Volume 24, Number 3 · March 3, 1977
The Ideal Grand Bourgeois
By C.B.A. Behrens
Les Idées de Necker
by Henri Grange
Librairie c. Klincksieck (Paris), 669 pp., F88
Necker
by Jean Egret
Librairie H. Champion (Paris), 478 pp., F70
Jacques Necker was born in Switzerland in 1732 of a Swiss mother but a Prussian father who had emigrated from Küstrin in the Mark of Brandenburg and established himself in Geneva as a professor of German public law. Though the family seems to have been in prosperous circumstances, and though the young Necker was a promising scholar, his school days were cut short, and at the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a Swiss bank operating in France. There, during twenty years of frugal living and hard work, he accumulated a fortune and a desire to make a name for himself in French political life. In this ambition he was powerfully aided by his wife, an intellectually ambitious Swiss beauty whom Gibbon had hoped but been forbidden by his father to marry. Once Necker's financial circumstances permitted it, she established a salon in Paris (where their daughter Germaine, later Mme de Staël, was born).
Review, 3796 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |