the world of private banking

‘HAUtE BANqUE’ AND tHE INtERNAtIONAL EcONOmy 129
for the Delesserts, an ancient Waldensian family, and the Odiers. The Hottinguers,
originating from Zurich, were also to be found practising as bankers in Paris from
1786, or, arriving at the start of the next century, the Hentsch family from Geneva,
as well as the Vernes, who were also Huguenot descendants. The last to arrive
were the Mirabauds, also with Huguenot ancestry, who really installed themselves
in Paris in 1846 when they became associates of the Paccard-Dufours, who were
originally from Geneva.
Among the Jewish families in the Haute Banque one finds the Foulds, who were
from Lorraine with distant Germanic ancestry, and, of course, the Rothschilds:
it is known that James de Rothschild, the founder of the French branch of the
family, arrived in Paris from Frankfurt in March 1811, where he was registered as
a banker with the Tribunal de Commerce (Commercial Tribunal) from 1814, but
that he remained of foreign nationality up until the end of his life (1868), even
though his son, Alphonse, became French naturalized at the start of 1848. Other
major Parisian bankers came from various German States, such as the Heines from
Lower Saxony (who became allied with the Foulds), and especially the Rhine
regions, such as the Cahens from Antwerp.
Among the Catholic families, not an insignificant number, one finds the
Pillet-Wills, who may also be considered to be of foreign origin, the founder
of this Parisian bank, Frederic Pillet-Will, being born in Savoy in 1781, well
before its annexation by France, and having served his commercial and banking
apprenticeship at Lausanne. But the other Catholic bankers were of French stock,
such as the Périers from the Dauphiné, the Seillières originating from Lorraine, or
the Durands, descended from an ancient commercial dynasty based in Roussillon
and Montpellier.
If the Parisian Haute Banque remains thought of as a cosmopolitan world
incompletely assimilated into the French elite, this is due to the continued links
that these great banking families maintained with their parents and friends who
remained in the foreign countries. It is also necessary to establish a distinction
between the Catholic Haute Banque and the Jewish and Protestant Haute Banque.
The major Jewish and Protestant bankers were married, and very often married
their children, to foreign wives and husbands, or with people established in France
but also with foreign origins, often of the same religion as themselves. These
unions sometimes took place within the confines of the same family, as with the
Rothschilds. The heads of the French branch were systematically married to other
branches of the family: James married the daughter of his brother Salomon, who
was located in Vienna, and his son Alphonse was married, in 1857, to his cousin
Léonore, the daughter of Lionel de Rothschild the head of the English branch, whilst
his sister Charlotte married Nathaniel de Rothschild. Often these marriages united
the bankers more closely with foreign, or foreign-origin, families, with which they
already had an affinity, or more or less close relationships. Thus, in 1813 and then
1818 two brothers, Louis-Jules Mallet and Adolphe-Jacques Mallet, successively
married the two daughters of Oberkampf, a Protestant of Bavarian origin who
was a client of their bank, with a factory for painted canvases at Jouy-en-Josas.