Chapter Two

The Authoritarian

I

When people say at a dinner-party, “You’re so lucky to be in cosmetics!” I say, “Yes, but you had to realize that in 1907.”

—LILIANE BETTENCOURT-SCHUELLER, 1987

Rue Saint-Honoré, where Helena Rubinstein opened her first Paris salon in 1908, is one of Paris’s most glamorous thoroughfares. But the backstreets that surround it are dark and dingy. Among the least prepossessing is a little corridor, called rue d’Alger, that links rue Saint-Honoré with rue de Rivoli. It was here, however, while Madame bustled about installing her stock and arranging couches and curtains in her new boutique, that the true revolution in cosmetics was taking shape. At the back of number 4’s dim courtyard a young chemist named Eugène Schueller had rented a two-room mezzanine to serve as a combination of laboratory, bedroom, and kitchen. He was working to isolate the world’s first safe artificial hair dye, and by the time Rubinstein opened her salon, he was almost there. For more than two years he had worked night and day, watching his savings diminish, cooking his food on the Bunsen burner he used for his chemical experiments. Finally he established his formula. He gave it the provisional name L’Auréole, after a hairstyle popular in 1905, the year he had begun his researches. Soon he would change this name to L’Oréal. Eighty years later, his company would swallow Madame’s.

Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller entered the beauty business at the optimum moment, when the market was ready but still untapped. Like her, it would make him rich. Like her, he spoke to the universal fear of aging, to every woman’s dread of wrinkles and grey hairs. But in every other respect, they, like their products, were utterly different.

If you believed Helena Rubinstein’s advertising, her various creams and lotions were miracle balms that banished blemishes and left the user’s skin blissfully free of wrinkles. And since that was what her customers ached to believe, they convinced themselves that it was true—or, at the very least, that the creams prevented deterioration. There was never any proof, however, that this was actually so. By the 1930s a large number of firms were marketing beauty products of various kinds, and in 1934 the pressure group Consumer Research organized a survey of them, the first attempt at any systematic analysis of what beauty creams did. It showed that most beauty products did not live up to their claims, while some were even dangerous. None of the creams marketed by Helena Rubinstein or her competitors had, Consumer Research reported, any measurable effect on wrinkles, while the notion that skin needed three or four different types of cream—cold cream, cleansing cream, vanishing cream, and skin food—was a myth invented to increase sales. Worse, the glycerine frequently used in vanishing cream was a common allergen that often caused rashes.

Beauticians like Rubinstein and her peers thus trod a wobbly psychological tightrope. On the one hand they shared their customers’ profound desire to believe the propaganda. On the other, they knew—none better!—that what went into their products was really nothing but the same old less-than-magical stuff women had always used, repackaged and skillfully sold. The Consumer Research survey therefore filled them with dread. On the day its results were published, in a book called Skin Deep, the cosmetics industry threw a party for magazine editors at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. The captive audience was harangued for an hour and a half on the wickedness of reformers and consumers’ research organizations and the irresponsible anticosmetic prejudice of the American Medical Association. It was magazines’ duty, the speaker perorated, to help preserve a million-dollar industry, now irresponsibly imperiled. Meanwhile the worst offenders hastened to change their more offensive products—Max Factor removing barium sulphate colors, which caused rashes, from its lipstick lines, Pond’s discontinuing the use of rice starch, which clogged the pores, in its face powder. But there was little they could do to make products such as face creams perform the wonders promised in the advertising copy—and they knew it.

As it happened, they need not have worried. The public bought the book, which swiftly rose up the bestseller charts—and went on with their usual cosmetic routines. No exposé, however painstaking, could outweigh the magical allure of hope. A reader from California spoke for many. Skin Deep had “quite shattered my illusions as to the efficacy of cosmetics,” she wrote. But despite being “a college graduate and a schoolteacher, I don’t really so much believe what saleswomen tell me as I hope that what they tell me will come true.”1 This blind and unquenchable desire—a desire that she herself shared—was the foundation of Madame’s fortune.

L’Oréal was a different matter entirely. Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller owed his success to both luck and talent. But his talent was for science, and his luck to have been presented with an opening that, left to himself, he would never have espied. In the beauty industry, whose claims routinely bore little if any relation to reality, his product was unique in that both he and his customers knew it would always do precisely what the package promised. L’Oréal worked: it would dye your hair any color you wished—and safely. And this was possible because of perhaps the greatest of all the differences between Eugène Schueller and Helena Rubinstein: he was educated, where she was not. The foundation of her business was folk wisdom; Schueller’s business rested on science. What was applicable to hair dye was applicable elsewhere, too. He could make other products, in other industries, and realize their possibilities as he had realized L’Oréal’s. It was simply a matter of time.

II

Eugène Schueller, born in 1881, was nine years younger than Helena Rubinstein. He, too, came from a poor background. His grandfather was a shoemaker, his father a pastry cook, his mother a baker’s assistant. The Schueller family originated in Alsace, the much-disputed Rhineland province on the borders of France and Germany. Eugène’s father, Charles, who considered himself French and did not wish to be a German subject, had come to Paris with his wife, Amélie, after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, when Germany occupied Alsace.

They bought a little patisserie at 124 rue du Cherche-Midi, in Montparnasse, where five sons would be born.1 Only one, Eugène, made it past infancy.2 And for this one surviving child the Schuellers would make any sacrifice. He was bright, and they determined to give him a good education, whatever it might cost. That way he might escape the hand-to-mouth poverty that constrained their own lives, forcing them to work from six every morning (five on Sundays) until ten at night (on Sundays till eleven) 365 days a year.

Young Eugène was expected to take his share of the work. From the age of four he buttered tart tins and shelled almonds before leaving for school in the morning. The habit he then acquired, of early rising in order to lead two or more parallel existences, would remain with him. Later, when he gave lectures or interviews, he often described himself as “Monsieur 6,000 hours” (2,000 hours a year being a normal conscientious working life). “Do you know what a 6,000 hours man is?” he demanded during a 1954 lecture at the Paris École de Commerce. “It’s someone who will work more than sixteen hours a day, 365 days a year, without Saturdays, Sundays or holidays.”3

His daily routine showed what this work involved. He rose at four, and for two hours, in his dressing gown, addressed all the questions raised by colleagues the previous day. Then came an hour’s walk in the company of a physical-training instructor, followed by breakfast, when he read the papers. By the time his secretary arrived at eight a pile of notes and letters awaited her, each with the reply indicated in the margin. This secretary was the object of his pride and admiration: Schueller, possibly because he was rather deaf, could never believe anything was real unless it was written down, and she could take dictation at the speed of light.4 Another pile had penciled reminders of the replies he would dictate; a third had been read and thought about. Other replies were decided upon while the first batch were dictated. This went on until midday, when his Rolls arrived to take him to the Valentine paint factory at Gennevilliers—one of four businesses he was running in 1954, the year he gave the interview setting out this routine. (The others were L’Oréal, Monsavon soap, and a magazine called Votre Beauté.) Office work continued during the drive. At Valentine, he conferred with divisional heads until three p.m., lunching during these discussions on a grapefruit and a cup of tea. Then he left for Monsavon, taking with him a briefcase full of notes, and leaving at five with a second briefcase full. Then it was on to Votre Beauté and a third briefcase, and thence to the offices of L’Oréal, where he stayed until nine p.m. He went to bed at midnight, and slept four hours. But even then his work continued: “My best working-time is when I’m asleep,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “During the afternoon I often listen to people without knowing how to respond. And then during the night I dream I’m in a meeting at L’Oréal, or in the lab with my chemists, and when I get up in the morning most of the necessary decisions have been made.” And so another day began.

