Péreire brothers

(Jacob) Émile Pereire (* 1800 in Bordeaux, † January 5, 1875 in Paris) was a French financier and publicist Portuguese- Sephardic origin.

Life

The grandson of Jacob Rodrigues Pereira went to Paris in 1822 and worked in a bank. From the mid 1820s he gained interest in the Saint- Simonism and championed in 1830 as a practical project for the promotion of trade and industry, the project of a " Comptoir d' escompte ". Pereire was 1831/32 editor of Le Globe, an organ de Saint -Simon, but was also active as a journalist for the liberal journal Le Commerce, and the Connaissances Utiles, where he championed the widespread establishment of savings banks. 1832 and 1833 he was editor of the Revue encyclopedique and 1832-1835 editor of the republican newspaper Le National.

Together with his younger brother Isaac Pereire he founded in 1852 the Crédit Foncier de France and Crédit Mobilier. The new banking institutions were the President and - in December 1852 - Emperor of the French Louis Bonaparte close. Pereire had already been very active in the financing of railway construction, beginning in 1835 with the line from Paris to Saint- Germain -en- Laye. The railway interests of the two brothers went but soon far beyond France and extended to the Danube monarchy, Spain and Russia. Your conglomerate also dealt with the Paris street lighting and the bus system of the city. The shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique belonged to the gas works of Madrid, the Spanish-French Versicherungsuntermehmen La Unión y el Fénix and numerous other financial institutions. For a time rivaled the Pereires as pioneers of modern industry funding with the oriented more to the traditional state credit Rothschilds and their wide -ranging activities correlated well with the world's political ambitions of Napoleon III. Visible expression of his wealth was the great city Palais in Paris ( 35 rue du Faubourg Saint- Honoré ), which he acquired in 1855 (now the seat of the British Embassy). After 1861 the brothers Pereire made ​​possible by the expansion of their investment Arcachon from a fishing village to a luxury beach resort. In 1867, however, came the collapse of the Crédit Mobilier - not least because this was massively engaged in Austrian government bonds and Austria had been defeated Prussia in 1866 in Hradec Kralove.

Émile Pereire was also politicians and 1857-1870 member of the Corps Législatif. His 1860 memoir published L' Empereur François -Joseph et l'Europe on the Austrian-Italian question was widely Napoleon III. self- attributed.