Marcel Boussac

Marcel Boussac April 17th 1889 with Chateauroux - March 21st 1980 was a textile manufacturer and a stockbreeder of racehorses.

Biography

It enters at 16 years the company of clothes industry that his/her father directs. Then it settles with Paris in the trade of fabric. The first, it with the intuition that the women would adore to get dressed with merry colors. Sure of him, it draws a collection which décoiffe, order of the hundreds of thousands of meters of fabric and proclaims in 1911 the “revolution in the fanfreluches”.

The success is fabulous and three years later it offers its first racehorse. During the First World War it obtains the order by the army of the blue uniform horizon. Georges Clémenceau becomes her friend.

In 1919, against the opinion of its entourage, it at low prices repurchases all the surpluses of airplane cloth and with this everlasting fabric, it makes blouses, shirts with flexible collar, and invents the pyjamas. It repurchases several factories in particular in the Vosges and a gigantic spinning mill in Poland. The latter will be confiscated by the capacity in 1935.

Its success enables him to go up, on the advised councils of the count Gaston de Castelbajac, one of the most important racing stables in the world whose casaque orange and the gray hat will gain the most prestigious international tests.

When the crisis strikes in 1929 there manages to lower its costs sufficiently to decrease its prices while remaining advantageous enabling him to increase its empire.

It feels all, checks all, control all. This owner is a tyrant who knows each one of his factories, unloads every year with débotté for inspections, studies the operation of the weaving looms thoroughly. Unceasingly, he scolds the workers, the foremen and his directors so that the defects are detected and corrected. A Boussac fabric, thinks it, must be impeccable. A signature. A guarantee.

During the Second world war its good relationships with many German senior officers and the minister for the industrial production of Vichy, Jean Bichelonne, enable him to save its factories and to continue to pay its personnel. But its entregent finds its limits. He is impotent to fight against the covetousness of the Nazi S for Pharis, his more beautiful standard. The ace is removed by a commando during the summer 1941.

He is not worried by purification in particular thanks to the thanks of the survivors of the deportation who discover that their wages were conscientiously versed with their families. He engages Christian Dior and takes part largely so that Paris becomes again the capital of the mode. He offers in Loiret close to Chatillon-Coligny a superb property of hunting, the castle of Mivoisin, 3.600 ha where he will receive with his Fanny wife all the tenors of the policy except Charles de Gaulle of which he would like to be the 3eminence grise.

To the beginning of the Années 1950 it is offered the newspapers the dawn, Paris-Racing and the washing machines the Bendix linen of which it offers a specimen to each one of its workers so that they can rest. In 1952, it repurchases the Haras of Jardy and the Hippodrome of Saint-Cloud, thus going, in the traces of its famous predecessor, Edmond Blanc, which it took as a starting point.

But, this contractor cannot delegate his powers and wants all to control. At the time of the decolonization and synthetic fibers, which reduce its markets, its profits disappear and its money worries accelerate. He will not be able to avoid the dismantling of his empire and dies ruined after having been the richest man of Europe. Since 1980, the Critérium of the Fillies was renamed Prix Marcel Boussac, in his honor.

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