He remembered his early life, which had instilled this habit, as “very rough and hard on us.” But it produced enough money for his parents to send him to a private school, where he got on well. In 1890, however, the Panama Canal Company, in which his father had invested his small savings, failed. The shop had to close, and there could be no more private school. M. Schueller found a job in a big patisserie at Levallois-Perret, a working-class district on Paris’s northwest outskirts, where Eugène attended the local state school.

And here, unexpectedly, Eugène’s private education resumed. Levallois abuts rich, leafy Neuilly, where the patisserie supplied a fashionable school, the Collège Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. M. Schueller made a deal with its head: if he made part payment in cakes, he could just afford a place there for his clever son.

It was a life-changing moment—perhaps the most important thing that ever happened to Eugène Schueller. The Collège Sainte-Croix was a feeder school for the elite Lycée Condorcet, and after that the way was open to the highly competitive grandes écoles—the Polytechnique, the Centrale, the Ponts et Chaussées, the École Normale Supérieure, whose graduates run France. He was all set to join the ruling class.

He duly made it to Condorcet, where the family scraped together enough to pay the fees. He discovered a bent for science, took his baccalaureate, and was hoping for the École Polytechnique or the École Centrale when his father was wiped out yet again. This time the family, including the sixteen-year-old Eugène, had to return to Alsace, and the German rule they had earlier rejected. His mother kept a market stall, helped by his aunt, whom Eugène remembered watching as she walked to the market barefoot, carrying baskets of goods weighing ten or fifteen kilos on her head. Eugène was apprenticed to a patissier, and also had to help his mother in the market, which he hated. A gifted publicist, he always loathed the business of face-to-face selling.

He endured this life for a couple of years, and then could bear it no longer. Returning to Paris, he entered the Institute for Applied Chemistry, paying his fees by working nights as a patissier. This was chemistry’s heyday: Mendeleyev had recently formulated the periodic table of the elements, and Marie Curie would soon isolate radium. Eugène graduated top of his class, and Victor Auger, one of his professors, who had become a friend, found him an instructor’s post at the Sorbonne. The way ahead was clear. He would become a research chemist, and, eventually, a professor. Had he continued on this route, his friend Frédéric Joliot-Curie later remarked, he would undoubtedly have made some significant discovery.5

But he found academic life disappointing—“dusty,” as he phrased it.6 The place, he said, felt like a cemetery. No one in France was much interested in science, there weren’t enough materials at the lab—even the gas supply was unreliable. And no one seemed to work. Accustomed from childhood to a punishing schedule, he felt cheated by academe’s comparatively relaxed pace. Why could one not get into the lab before it officially opened? Why did one have to leave when the bell rang? He would climb in and out through the window before and after hours, sometimes starting work at six a.m., sometimes staying on late into the evening—hours his colleagues inexplicably preferred to spend with their friends and families, or even in bed. He soon left for something less lackadaisical, a job at the Pharmacie Centrale de France, the standard manufacturer of chemical products. He remained there for three years, becoming head of the research laboratory and eventually head of the chemical service and secretary to the editorial board of its publication, the Grande Revue Scientifique.

Some of the people he met during this trajectory would remain his friends for life. One was Jacques Sadoul, a friend from Condorcet who later became a Communist, and with whom he would conduct an experimental “free university” before World War I. Another was Fred Joliot, who later became Marie Curie’s son-in-law (and who added the Curie name to his own). Joliot and Schueller met at L’Arcouest, a tiny Breton village where the distinguished Sorbonne historian Charles Seignobos kept a cottage. Around the village, in a scatter of houses and rented rooms, a group of all ages known to all as “Sorbonne-sur-mer”—consisting of professors, their families, and their students—passed happy summers sailing, swimming, and living a quasi-communal existence. “A reporter suddenly finding himself in the midst of the peaceful group would have been overjoyed,” Marie Curie’s daughter, Eve, remembered. “He would have had to take great care not to step on some member of the Institut de France lazily stretched out on the ground, or not to kick a Nobel Prize winner. . . . These customs of children or savages, living half-naked in the water and the wind, were later to become the fashion and to intoxicate all classes from the richest to the poorest. But in those days . . . they aroused the shocked criticisms of the uninitiated. In advance of the fashion . . . we discovered beach life, swimming races, sun-bathing, camping out on deserted islands, the tranquil immodesty of sport.”7

Eugène became part of the group at the invitation of Victor Auger. It was his first introduction to the notion that life, or parts of it, might be spent having fun, and he adored it. Ever after, recreation, for him, meant L’Arcouest and its pastimes. In 1926 he built himself a luxurious house there on a high spit of land that had once been a beautiful orchard. He kept his own yacht, the Edelweiss; Ambre Solaire was invented to counter the sunburn he suffered while sailing it. Sorbonne-sur-mer did not approve. The plot of land had first been noticed, and coveted, by another member of the group, and they found the house pretentious—there was even a colonnade, Fred Joliot remarked with disgust. Worse, he fenced his estate off, something unheard-of.8 Schueller didn’t care. He might love L’Arcouest and its pastimes, but once he became rich, the simple, communal life was not his idea of pleasure.

The breezy outdoor life at L’Arcouest also set a benchmark for an ideal of feminine beauty. The magazine Votre Beauté, which he established in 1933, always included articles on the healthy sporting life, and promoted a tanned and glowing look that related more to fitness and exercise than paint and powder—something rather unusual in the 1930s.

But academic life, even as enjoyed by Sorbonne-sur-mer, was not for him, and in 1905, after only two years as an instructor, he glimpsed a way of escape. A hairdresser came to the Pharmacie Central, offering to pay fifty francs a month to someone who would help him find a safe and reliable artificial hair dye. Schueller eagerly volunteered. A harmless hair dye might not be what Fred Joliot meant by an “important discovery,” but it was an interesting problem. Nobody had tackled it before, because hair dye was, as Schueller put it, “such a small part of the scheme of things.”9 That was to say, it was women’s frippery and therefore of little interest to male chemists. Indeed, they retained this blind spot even after it became clear that fortunes were to be made in the beauty business. In 1935, the Consumer Research book Skin Deep declared, “So far as we have been able to learn, there is no hair dye which is both certainly safe and at the same time effective.”10 In fact, such a hair dye had by then existed for nearly thirty years—but it was available only in France, and no American chemist had concerned himself with this problem.

Schueller discovered that hair dyes were based upon four groups of substances: anilines, silver nitrate, pyrogallic acid, and lead acetate. The first group was the most dangerous. Aniline derivatives are very soluble, going through many intermediate stages before forming the lacquers which give the hair its new color, and some of these derivatives are extremely caustic and may eventually enter the bloodstream, affecting the white cells and giving rise to chemical eczema. Anilines were, nevertheless, the most popular base for hair dyes, because they were easy to prepare. Their dangers were known, but as only 3 to 5 percent of users were adversely affected, they were sold widely. Silver nitrate and lead acetate were less dangerous compounds, though still not altogether safe, but they turned the hair raven-black. “You could see it was artificial a hundred yards away,” Schueller remarked. Such blatant artificiality scandalized people: Eugène’s own mother would point her finger at a neighbor. “She’s using hair dye! And we thought she was a decent woman!” He finished by writing so many articles on the subject for the Grande Revue Scientifique that he eventually made a little book out of them: De l’Innocuité des teintures pour cheveux. (It is not dated, but since among the author’s many listed qualifications—Ingénieur-Chimiste, Diplômé de l’Université de Paris, Ex-préparateur à la Sorbonne, Ex-chef du Laboratoire des Recherches de la Pharmacie Centrale de France—he included “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,” it must have been published after World War I, when he received this decoration.)

