Michel Goudchaux

Origins and early life

Michel Goudchaux was born at Nancy on 18 March 1797 into a Jewish family, son of the banker Gerson Jacob Goudchaux and of Minette Berr de Turique, of the family that had led the Jews of Lorraine to the Constituent Assembly.

Work and career

He was president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris from 1829 to 1832, and made his career as a banker and a republican. In February 1848 the provisional government of the new republic made him minister of finance, and he took the post again under General Cavaignac from June to October of that year, so that a practising Jew held the finances of France barely half a century after French Jews had been granted citizenship; no European state had done such a thing before.

He defended the collection of the forty-five-centime tax when it was politically ruinous to do so, and worked on the postal reform that gave France a single uniform rate. Elected deputy for the Seine, he sat in 1848 and 1849, and after Louis-Napoléon's coup he helped organise financial assistance for republicans driven into exile. Elected again for Paris in 1857, he refused to swear the oath of loyalty to the Empire and therefore could not take his seat. He died in Paris on 27 December 1862.