Summary of Tom Sancton's The Bettencourt Affair

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Charles Schueller, the son of a shoemaker, was a French patriot who would rather die than live under German occupation. The Franco-German war of 1871 resulted in the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership.

#2 Eugène Schueller, the man who would found L’Oréal, was a graduate of the Institute of Applied Chemistry in Paris, where he had excelled in his studies. He began experimenting with hair dyes in a rented space near the Tuileries Gardens. His first efforts were disappointing, but he persisted, changing formulas, and eventually selling his products to hairdressers.

#3 Schueller was a restless thinker who was always probing new ideas about the organization of industry and the economy. In 1914, he was assigned auxiliary status in the French army, and he fought in the First World War.

#4 Schueller was a success at L’Oréal, but he also had many failures outside of the company. He took over a soap manufacturer in 1928, Monsavon, but the French soap market was already saturated with competitors. He had to spend hundreds of thousands of francs a month out of his own pocket to keep the company afloat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822519763

IRB Media

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Insights on Tom Sancton's The Bettencourt Affair

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Charles Schueller, the son of a shoemaker, was a French patriot who would rather die than live under German occupation. The Franco-German war of 1871 resulted in the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership.

#2

Eugène Schueller, the man who would found L’Oréal, was a graduate of the Institute of Applied Chemistry in Paris, where he had excelled in his studies. He began experimenting with hair dyes in a rented space near the Tuileries Gardens. His first efforts were disappointing, but he persisted, changing formulas, and eventually selling his products to hairdressers.

#3

Schueller was a restless thinker who was always probing new ideas about the organization of industry and the economy. In 1914, he was assigned auxiliary status in the French army, and he fought in the First World War.

#4

Schueller was a success at L’Oréal, but he also had many failures outside of the company. He took over a soap manufacturer in 1928, Monsavon, but the French soap market was already saturated with competitors. He had to spend hundreds of thousands of francs a month out of his own pocket to keep the company afloat.

#5

In France, the Third Republic, the parliamentary regime that had followed the fall of Napoleon III in 1871, was teetering on the verge of collapse in the 1930s. In 1934, violent clashes between police and far-right rioters on the Place de la Concorde left some thirty dead and two thousand wounded.

#6

Schueller was a French patriot, but he had little use for the Front populaire government, which was headed by a Socialist Jew. He remained a French citizen, but he admired the authority, order, and efficiency that reigned in Germany and Italy.

#7

Following the German victory in World War II, the Cagoule was revived under a new name, Mouvement social révolutionnaire, which openly collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy government.

#8

In February 1941, Schueller merged the group with another pro-Fascist organization, the Rassemblement national populaire, headed by Marcel Déat, an ex-socialist turned Nazi sympathizer. Schueller had cause to regret his words once the German occupiers fled the country in 1944.

#9

After the war, Eugène Schueller was swept up in the épuration, and was charged with economic and political collaboration. He was able to call on various witnesses to support his