The hair-dye job meant working at the hairdresser’s salon in the evenings, from eight till eleven, at the end of an already unimaginably long day. Eugène’s excessive appetite for hard work had not endeared him to his boss at the Institute, and he soon found himself exiled to a factory at Plaine-St.-Denis, out in the northern suburbs. Work there started at 6:30 a.m. There was as yet no Metro. To arrive in time, he had to get up at 4:30 and take a tram. And at the end of the day, the hairdresser’s salon was on the other side of Paris.

It was not long before Eugène fell out with the hairdresser—in one account because the hairdresser took no interest in the work, in another because Eugène wanted to claim all the credit for himself. The probable truth was that Eugène’s acute business antennae sensed the moneymaking potential of this work, and he preferred to pursue it on his own. The hairdresser, too, must have had some notion of a harmless hair dye’s commercial possibilities, else he would not have commissioned the work in the first place. He specialized in hair dyes, and his clients referred to his store of bottles as “the fountain of youth,” a phrase potent enough to start the mental cash-registers ringing loud and clear. He had only employed Eugène because he did not know how to make the new product himself and needed a consultant who did. Unfortunately for him, the consultant fate allotted him happened to be that extreme rarity, a brilliant scientist who was also a business genius, and whose sensitivity to potential moneyspinners, and ability to make them spin money, would turn out to surpass that of almost anyone else in France.

The prospect of working for himself with a definite end in view, and of financial independence should he succeed, suited Eugène far better than dreary academic security. He decided to continue his research on his own account, and resigned from the Pharmacie Centrale. His boss was disbelieving. He was still only twenty-six and was already being paid a special salary, 250 francs a month. How could he give it up, just like that?

It was indeed an excellent salary—so much so that during his three years at the Pharmacie he had managed to save 3,000 francs, enough to support him while he perfected his formulas. The only snag was, he’d lent most of the money to a friend who was not just then in a position to pay it back. He resigned anyway, on 800 francs, the capital remaining to him. The two-room apartment on rue d’Alger cost 400 francs a year, which since he had also to eat and buy materials gave him a little less than two years. The dining room became his office, the bedroom his lab. He lived alone, cooked for himself, and slept in a little camp bed until it was crowded out by laboratory equipment, when he took it up to a vacant storage room. “When I think back to those days, I can’t imagine how I got through them,” he reflected forty years later.

His first product worked well on dead hair in the lab, but proved useless in the salon, on live hair still attached to a sensitive human scalp. He had therefore to begin all over again. But by 1907 he had his formula; all that remained was to sell it.

How he summoned up the courage to go out and find clients he could never afterwards imagine. He was by nature rather shy, and a very bad salesman. But the product was excellent, and he soon got to know Paris’s fifty top hairdressers, who formed a respectable core of clients. He made his products at night, took orders in the morning, and delivered in the afternoons. By 1909, he had the satisfaction, “which I think I deserved,” of making a small profit. There were no margins. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Every bill, whether for raw materials or household necessities, was a nightmare. Nevertheless, L’Oréal was a going concern. On the strength of it he allowed himself to get married, and Mlle. Berthe Doncieux, whom everyone called Betsy, and of whom we know little save that she was musical and liked to play the piano and sing,11 came to share his storage-room bed.

III

In every town, there will be shops where the scalp will simply be massaged with lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids that will prevent hair from turning white in the first place.

—EUGÈNE SCHUELLER, Coiffure de Paris, 1909

Although Eugène Schueller’s public career is amply documented, the private man remains elusive. He makes a few cameo appearances in other people’s memoirs. He gave two short accounts of his life, one in 1948, when he was tried for collaborating with the Germans, another in 1954, to Merry Bromberger. He produced a few treatises on politics and economics, and a good many articles and speeches. But in most of these writings he had one if not both eyes on his own or his country’s future. He always remained committed to L’Oréal, but as the 1930s progressed it became more and more the means to an end—an inexhaustible source of money that would allow him to influence the economic and political scene.

There was little time for private life. The marital bed crowded out by laboratory and office requirements was as much metaphor as reality. And although later he surrounded himself with the trappings of luxury—big houses, a Rolls-Royce, specially commissioned furniture—his lifestyle remained ascetic. If you work, as he did, from five in the morning until nine at night, there is little time left for anything else.

We can glimpse his progress in a magazine called Coiffure de Paris, whose first issue, in October 1909, declared that it was “distributed free to Wholesale Buyers and to principal Practitioners in the Five Corners of the World.” A double-page photo-spread of founders’ portraits showed a cluster of well-set-up gentlemen of a certain age, with neat gray beards. In this portly and expansive company, E. Schueller, listed as one of the magazine’s “independent corporate publicists,” was noticeable for his youth and his abundant black, curly locks. Confined to the bottom right-hand corner of the page, he was seemingly a sort of afterthought. But this placement was deceptive. He was one of the magazine’s moving spirits. A hairdresser of his acquaintance had started it at the suggestion of a journalist, and co-opted Schueller because of his experience editing the Grande Revue Scientifique. Always publicity-hungry, he saw in it an excellent potential vehicle for his advertisements: L’Oréal occupied the whole of the back page, the space purchased at a cheap contributor’s rate. Before long, in a foretaste of events to come, he had taken the magazine over entirely and become its proprietor, editor, manager, and publicist.

Coiffure de Paris, when it began, was largely about the now lost world of the postiche, the false hair piece every fashionable woman needed to achieve the bouffant hairstyles then in vogue (such as the one called “L’Auréole,” the original inspiration for the new hair dye’s name), necessary to support the vast hats of the period. Much of this hair came from Asia, though some was also harvested in the depths of la France profonde. A tragic photo in the magazine’s first issue, “Cutting Hair in the Corrèze,” showed one of the avuncular gents from the frontispiece, a large pair of scissors in one hand, triumphantly holding on high a thick mane of locks. Its erstwhile owner, shown in back view, sat crudely shorn on a bench, while to the right of the picture a second girl, still in possession of her hair, but about to lose it, and on the verge of tears, was being pushed forward by a grim-faced maman, intent on driving a hard bargain. But these were mere peasants, whose hair was wasted upon the Corrèze. Paris was its true home, where in studios such as “Postiches d’Art” “a buzzing hive of posticheuses” washed, colored, and otherwise prepared the raw material.

The art of the postiche consisted in blending it undetectably with the wearer’s own hair—a complex and time-consuming business almost impossible to achieve at home. It had largely contributed to the spread of commercial hairdressing salons, as need overcame the traditional distrust of that immoral figure, the male hairdresser. And of course satisfactory matching necessitated a wide range of hair dyes.

Amid the magazine’s fashionable hyperbole—“This season, big hats mean big hair”—the title of E. Schueller’s article, “Practical Techniques for Dyeing Hair,” struck a strictly down-to-earth note. Every month he supplied a piece on dyeing techniques and dangers, as well as answering readers’ questions. How, for example, should one deal with accidents that left hair green or purple? “This happens because you don’t know about hair dye, as you prove when you say ‘I tried in vain to dye it again.’ That’s just what you mustn’t do. When hair turns green, you don’t dye it again, you remove the dye that’s already there. What you’re doing isn’t colouring, it’s interior decorating—applying coats of plaster.”

