Norman and Laura.

Computing and telecoms

Cosmetics did not hold him entirely. From the 1990s he put money into computing and telecommunications, and out of it came two companies, as he tells it: one in telecoms, and an IT services firm which counted eight hundred engineers and was listed on the Paris Bourse in April 2000. Asked to sum up fifty years of work, he chose a line that takes in the whole range of it: from the market of Dakar to the Paris stock exchange, from a Caribbean puddle-jumper to Concorde to New York, from French to sign language to make himself understood.

The property companies

Beside the cosmetics house, the French registers list some twenty property companies under his direction.

The commitment

Marcel is not only this brilliant entrepreneur, to deserve the gratitude of the Nation, said General Thorette as he pinned on the cross. Following his father's example, he carried his commitment to the International Federation for Human Rights, to the International Abolitionist Federation, to various charitable works, and to Moroccan families settling in France. Nicolas Sarkozy had said as much in 2006: from his arrival, first beside his father and then alone, he had worked at the settling in France of Franco-Moroccan families of every faith — people, the minister added, who are not uprooted but have their heart on both sides of the Mediterranean.

Decorations

By decree of the President of the Republic of 18 April 2014, published in the Journal officiel of 20 April, he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur on the list of the ministry of foreign affairs — 'M. Cohen (Marcel, George), président d'une société de produits cosmétiques ethniques ; 44 ans de services', reads the line — taking rank from 5 December 2014, as his letters patent record. He had been made a Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite by the brevet signed in Paris on 14 November 2005.

The two framed brevets, each bearing its insignia — the red ribbon of the Légion, the blue ribbon of the Mérite — are photographed in the media gallery of this card. His family records the two ceremonies for this card: the insignia of the Mérite was presented to him by Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, at the ministry of the interior; that of the Légion d'Honneur by général d'armée Bernard Thorette, former chief of staff of the French army, at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris.

The two ceremonies

On 24 May 2006, at the Hôtel de Beauvau, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, pinned on him the insignia of the Ordre National du Mérite, and made of it a lesson on the Republic: one can be faithful to one's roots and turned towards others; the Republic is not a matter of giving up what one is before coming in, but of coming in as one is, being accepted as one is, accepting the values of the Republic, and adding one's own share of identity to the republican crucible rather than denying it.

On 5 December 2014, in the Grand Salon of the Musée de l'Armée at the Invalides, General Bernard Thorette handed him the Légion d'Honneur and recalled that the accolade is no embrace: it is what twelve centuries of French history have left of the dubbing of medieval knights. The two men were both born in Morocco — Marcel George Cohen at Oujda, the general at Port-Lyautey, since renamed Kénitra. The three speeches of those two days were given to this directory by the family.