An Infinite History by Emma Rothschild

Author:Emma Rothschild [Rothschild, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Histories of Economic Life: Banking and Inexactitude

The subsequent history of the Allemand Lavigeries in banking—to return to the economic lives of the family, and to the bridegroom of 1851—was a mixed success. Scipion Allemand Lavigerie, the founder of the banking house of “Lavigerie et Demorieux,” died in his mansion in the center of Le Mans in 1853, at the age of fifty-six. He was a widower with no children, and his heir was his brother in Angoulême, Camille Allemand Lavigerie. Scipion was a wealthy man, with property in Le Mans and in the nearby commune of Saint-Pavace; his furniture and immediate possessions were valued at 154,356 francs.82

Camille moved to Le Mans with his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and young grandson, where they lived with his widowed mother in the house that Scipion had bought on the Place des Halles.83 Henri Portet, Camille’s son-in-law, was the protagonist in the last, turbulent period of the family’s banking history. When the family returned to Le Mans, in 1854, the old partnership was still there: “Banquiers: Lavigerie et Demorieux.”84 By 1855, everything had changed. The mercantile listing in the Firmin-Didot directory had vanished, transposed into “Lemarchand, successeur de Lavigerie et Demorieux” (and a specialist, still, in the manufacture of sacks). The listing for bankers in Firmin-Didot was “Portet-Lavigerie et cie.”85

It was an epoch of “limitless expansion,” the linen merchants of Le Mans had written in the petition of 1842 that was signed by Scipion, in opposition to the “supposed protective rights” of the prohibitionists, identified, in the merchants’ view, with the “industrial and commercial barbarism of the Middle Ages.”86 Le Mans was itself, by the 1850s, an industrial town, of “mechanical saws,” starch produced with “steam engines,” zinc foundries, and “hydraulic mills.” (There were also the “voitures,” weighing machines for “voitures,” and “voitures of all sorts” that became the foundation, eventually, of the town’s enduring destiny—including L’Obéissante, the first private automobile in France, produced by an inventor whose father was a caster of church bells in a suburb of Le Mans.)87

The Portet-Lavigerie bank, in these propitious times, was an immediate success. The “Maison Portet-Lavigerie” was the correspondent in Le Mans for some of the most grandiose investment projects of the Second Empire of Napoléon III: marble quarries, in 1856; the Galveston-to-Houston railway, in 1857; the Panama Canal.88 The company specialized in arbitrage in the London markets, as described in a case they brought against a client for the nonpayment of 85,679 francs in commissions (and eventually lost on appeal, in a judgment that earned a modest place in the emerging commercial jurisprudence of foreign exchange; in the decision of the court, “the banker [must] inform the remitter of the profits arising from the exchange of pounds sterling for French values [and must not substitute] an average that he has established arbitrarily over the totality of the operation”).89

Henri Portet started to use the name of his wife, and her successful uncle; he called himself “Portet-Lavigerie” in his public life. He gave expert testimony about the agricultural

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