Schueller’s dynamism soon put him in charge of Coiffure de Paris. And that same year, 1909, L’Oréal, too, was financially transformed. One of Eugène’s cousins gave him an introduction to an accountant by the name of Sperry who worked for the liqueur firm Cusenier in Epernay. Sperry had just come into a small inheritance of 25,000 francs which he was looking to invest. Impressed by Schueller’s evident intelligence and excited certainty, he agreed to set up a joint venture, Schueller et Sperry. He insisted, however, on a special safety clause. At the end of each year Sperry was entitled to withdraw if he chose, and if he did, Schueller would repay his 25,000 francs. The clause was never invoked. On the contrary, when Sperry became ill some years later and had to retire, Schueller, grateful for the the help Sperry had given him when he needed it, suspended it and paid Sperry’s full share of the annual profits (by then exceeding 25,000 francs) every year until he died.

This injection of funds allowed Schueller to set himself up more sustainably. He hired a delivery boy and splurged on some advertising. His first account books showed expenditures of 49 francs on salaries, 28 fr. 25c on publicity.12 And he and his wife, Berthe, moved from their cramped quarters in rue d’Alger to a four-room apartment at 7bis rue du Louvre, at the eastern end of rue Saint-Honoré. As at rue d’Alger, this apartment housed not only living quarters but the firm’s office, laboratory, and showroom. And as at rue d’Alger, the business expanded and expanded, until the Schuellers found themselves sleeping, as before, in a vacant maid’s room at the top of the house.

For many years they remained childless. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. At first there was literally no room for children. And then war broke out, and Schueller enlisted. Whether by accident or design, it was not until 1922 that their only child, a daughter, Liliane, was born. Schueller was by then forty-one, and Berthe cannot have been a great deal younger. They had been married fourteen years; she did not become pregnant again. There are hints that this was not for want of trying. In the plan for an ideal world he set out in 1939, he insisted that women should marry young and conceive early, since after the age of twenty-five “children are conceived and born only with the greatest difficulty.”13

The war interrupted the hair-dye business, along with everything else. Schueller was overage, and at first the army refused to take him. Later it agreed to admit him as a chemist, but he turned that down and was eventually inducted into the 31st Artillery at Le Mans, leaving L’Oréal in the hands of his wife. At the front he acted as a liaison officer, with spectacular success. The citations for his various decorations describe him as careless of personal danger, quick to grasp what was relevant, and precise in conveying necessary detail.14 He was mentioned in dispatches at Verdun, the Aisne, the Chemin des Dames; in all, there were five citations. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in the trenches, and by the time he was demobilized, in 1919, he was a lieutenant of artillery and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre with several palms. He enjoyed the army’s adventurous life, and its lessons in organization were useful to him later in business.

He returned to find that Berthe had done an excellent job of managing the business. L’Oréal was flourishing, and the rue du Louvre apartment was now far too small. They moved once again, just around the corner, to rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, taking an entire floor at an annual rental of 16,000 francs—four times what they had previously been paying—and soon needed an additional floor for offices. Before long, revenue was running at 300,000 francs a month, and a large proportion of that was profit.

It all seemed too easy, and Schueller began to get bored. He diverted himself by embarking upon a voyage of industrial exploration, progressing from industry to industry as one led to another.

The first move arose through his prewar activities at Coiffure de Paris. In search of advertising, he had met some manufacturers of celluloid combs. The war, with its demand for nitrocellulose explosives, meant a large development of their chemical division. They asked Schueller if he might be interested in helping them expand it, and how much money he would want for doing so. He explained that money was not his principal concern—he was already making plenty of that. What did interest him was how big they expected the business to become. They would be happy, they replied, with a million francs a year profits. By the end of the first year, the profits stood at 4 million francs, of which Schueller was entitled to one-quarter. Five years later, he had become the company’s principal shareholder.

At the same time he started a new company, Plavic Film, which took control of the Lumière film-manufacturing company of Lyon (run by Auguste Lumière, one of the two brothers who in 1895 had made the first true motion picture). Plavic manufactured movie and still photographic film. He bought into another company that made Bakelite, and yet another making cellulose acetate and artificial silk.

At this point, huge orders for celluloid began to arrive from Russia. Schueller had recently renewed acquaintance with Jacques Sadoul, his boyhood friend from the Lycée Condorcet. Capitaine Sadoul had been sent to Moscow in 1917 as part of a French military mission intended to make sure Russia remained on the Allied side. Excited by what he saw, he declared himself a Communist and declined to return to France. Having worked in various capacities for the Bolsheviks, he now returned to find that he had been accused of treason and sentenced to death in absentia, and took shelter with Schueller while gathering courage to give himself up. In the event, the charges were dropped. Sadoul returned to thank his old friend and, incidentally, put him in the Russian picture. The Russians, Sadoul said, were granting concessions to foreign businessmen to set up new industries in the U.S.S.R. Schueller, he insisted, should get himself in there.

The upshot was a concession to make celluloid and also photographic film stock. In reality this boiled down to a comb factory. But in 1928, Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy), which had allowed small businesses to operate for private profit in an effort to rebuild Russian industry, was abandoned by Stalin in favor of a collectivization program of five-year plans, and the Russians bought Schueller out.

Meanwhile, in 1927, he became interested in the manufacture of cellulose paints, which shared many laboratory processes with celluloid, and was soon managing director of a paint firm, Valentine. As he put it, however, “it wasn’t enough to manufacture paint—we also had to sell it”15; so he went to see André Citroën, whose company was the world’s fourth-largest automobile manufacturer. Citroën gave him a contract for 23 million francs; there were also valuable contracts with Renault and Peugeot. But this arrangement, though lucrative, left the company at the mercy of just a few clients. Schueller decided to branch out and sell his quick-drying paints to the public—by radio.

Radio advertising was new. It had hit France courtesy of the young advertising genius Marcel Bleustein, who recognized its potential during a year’s stay in America. Returning to Paris in 1926 at the age of nineteen, he opened his own advertising agency, Publicis. By Christmas of 1927, he had his first client, and in 1935 bought a private station, Radio LL, which he rechristened Radio Cité. It was the first station in France to broadcast uninterrupted from six a.m. till midnight, with talent contests, news reporting, singing stars such as Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf—and commercials interspersed amid the programming. Schueller persuaded Bleustein to let him advertise with a sung jingle, in the style of Maurice Chevalier:

Elle se vend en tout petits bidons,

Valentine, Valentine,

Elle se fait dans les plus jolis tons,

Valentine, Valentine. . .

(It’s sold in little cans, / Valentine, Valentine, / And in such pretty tones, / Valentine, Valentine . . .)

At first Bleustein was reluctant—perhaps because he hadn’t thought of this idea himself. But Schueller won him over, and the advertising jingle hit France.

After a while, Schueller decided to exchange his shares in plastic and celluloid for his partners’ shares in Valentine, leaving him with just two business interests—Valentine and L’Oréal. But this comparative calm did not last long.

In 1928, following his Russian adventure, Schueller had got involved with yet another business: a brand of soap called Monsavon, created just after World War I by a M. Wisner. The brothers Henri and Philippe de Rothschild were persuaded to put 18 and 20 million francs, respectively, into the business, lost the lot, and wanted out. They were prepared to sell cheaply. Schueller bought it from them for nothing, paying only for existing stocks and such money as remained in the bank.

Monsavon went on losing money. It wasn’t a bad product, but brands like Palmolive and Cadum were much better known—so much so that shoppers, especially in rural areas, would request “a cadum of Monsavon.”16 Schueller was losing 300,000 francs a month. He sold his cars and mortgaged the two houses he now owned, at L’Arcouest and at Franconville, just outside Paris.

