Les Grands Fauves
Deluxe printing, entirely hors commerce and reserved for the author: 200 copies on Munken paper. These copies, reset in large format, are illustrated with drawings in and out of text by Alain Bouldouyre, with a signed original color lithograph, in publisher's cloth binding.
Curiously, Claude Bébéar had never before been the subject of a biography. To fill this gap, Christophe Labarde, a former journalist at Le Figaro and longtime head of the HEC Alumni association, chose an original approach: recounting the story of Entreprise et Cité, the club that brought together, around the founder of Axa, all the “great beasts” of French business. Entreprise et Cité was the pioneer of the think tanks that have shaped French political life for the past thirty years.
It was in 1983 that Claude Bébéar, then in the process of transforming his small mutual insurance company into a global leader in the sector, decided to create, with a few friends, this small discussion group, which never numbered more than about thirty members — all men. Together they met to work on the relationship that should unite private enterprise and public engagement: the rights, duties and goals of business toward society as a whole. Without a logo or premises, they gathered informally around a rugby match, a good meal, or an outing among friends. For nearly twenty-five years they hunted as a pack, led by Bébéar, who invited his closest friends, almost all of them chief executives: Michel Pébereau (BNP), André Lévy-Lang (Paribas), David de Rothschild (Rothschild et Compagnie Banque), Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Didier Pineau-Valencienne (Schneider), Jean-René Fourtou (Rhône-Poulenc), Vincent Bolloré (Bolloré Technologies), Serge Kampf (Capgemini), Pierre Dauzier (Havas), Michel François-Poncet (Paribas), Thierry Breton (France Télécom), Philippe Midy (Poulain), Christian Blanc (RATP/Air France), Noël Forgeard (Matra, Airbus), Gérard Mestrallet (Suez), Pierre Bellon (Sodexo)… All those who “mattered” in the French economic landscape gathered around the table — literally and figuratively — the table around which, as Vincent Bolloré repeatedly put it, “it is no exaggeration to say that for twenty-five years French capitalism was made and unmade.” As it turns out, he was not exaggerating: a fascinating deep dive into a clan-based capitalism, at once selfish and generous, soloistic and choral, chaotic and convivial, driven by the boundless appetite of men of monstrous ambition and sociability. “They all spoke English badly, each in his own way,” writes Christophe Labarde, “but that did not stop them from becoming global giants, with rugby ingrained in body and heart as their philosophy.”