The Javal family were a Jewish family originating in Alsace. They benefited from Napoleon Bonaparte's policy of openness toward Jews, and in the 19th century experienced an ascent, with family members becoming bankers, industrialists, physicians, public officials and artists.
The Javal were a family rooted for many generations in Paris and Europe for over a century in the Industrial Revolution. This family produced bankers, captains of industry, professors of medicine, high civil servants, members of parliament, and artists.Jacques Mousseau, Le Siècle de Paul-Louis Weiller. 1893–1993, Paris, Stock, 1998, p.49
The Javal family, writes Pierre Birnbaum, had experienced financial success. Beginning in the late 18th century, they were involved in industries ranging from railways to textiles and established links with the business world. Operating within an international industrial network, they began financial operations in the early 19th century, acquiring wealth that placed them within the social elite.Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République, Paris, Le Seuil, coll. Points, 1994, pp.289–290
Early history The group was led by two Javal brothers (both named Jacques, and called respectively Jacques Javal the Elder and Jacque Javal the Younger) whom operated a mill in Mulhouse.
In 1826, Jacques Javal the Younger entered the Board of Manufacturers. In 1828 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor, under its industrial activity on the proposal of Count Chabrol de Volvic, prefect of the Seine. He built a mansion at the bottom of rue Taitbout while his son and partner, Joseph, settled on Rue Chauchat. When Jacques the Younger retired in 1835, he was one of France's richest men.
Leopold Javal Jacques the Younger sponsored Leopold, then 31 years old, to invest in new businesses. Leopold invested in mines in Provence, in pipeline companies, a department store, a public bathhouse on the Seine at the foot of the Samaritaine, a housing neighbourhood for workers in Montrouge. In ten years, he multiplied by three the capital of the family companies and created his own personal fortune. He took control of the banking side of the family empire and renamed it "Leopold Javal and C i.e. "and took the lead. Through this bank, it invests in the development of railway lines, in combination with the house Koechlin.
He also took up a political career as general counsel of the Gironde from 1851, with the support of the imperial regime, and as a representative of the department of the Yonne to the Legislature from 1857, where he appeared first as a Republican against the Bonapartist candidate, and was consistently re-elected in 1863, 1869 and 1871. In 1862, he was made an Officier de la Legion d'honneur. He lived at the end of his life, an hotel particulier of rue d'Anjou, and started the very important Javal art collection with paintings of François Boucher, Claude Joseph Vernet, Canaletto, Andrea del Sarto, Bruegel and Rubens.
In 1838, Javal married Augusta von Laemel, daughter of the financier Léopold von Laemel and the Baroness Sophia von Eichthal, sister of the Baron Simon von Eichthal, a member of one of the , the two hundred families that were the biggest shareholders in the Bank of France, a family which gave several governors to the Bank of France.
Being heavily influenced by Saint-Simonism, Javal began by planting pine forests and drilling wells. The Javal family owned some 300 hectares around the cistercian abbey of Vauluisant, while in Andernos Javal enlarged an estate at Audenge to Ares and to Lacanau, thus forming a big property of over 3,000 hectares.
Houbigant
The Javal owned the perfume house Houbigant, the second oldest perfume house in Europe. Operating since 1775, the House of Houbigant is the only fragrance house that has existed through four centuries of history. Through these centuries, the perfumers of the House of Houbigant have made discoveries in the formulation of perfumes.
Over the centuries, the House of Houbigant became perfumer to the royal courts of Europe. When in 1793 Marie-Antoinette was guillotined, she carried three vials of Houbigant perfume in her corsage to give her strength. Josephine, the future Empress of France, belonged to a group of stylish young men and women called "The Muscadins" because of their craze for musk which was Josephine's favourite essence. Houbigant fragrances travelled in Napoleon's campaign chest during the years when he was conquering Europe. In the spring of 1815 Napoleon was only in Paris for three months, a period known as the "Hundred Days". In those brief months he raised an army and yet found time to shop at Houbigant.
In 1829, Houbigant was appointed perfumer to Her Royal Highness, the Princess Adelaide d'Orleans, mother of King Louis-Philippe. In 1838, the French house was awarded the license of "Perfumer to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom". Czar Alexander III named Houbigant perfumer to the Imperial Court of Russia in 1890. Houbigant created a perfume, "The Czarina's Bouquet", in honor of the Empress, Maria Fyodorovna. When her son ascended the throne as Czar Nicolas II in 1894, Houbigant continued as royal perfumer. Hand-written ledgers record the purchases of the Dowager Empress from 1900 until the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Her sister, Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, began her purchases in 1902. The account books reveal that the two queens did their Christmas shopping together at Houbigant. Other royalty luminaries include La Comtesse de Saxe, first cousin of Louis XVI the King and Queen of Holland; the Queen of Italy; Princess Mathilde, sister of Napoleon, Prince of Battenberg; Le Duc de Mouchy; Tolstoy; the Russian Ambassador; Guy de Maupassant; the Rothschilds and more.