With Valentine and L’Oréal both flourishing, the obvious answer was to cut his losses and close Monsavon down. But acknowledging defeat was something he could not bring himself to do. Business, for him, meant risk. “Difficult problems like Monsavon interest me more than easy successes,” he said at the end of his life. “It’s the way I’m made. . . . You can’t argue with the way you’re made.”17 He reduced production: the monthly loss fell to 30,000 francs, a level he could bear. He reformulated the product, reorganized the factory, publicized the improvements in the papers. Sales still did not rise.

The problem Schueller faced was the problem all cosmetics and toiletry manufacturers face—that their products are almost indistinguishable, and that brand loyalty must somehow be engineered despite this. Publicity is therefore all important. As Helena Rubinstein observed, “There’s nothing like a clever stunt to get something off the ground.” Her favorite campaign was the one for the fragrance “Heaven Sent,” when in the late 1940s thousands of pale-blue balloons were released over Fifth Avenue, each one bearing a sample of the fragrance, with the tag: “A gift for you from heaven! Helena Rubinstein’s new ‘Heaven Sent.’ ”

Schueller, too, realized that he needed a really huge publicity campaign. He returned to Bleustein and Radio Cité, and this time he did not confine himself to mere jingles, but bought an entire program, the extremely popular Crochet Radiophonique, which he interspersed with catchy advertisements for Monsavon and sponsored singing contests, broadcast live from different locations. For six months nothing happened. Then sales suddenly took off. Monsavon took and retained first place in soap sales. Schueller was vindicated.

Sales of L’Oréal also rose during the 1920s, not because of any advertising campaign but because of a new hairstyle: the bob. The fashion for short hair began during World War I, when many women took jobs in factories. The popular film stars Clara Bow and Louise Brooks were famously bobbed, as was Coco Chanel, the up-and-coming fashion designer, who cut her hair off after singeing it one day. Just as Chanel’s straight, comfortable clothes meant the end of corsets, padding, and petticoats, so her new short hair did away with laborious, long-drawn-out hair-washing and -drying sessions. Women everywhere began to cut their hair. Like lipstick a few years earlier, the bob became the symbol of a new freedom and independence. Men were horrified. “A bobbed woman is a disgraced woman!” thundered one in outrage. “ . . . How strangely ill at ease our poor shorn sisters would have been had they been present in the Bethany home that day!”18

Schueller, too, was gloomy—not because of possible troubles in Bethany, but because L’Oréal’s sales had always been predicated on women having lots of hair to dye. He anticipated a catastrophic drop in demand. He could not have been more wrong. Short hair needs frequent cutting, and only men’s barbers had the appropriate skills. Faced with a female invasion, they were hesitant at first, but soon reinvented themselves as hairdressing salons, and flourished as never before. “Before the bob became the accepted style, there were less than 11,000 beauty shops in America. . . . Today there are more than 40,000 beauty shops in operation in America alone,” wrote hairdresser George E. Darling in 1928.19 And more hairdressers meant more hair-dyeing outlets.

Short hair did, however, present some difficulties when it came to coloring. The bob was about modernity, and hence youth: a gray bob looked anomalous. But a large proportion of short hair consists of roots, so that any coloring must be frequently retouched. And this meant frequent dyeing sessions, which were bad both for the hair and the pocket.

One easy answer was to bleach. Schueller set to work and produced L’Oréal Blanc. It quickly became the rage. Advertisements throughout Europe and America were overtaken by a blond invasion. He soon occupied the whole building in rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and opened, too, his first proper factory, in rue Clavel, out in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. In 1929, for the first time, L’Oréal achieved revenues of more than a million francs a month.

Almost at once another problem presented itself: the permanent wave, or as it was more usually known, the “perm.” The difficulty this time was that perms do not take on dyed hair if the dye forms an impermeable colored film on the outside of the hairs, as L’Oréal’s existing dyes did. Permed hair needed a dye that would penetrate the hairs and color them from the inside. Some new British and American dyes did this, and threatened to sweep the market.

Schueller had in fact discovered and patented just such a dye during his early researches, in 1907. But he had never used it. As with the penetrating dyes his competitors were selling, its active ingredient was paraphenylenediamine. “Para” had a fatal flaw: as Skin Deep would reveal, some people were allergic to it. If they used it they would suffer from an itchy, flaky scalp, or in the worst cases a facial rash and swelling of the eyelids, face, and neck. Urged now by his colleagues to resuscitate this dye, Schueller hesitated. L’Oréal’s reputation was built on its not provoking allergic reactions. “If one client starts to scratch, there go twenty years of confidence!” he objected. But without the new formula, sales would continue to fall.

Schueller decided the only remedy—and the only way to outflank his competitors—was to be frank. The new dye, called “Imédia,” was launched with a warning: it might be dangerous. New users were advised to dab a drop behind an ear and wait forty-eight hours. If an inflammation appeared, the dye should not be used. At the same time he advised that should an allergic reaction declare itself, there was an antidote: a rinse of brine mixed with oxygenated water, which would remove the offending substance. The policy worked, and sales jumped.

By the mid-1930s, L’Oréal employed three hundred salesmen where once it had employed ten, and the company decamped once again, to the imposing building in rue Royale that remains its headquarters to this day. Like all L’Oréal’s successive headquarters, as it outgrew one building after another, this building, too, was just a few steps from rue d’Alger. But by this time both L’Oréal and its founder had moved, definitively, into the other, brilliant world—the world of rue Saint-Honoré that in 1908, though physically close, had been at the same time so immeasurably distant.

IV

What I always tried to do, in dealing with people, was to provide them with something they seemed cruelly to lack: a goal in life.

—EUGÈNE SCHUELLER, 1957 20

Like Helena Rubinstein’s endless scurryings from one side of the world to the other, Eugène Schueller’s zigzag path from industry to industry bore the mark of compulsion. They had to keep moving or they were lost. But these compulsions had diametrically opposite roots.

Rubinstein’s career was chaotic, a progression of brilliantly executed extempore sallies. Just as her business was an extension of herself, peopled by the sisters, cousins, nephews, and nieces who were her pale imitations, so her constant journeyings reflected her emotional life. They might go under the name of business necessity, but the essence of Madame was that business and emotion were not separable. Every crisis—the row with her father when she turned down his choice of husband and left his house forever, Edward Titus’s insistent desire that she marry him, the arrival of children, the outbreak of World War I, the sale of her American business to Lehman Brothers, the outbreak of World War II—was marked by physical flight, to another country, another continent, another beginning. Stuff happened, and she dealt with it somehow, and because she was clever and thought nothing of the world’s opinion, simply following her instincts, which rarely led her astray, things turned out all right. And then there was more stuff, and she dealt with that. She ran on adrenaline: her chaotic, compulsive letters to Rosa Hollay, in which the worry of the moment was scribbled down whenever it might occur on whatever scrap of paper lay to hand, reveal the constant, jumbled panic beneath her assured exterior. “I haven’t paid any bills the last three weeks, let me know again what must and should be paid now. I am frightfully short of money, it seems worse and worse. . . . I often don’t know if I am on my feet or my head.” “I am in such chaos, I am most thankful to have good constitution all the same I feel at times I will go mad, the worry and the responsibility is just eating me up. . . .” “I do actually nothing and work all the time.”21 However successful, however mountainously rich, hers was life as crisis management. “I have too much on my shoulders. I’m surrounded with people, but I can’t get to them. . . . People . . . people . . . and I’m alone! With burdens . . . such burdens!” she told Patrick O’Higgins the day she offered him the indeterminate job that would keep him by her side for the rest of her life.22

Schueller, by contrast, was in control. In the world, as in the laboratory, he knew what he wanted to achieve and methodically set about achieving it. He was a scientist, and therefore saw the universe as a place of logic and patterns. Human life was no exception: without a pattern, all was chaos. Having abandoned the Catholic faith of his childhood, he spent the rest of his life constructing a substitute for it, a framework within which a modern industrial state might function fairly and efficiently for the benefit of its citizens.

This fascination with possible worlds surfaced in some unexpected places. The opening paragraphs of his earliest contribution to Coiffure de Paris, the October 1909 essay on “Technical and Practical Hints on Hair Dyes,” plunged its readers into a world of scientific fantasy.

In four or five years from now, our bicycles will have become monoplanes weighing a hundred kilos, which will carry one or two people, and on which it will be possible to travel from here [Schueller evidently assumed all his readers lived in Paris] to Orléans in an hour.

When that happens, there will probably be no more hair dyers. That delicate, difficult, and sometimes even dangerous profession will exist only in a few lost villages in Morocco or Calabria. Nor will there be any more dyeing of white hair. Instead, in every town, there will be shops where the scalp will simply be massaged with lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids that will prevent hair from turning white in the first place.

Eagerly, Schueller outlined the chemistry by which this future would be achieved. The magic liquids would be “dilute solutions, in alcohol, tafia, or rum, of some di- or tri-ethylaminoparoxybenzene which will recolor any hair, whatever its original color, that will be harmless and that everyone will use each morning, like powder or toothpaste, but”—a bow here to the readers of Coiffure de Paris—“which many will prefer to have applied by a hair artist—the successor of today’s hairdressers.” Another miraculous invention would abolish the barbershop: men would simply rub their faces with an oil that stopped the hairs from growing.23

Here is the authentic voice of the times, of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Like them, Schueller was enraptured by the new worlds science was opening up, convinced that it would transform the future in unimaginable ways, and eager to share this vision with a wondering public. There was, of course, an important difference between them and him. Where Verne, Lang, and Wells expressed themselves through stories, Schueller aimed to work his transformations in reality. But whatever its medium, one significant corollary of Schueller’s visionary mind-set, with its scientifically argued blueprints for ideal worlds, was a deep impatience with the retrogressive dullards who refused to act on these excellent ideas. And this impatience would point the way to dark places.

Schueller was always conscious that had he not received the kind of education rarely available to bakers’ sons, he would probably, despite all his abilities, have remained poor. He was aware, too, that that education had been largely a question of luck. Despite his parents’ desire to give their son the best possible start in life, he would have had to make do with whatever the state could then provide had not the Collège Sainte-Croix, in an unusual access of imagination, accepted part payment of his school fees in pastries. He therefore directed his first social efforts towards education. He felt it was time to end the self-perpetuating mandarinate of the supercompetitive and expensive grandes écoles that excluded so much talent even when—as in his own case—a poor boy had demonstrated unusual intellectual potential. Intelligent working-class men seemed to him particularly disabled by their lack of math and science education,24 and he wanted to remedy this personally, so far as he could. Before they were even twenty, he and his friend Jacques Sadoul, who shared his concerns, had founded a modest people’s university at La Chapelle, a poor area to the north of Paris, where they taught in their free time.25

Soon enough, of course, there was no more free time, at least for Schueller, and the teaching lapsed. But despite his increasingly frenetic level of activity, first with L’Oréal, then in the army during World War I, then during his headlong progress through assorted chemical industries during the 1920s and thirties, his concern with the unsatisfactory state of the world, like Sadoul’s, continued. Sadoul turned to communism and took refuge in the nascent Soviet Union; Schueller, the self-made man, set about designing a new, improved capitalism.

His sense that the old model was failing crystallized during the 1920s. In 1923, at the height of the great inflation, he made a trip to Germany, where L’Oréal had opened an agency, and “felt, for the first time, that the world had veered off-track.” Three years later, in France, it veered off again, almost as catastrophically, though in the opposite direction, as the franc was revalued. “Factories full of orders were going day and night . . . and suddenly, customers stopped ordering. A month later they wouldn’t even take delivery of stuff that was already in the pipeline, and I had to close two out of three factories.”26

One day he realized that with modern machines he could double production using only half his existing workforce. But if only half the previous number of workers were earning salaries, who would be there to buy the goods? Then he had a revelation. If salaries were doubled along with production, there would still be buyers. “Capitalists had to realize that they should stop lowering prices while trying to maintain their profits by cutting salaries too. On the contrary, what they needed to do was not lower prices but raise salaries—not in an unplanned way, as when workers demanded and threatened [and employers gave in]—but mathematically, raising them as production increased. The trick was to raise buying power, not lower prices. Lowering prices would never absorb overproduction, because it was impossible ever to lower them enough.”27

Over the next few years Schueller worked out his economic theories. He first expounded them in a speech to old Sainte-Croix pupils in 1934, later published as an article in the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly magazine. The article created such a stir that he was encouraged to spread the word wider, which he did at two meetings of industrialists. Later, in 1936, he published a journal, L’Action patronale, in which employers were exhorted to social reform. Finally he set out his programs in two books, Le Deuxième salaire (The Second Salary), written in 1938 and published in 1939, and La Révolution de l’économie, published in 1941.

What was needed, he was convinced, was a new formula for paying workers. They would receive their salaries as usual at the end of each month—but this basic pay would not be their only pay. In his own industry, he reckoned that salaries should amount to 30 percent of the product’s factory-gate selling price. If, at the end of the month, 30 percent of total receipts amounted to more than the total of the workers’ agreed-upon basic salaries, the difference would be paid out to the workers, apportioned according to their individual work records. Thus: the “second salary.”28

This system would have several advantages, of which the first and most important was that workers, instead of spending the day watching the clock, would work hard because they would benefit personally if the business flourished. He himself, Schueller said, had spent a good deal of his youth performing boring manual tasks, and recognized that the reason this had never bothered him was because, unlike most workers, he had always, even when he was very young, been working for his own benefit rather than an employer’s. Of course, few young men were as driven as he had been. Nevertheless, the second salary would make every worker a stakeholder in his own factory.

It would also, Schueller thought, solve the problem of impersonality, which inevitably increased as the business grew larger. While his own business had still been small, he had worked alongside his employees and transmitted his own enthusiasm to them. But when it grew larger, and personal contacts became rarer, he saw that most workers had no real interest in their job. It was then, he wrote, “that the problem of restoring some sense to the life of the men who worked in my businesses began to obsess me.”29

These theories, dismissed by contemporaries as “Schueller’s dada” (Schueller’s hobbyhorse) were in fact extremely forward-looking. As he realized, in a recession nothing is more fatal than the deflationary spiral of ever-reduced prices, jobs, and wages. It was this problem he sought to tackle.

Schueller knew the second salary worked: he used the system in his own factories, and they, as everyone could see, flourished.2 Others of his ideas—social security for the unemployed paid for through an automatically deducted national insurance (revolutionary, he admitted, “but we live in revolutionary times”30); a united Europe in which the mark and the franc would be one monetary unity in a European economy31—are now part of everyday life. In economics he was a visionary, and a benign one.

He did not stop at economics, however. Having lighted upon an idea that he felt would save the world, he felt impelled to design the world he would save. And that was altogether more problematic. For the second salary did not take the form of a simple monthly addition to the paycheck. Rather, it went to workers’ wives and children, to the retired, the ill and the unemployed, in the form of grants. Only after these grants had permitted the wives, children, and old to live “properly” were surpluses passed on to the workers themselves, as bonuses.32 But who was to define “properly”?