In 1882, the famous Fougère Royale came out, a fragrance that would define a new category of perfumes – the "fougère" (or fern-like) fragrance family, which is still today the most popular family in men fragrances. In 1912, Houbigant perfumer Bienaimé picked up the ball from Paul Parquet and introduced Quelque Fleurs, the first multi-floral bouquet ever created. During the same period, Houbigant stretched out its commercial arms around the world. Under the direction of the Paris office, offices were established in the United States, England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania. Connections were made in Havana, Buenos-Aires, Rio-de-Janeiro, Australia, Japan, and China.
The Weiller With the Weiller branch (Paul-Louis Weiller, son of industrialist and politician Lazare Weiller (1858–1928) and Alice Javal, the first woman to ever pilot an airplane), they conducted a social life between the royal families of Europe and the men of political affairs ( Aristotle Onassis, Henry Ford, Jean Paul Getty, Richard Nixon, Georges Pompidou ). Paul-Louis Weiller also funded many charities.
Captain of industry at the age of twenty-nine years, from 1922 to 1940, Paul-Louis Weiller developed the largest construction company of aircraft in Europe, the Gnome et Rhône conglomerate, which became the Snecma after nationalization in 1945 . From 1925, he gradually buys the capital of the airline CIDNA. He participated in the creation of other airlines to Africa. They were nationalized in 1933 to become Air France, of which he became one of the first directors (he was offered in 1933 by Pierre Cot, the Ministre de l'Air, to be President of Air France, but he refused).
Paul-Louis Weiller was married 29 August 1922 in Paris, with Princess Alexandra Ghica (of the ruling princes of Wallachia and Moldavia) with whom he had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth and whom he divorced in 1931.
He married second wife Aliki Diplarakou, Miss Europe in 1930. Aliki was the daughter of a diplomat Georgios Diplarakos. She had three sisters, Nada Diplarakos who married French Ambassador André Rodocanachi, Cristina Diplarakos, who married Henri Claudel, a son of the French poet Paul Claudel. Aliki second marriage was in 1945 with Sir John (Jack) Wriothesley Russell (23 August 1914 – 3 August 1984), an English aristocrat who was descended from John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford and cousin of the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
They had a son Paul-Annik Weiller (1933–1998) who married in Rome, in Santa Maria in Trastevere in 1965, Emmanuela Donna Olimpia a Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi. She was the daughter of Don Alessandro Torlonia, 5th Prince of Civitella-Cesi (Don Alessandro's youngest sister was Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi, grandmother of the American actress Brooke Shields. He was also a first cousin of Bettine Moore, the mother of the actress Glenn Close) the Infante Beatriz of Spain(granddaughter of the King of Spain Alfonso XIII and his wife Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, grandmother of Juan Carlos I of Spain and grand daughter of Queen Victoria, the first cousin of King George V of the United Kingdom, Queen Maud of Norway, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, Queen Marie of Romania, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Queen Louise of Sweden, and Queen Sophia of the Hellenes )
The daughter of Paul-Annik, Sibilla Weiller married in 1994 Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg, Prince of Nassau and Parma, youngest son of Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg (descendants and heirs of the House of Nassau-Weilburg, agnatically, now a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon-Parma, itself a cadet branch of the House of Capet)
Louise Weiss
Louise Weiss (1893, Arras, Pas-de-Calais - 26 May 1983, Paris) was the daughter of Jeanne Javal (a daughter of Louis Émile Javal) and Paul Weiss. She became an author, journalist, feminist and European politician. She was awarded a degree from Oxford University. From 1914 to 1918, she worked as a war nurse and founded a hospital in the Côtes-du-Nord. From 1918 to 1934, she was the publisher of the magazine, . From 1935 to the beginning of World War II, she committed herself to women's suffrage. In 1936, she stood for French parliamentary elections, running in the Fifth arrondissement of Paris. During the War, she was active in the French Resistance. She was a member of the Patriam Recuperare network, and she was chief editor of the secret magazine, "Nouvelle République" from 1942 until 1944. In 1945, she founded the Institute for Polemology (research on war and conflict) together with in London. She travelled around the Middle East, Japan, China, Vietnam, Africa, Kenya, Madagascar, Alaska, India, etc., made documentary films and wrote accounts of her travels. In 1975, she unsuccessfully tried twice to be admitted to the Académie Française. In 1979, she became a Member of the European Parliament for the Gaullist Party (now Union for a Popular Movement).
During World War I, she published her first press reports under a pseudonym. In Paris, she came in contact with her first great loves, representatives of countries striving for independence, such as Eduard Beneš, Tomáš Masaryk and Milan Štefánik. Between 1919 and 1939, she often travelled to Czechoslovakia. In 1918, she founded the weekly newspaper, (New Europe), which she published until 1934. Thomas Mann, Gustav Stresemann, Rudolf Breitscheid and Aristide Briand were among her co-authors on the paper. Louise Weiss described those who paved the way for the closening of the German-French relationship between the World Wars as "peace pilgrims", and they called their important co-worker "my good Louise". Europe dreamed of unification and in 1930, she founded the "Ecole de la Paix" (School of Peace), a private institute for international relations. With the takeover by the National Socialists in Germany, the possibility of a unification was over.