Not the workers, that was for sure. Schueller did not believe in consultation. To run an enterprise jointly was, he felt, “humanly impossible.”33 He saw egalitarianism, “the determination not to recognize any superiority, and never to admit the truth,” as a sort of social gangrene. Trade unions and work councils were destructive rather than constructive; the noisiest propagandists always got elected, and then had to justify their election by making unreasonable demands. Concerned only with their short-term interests, they were part of the company, but not for it.34 Everything about workers’ lives precluded the visionary detachment essential if those lives were to be improved.

Schueller, on the other hand, felt himself uniquely well placed in this respect. France in the first half of the twentieth century was a very static society, and his rise from poverty to wealth and power had given him an unusually broad view of it. His scientific training and industrial experience meant that he had a wide personal experience of design, production, and publicity. Through his factories, he remained intimately acquainted with how the poor lived, and he devoted much of his business life to teaching them better habits, in the form of cleanliness. For him, advertising was not just a way to raise sales but a tool for improving people’s living standards. “People are lazy,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “You have to push them to spend, to consume—to move on. When I advertise . . . I feel I’m working in the public interest, not just for myself.”35

This evangelistic inclination was also evident in Votre Beauté, the magazine he published monthly. His original magazine, Coiffure de Paris, had become, by the 1920s, Le Coiffure et la mode. But despite carrying its articles in English, Spanish, and German, presumably to increase international sales, this was still of very limited interest compared to the general-interest women’s magazines he saw on visits to England. So in 1933 Le Coiffure et la mode became Votre Beauté, complete with readers’ letters seeking help for confidential problems (one of its most important sources of copy), as well as the latest from the couturiers, interviews with prominent society women and actresses, and assorted beauty hints. The result was a much wider readership and advertising base.

Although Schueller’s name did not appear above any of the articles, he wrote a great deal of Votre Beauté himself. And this gave it a particular flavor. In similar American and British magazines, beauty hints meant discussions of cosmetics, creams, and the best ways to apply them. But such things had little place in Schueller’s world: he neither made nor used them. Instead, French women were exhorted to make themselves beautiful through strict routines of diet and exercise. From thinness and fitness, all else followed. “Do marrons glacés put on weight?” enquired “Rose d’Orléans” in the first selection of readers’ letters. “Yes!” came the uncompromising answer—followed by a calorie breakdown showing that a single marron put you 100 calories to the bad (the recommended daily intake being no more than a meager 1,500 calories all told3).36 Many readers wanted to grow taller: they were advised to stand up straight—and, above all, to exercise. “It is a crime,” thundered an editorial in January 1934, “not to make the most of such an easy and pleasant way of improving your physique, keeping young, and prolonging your life!” Pages of detailed drawings and photographs introduced readers to winter sports (their skins protected, of course, by L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire), and every issue contained a new, health-giving diet. When Colette, whose love of good food was legendary and who in later life had become very plump, wrote a piece in her journal saying fat women were happier than thin ones, Votre Beauté’s disapproval was almost hysterical. “Colette, dear, wonderful Colette, we all know you’re too fond of food. . . . But, for heaven’s sake, don’t try and make converts. . . . Go to all the banquets in the world, but don’t put your genius at the service of big bottoms and fat thighs!”37

In particular (a clue, here, as to the editor’s particular predilection?) women were exhorted to take care of their breasts. How to stop them sagging? (Exercises.) How to prevent them getting too large? (Stimulate ovarian activity as soon as puberty sets in, as sluggish ovaries lead to oversize breasts.) How to make them bigger? (Exercise.) Every issue contained a page of before and after photographs, in which nipples, following the recommended treatment, migrated upwards as if by magic; every month Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a well-known pundit and “the uncontested master of sexology,” recommended his special hormone treatment (also with before and after photographs). A despairing reader, writing in to ask if she should undergo breast reduction surgery, was, however, recommended not to do so immediately. Big breasts weren’t necessarily a complete barrier to attraction; she shouldn’t give up hope, and she should remember that surgery left scars.

Economics, health, beauty—who better than such a universally qualified man to propound the basic principles of utopia? The 1930s in France was a time of intense theorizing on both the left and the right, and everyone was eager to set out his own plan for national renewal. Schueller was no exception. In his book Le Deuxième salaire, published in 1939, he described his ideal world. To begin with, every family would have a house, ideally one designed by Schueller himself. In 1929 the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller had designed a house made of aluminum with premolded pipework, kitchen, and bathroom, and intended for low-cost mass production, that he called the Dymaxion House. Schueller made no mention of Fuller in his writings, but his own design incorporated many Dymaxion-type features—aluminum construction, industrial prefabrication, molded bathrooms. The Schueller house was prefabricated along the lines of an aircraft hangar, its triple-skinned aluminum frame providing heat and sound insulation, and its ogival shape giving a lofty sense of space. It was built from modules 85 centimeters long, 6 meters wide, and 5 meters high: house sizes would vary depending on the number of modules used. Large windows and skylights would make for light, airy spaces. Modern domestic necessities would be built in: piped water, washing machines, ironing machines, fridges, radios. The furniture would be of the latest wonder material, Bakelite, and designed by the best designers (Schueller was a connoisseur of fine furniture, commissioning his own from the great Art Deco designer Ruhlmann, whose clients also included Baron Henri de Rothschild, from whom he had bought Monsavon). Schueller’s suburbs would be spacious and green, with widely spaced dwellings set among intensively cultivated vegetable gardens, along the lines of William Morris’s 1890 utopian News from Nowhere, which advocated a bucolic lifestyle in harmony with the natural world.4 Transport would consist of small family cars with an average ten-year life span. People would wear modern fabrics, crease-resistant and stretchy. Only young, strong men would work in industry, traveling to work in car pools. Women would stay home, devoting their lives to their families. Every working man, in Schueller’s view, needed a wife waiting for him at home. Especially when work was scarce, he thought women had a duty not to compete with men: they should resign their jobs and look after their many children. “A home, for a man, means a wife at home, and if every member of the family over fourteen has to work for a living, it isn’t a real home.”38 Older men would cultivate the gardens, and help the women with household tasks and crafts. Artists and craftsmen were also accommodated in this worldview, their artifacts adding to the pleasure of life.

Under Schueller’s system, poverty would be eliminated. So, too, would enormous wealth. Schueller admitted that getting rich was a not insignificant motivation in business, but in the end “we all have the same pen, the same telephone, the same radio, we’ll all have more or less the same fridge, the same car, the same mattress, the same sheets—and anyway,” he grumbled, like Helena Rubinstein indignant that such a large proportion of his rightful earnings should be confiscated by an ungrateful state, “there’s not much left once you’ve paid your taxes.”39 Running a business was, rather, about reinvestment and development, and he had definite ideas about that.

First, it was important that employers personally own their concerns. They must be allowed to take risks and go broke from time to time—for Schueller, risk-taking was what being a successful industrialist was all about—and shareholders would always vote for income over investment, rejecting risk on the pretext that “it all works fine as it is.” (L’Oréal remained a private company throughout its founder’s lifetime, going public only in 1963, six years after Schueller’s death.) Banks’ money was especially to be avoided, since banks were particularly risk-averse.5 So were those who owned a business through inheritance. Schueller thoroughly disapproved of businesses being inherited. The fact that so many of France’s businesses were dynastic was, he thought, a great weakness. Not only did it entrench social immobility, it had left the country economically underdeveloped—to the point, indeed, where even Schueller felt France’s most important resource was her land;6 her industries relied for survival on tariffs and cartels.

Above all, Schueller felt that being an employer was about social responsibility. He offered his own experience as an example of the kind of management vision needed. In 1936, he had mechanized one of his factories, and two years later production had risen 34 percent, using 11 percent less in the way of manpower. Each sacked worker represented 12 francs a day saved, but 15 percent of those let go were unable to find another job, and to those he continued to pay 10 francs a day out of this saving. He also paid monthly supplements to his workers’ families, 100 francs for the first child, 50 francs for the second, 200 francs to mothers who stayed home rather than going out to work. Motherhood was a social service: big families were essential if France was to be repopulated following the carnage of World War I.40 He hoped such practices would become widespread. All that was needed to achieve the revolution was a handful of strong-minded men like himself. If they persevered, they would prevail.

To connoisseurs of twentieth-century self-made men, all this will sound oddly familiar. A dynamic employer who rises from poverty to create a new industry through his own outstanding technical and commercial abilities, and who then uses part of his profits to create a kind of self-contained mini-state in which to impose his idea of how things should be—such a man already, and famously, existed. Schueller’s trajectory, so rare in France, would have raised no eyebrows in America. And his hero was indeed American—the automobile magnate Henry Ford. Ford, like Schueller, directed some of his profits into social services—housing, schooling, hospitals—for the families of his workers. Like Schueller, he was concerned that these subventions should be used properly—that is, used as Ford thought best. Like Schueller he was a political idealist, the idealism, in his case, taking the form of pacifism. (In 1915, his Peace Ship initiative tried vainly to bring World War I to an end.) And, like Schueller, he had an economic dada—in Ford’s case, the five-dollar day, his aim being to ensure that every one of his workers could afford to buy one of his cars.

When Ford instituted the five-dollar day in 1914, it seemed like an act of reckless generosity. In fact it paid for itself handsomely as higher wages led to better health and morale, and hence increased production. But it was not, in practice, as straightforward as it sounded. You could earn five dollars a day, if you worked uncomplainingly on the production lines Ford had built and led the kind of life he thought you should lead: not smoking or drinking (Ford did neither), and putting some of your money into savings. Ford created a Sociological Department to educate and inspect his workers, and decide how much each man should be awarded. You didn’t have to be a respectably married nonsmoking teetotaller to work at Ford’s. But you wouldn’t earn five dollars a day unless you were, any more than Schueller’s workers would see their share of profits until their families were certified as living “properly.”

Schueller was a great admirer of Ford, and his economic and social theories were heavily influenced by Fordism.41 And Fordism led to a particular kind of politics. Unlike most businessmen, whose interest in their workers ceased once they had left the plant, Ford and Schueller’s form of extended paternalism effectively turned their businesses into mini–welfare states. And in the chaotic world of the 1920s and thirties, it seemed logical that what worked for their businesses might also work in the wider political arena.

Ford first dipped his toes into political waters in 1918. He ran for the United States Senate, as a Democrat, but was defeated in a viciously corrupt campaign. In 1923 there was talk of drafting him to run for president. But he hated public speaking so much, and was so bad at it, that after his one and only failed attempt at a political rally, he determined never again to risk a comparable humiliation. “I can hire someone to talk for me that knows how,” he said. “That talking thing is a gift. I’m glad I never acquired it, and I’ll never try again.”42 Nor did he need to. Why humiliate himself at the hustings when he could practice his theories upon a captive audience and a captive population?

Untrammeled by the need to accommodate public opinion, what had begun as a benign dictatorship soon changed into something altogether unpleasant. Ford’s Sociological Department, begun in a genuine spirit of philanthropy, was after a few years replaced by a Service Department, which sounded equally altruistic but whose function was very different. Set up to coordinate the protection of the plant, the Service Department soon transmuted into a network of spies, informers, and enforcers who terrorized the Ford factories and suppressed all dissent. Labor organizers were beaten, strikes were broken brutally, protesters were sacked: one ex-member of the Service Department referred to it as “our Gestapo.”743 Indeed, Hitler was a fervent admirer of Ford. Mein Kampf was written with Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Times, and philosophy—“an absence of fear of the future and of veneration of the past”—much in mind.8

Schueller, too, was an unashamed authoritarian: as he put it, “An elected leader is already less of a leader.” 44 He thought democracy should mean government for all, but not by all. Running a modern state was too difficult to be left to anyone the masses might choose.45 However, when it came down to picking actual men, he showed himself to be somewhat uncertain. The list of leaders he admired included Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Horthy, Atatürk, Pilsudski, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, and Daladier—that is, pretty much every available one, elected or otherwise. From which we can only conclude that the mere fact of making it to the top was evidence, as far as he was concerned, of the right stuff. Similarly, although he did not at this stage think France should ally herself with Germany—on the contrary, his great concern was the unpreparedness of the French army—as a committed authoritarian he could not help admiring Hitler’s style. Hitler hadn’t pandered to the trade unions with a New Deal like Roosevelt in the United States, or with a forty-hour week and unemployment pay like Léon Blum in France. Instead, he had taken all the men he could get hold of and put them to work, creating a formidable military power. France, Schueller felt, should do likewise. Nevertheless, despite his dislike and distrust of the unions (a dislike wholeheartedly reciprocated), he continued to employ union men, and did not persecute them as Ford did.

Of course Schueller and Ford were not alone in being attracted by the idea of dictatorship. They were probably unique, outside the ranks of politicians, in actually running, to a greater or lesser extent, their own state; but as the broke and dithering thirties limped on, many idealists with no personal experience of power were attracted by the capacity for unimpeded action that dictatorship seemed to offer. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,” declared H. G. Wells, addressing the Oxford Union in 1932, still, despite all the evidence, apparently believing that a benign dictatorship was not an oxymoron. “The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. The fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of liberation must carry out a parallel ambition on a far grander scale.”

With hindsight, Wells’s call seems extraordinarily naive. But it was a true expression of his personal creed, which managed to combine socialism with unambiguous elitism. Many of his novels—The Time Machine, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli, Anticipations—envisaged worlds ruled by a special governing order of the best and the brightest. And Wells was not alone in this seemingly incompatible combination of beliefs: this was the generation of socialists who embraced the new “science” of eugenics—but who were appalled when those theories were actually translated into action.

It is tempting—though probably false—to wonder whether eugenic considerations partly explain the fascist sympathies of Europe’s beauty tycoons. The perfumier François Coty famously backed the far-right Faisceau and Croix de Feu movements during the 1930s, and a little later founded the infamous paramilitary group Solidarité Française; Coco Chanel was a renowned horizontal collaborator. Eugenics, after all, did identify physical beauty—which, for these Europeans, naturally meant Caucasian beauty—as a prerequisite for most other desirable qualities. As the then-celebrated American psychologist Knight Dunlap put it in 1920, “All dark races prefer white skin.”46

In his book Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment, Dunlap, who, inter alia, saw baldness as a sign of physical degeneration—“It is difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist”47—pointed the way, twenty years before the event, to notions of the Untermensch and the Final Solution. “Perhaps there are limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower grades of the feeble-minded.”48

Dunlap was not alone in these thoughts. Similar theories were commonplace among psychologists at the time, some of whom had little hesitation in acting upon them when they could with impunity. Their use of inmates in American state hospitals as fodder for experimentation during the 1920s and thirties has become notorious. If fascism is the absolute subjection of the individual to the needs of the state, as defined by the ruling dictatorship, then those psychologists—absolute dictators in their own realm—were undoubtedly fascists. And if—as after World War II—culpability is graded along a scale of readiness to eradicate undesirable individuals, with Hitler at one end and, say, H. G. Wells at the other, then Dunlap and his ilk would probably not have survived a Nuremberg.

Most of those who held these views, however, lay at some point between these two extremes. In those cases, the matter of gradation could become a question of crucial personal concern. And one of these cases would be Eugène Schueller.