Sometimes beauty is just business. One of the leaders of the far right in France, in the tumultuous years leading up to the Second World War, was Eugène Deloncle, whom Brandon describes as a "clever and charismatic naval engineer whose hypnotic personal charm nullified his somewhat absurd appearance-short, plump, invariably bowler-hatted." Deloncle ran what was essentially a terrorist group called La Cagoule, which conducted political assassinations, fired on a socialist demonstration, and set off two bombs near the Arc de Triomphe. He had a personal hit man, named Jean Filliol, who at one point tried to kill the French Prime Minister. After the German invasion of France in 1940, Deloncle formed a political party called the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire, or MSR, which in Occupied France was one of the loudest voices favouring collaboration with the Nazis. Deloncle's men marched through Paris in jackboots and tunics, cataloguing Jewish property for expropriation.
In October of 1941, the MSR blew up seven Paris synagogues with explosives provided by the Gestapo. Deloncle was a gangster, a thug, and a vicious anti-Semite, and Eugène Schueller was one of his biggest backers. Schueller wrote for Deloncle's newspaper. He gave him money. He even set the MSR up in an office next to his own at L'Oréal's headquarters. Brandon argues that Schueller's affection for the MSR wasn't primarily ideological. He wasn't pro-German. He wasn't a Nazi. There is no evidence that he was particularly anti-Semitic. Many of Deloncle's followers were essentially right-wing royalists, pining for the long-lost Catholic monarchy. Schueller was the kid from the Rue du Cherche-Midi. He believed in a meritocracy. Schueller's behaviour stemmed from pragmatism. He was a businessman, and collaborating with the Germans was to him the correct business decision. "The war years were very profitable for those who could keep manufacturing-anything that could be made could be sold, the occupiers would pay any price for luxuries, and there was a flourishing black market in scarce necessities," Brandon writes. "But only collaboration ensured access to raw materials."
The minute Schueller sensed the tide of the war turning, he coolly changed course. In late 1941, he began to cut his ties to the MSR and Deloncle. By the end of 1942, with America now in the war and Hitler overextended in Russia, Schueller began cozying up to the Resistance. He let a L'Oréal van be used for a covert mail drop. He donated 700,000 francs to the Maquis, and two million francs to de Gaulle, in exile in England. He started working with a group that eventually helped 200 people escape the Nazis. After the war was over, Schueller-along with a number of other French industrialists-was charged with collaboration. A contemporary, the automaker Louis Renault, ended his life in disgrace, and his business was taken over by the government. Not Schueller. The Resistance legend Pierre de Bénouville stood up and vouched for him. In the post-war years, the good word of a war hero was everything. Schueller was acquitted.
The details of just how Schueller managed to wriggle out of legal trouble are sordid. Bénouville turns out to have barely known Schueller. He was, it seems, doing a favour for three friends: François Dalle, who ran L'Oréal after Schueller's death; André Bettencourt, who married Schueller's daughter and became one of the richest men in the world; and François Mitterrand, who worked for L'Oréal in the last days of the war and ended up as the President of France. But there is no denying the cynical brilliance of Schueller's strategy. As they would say on Wall Street, he hedged the war to perfection. When the market turned in 1942, he shorted Germany and went long on France, and the awkward fact about Schueller's behaviour is that this ability to deal with unexpected obstacles is what we normally celebrate in entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is someone obsessed with his creation, who applies the full force of his intellect to protect and sustain it. That's why Alexander Graham Bell didn't give up on the telephone, and why Hewlett and Packard kept plugging away in their garage in Silicon Valley. We like this about them.
Here is Brandon describing what happened to Schueller when he first embarked on his hair-dye project. Having quit his job, and with just 800 francs to his name, he surrendered to the compulsion of invention:
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 I think back to those days, I can't imagine how I got through them," he reflected 40 years later. So why should we be surprised that Schueller would cross a moral line in the service of that same obsession? Schueller's daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, later tried to excuse her father's wartime behaviour by saying that he was a "pathological optimist who hadn't the first idea about politics, and who always managed to be in the wrong place."
Brandon is sceptical of that explanation. But it is not entirely wrong. The kind of people who retreat to their two-room apartments or cluttered garages and emerge, two years later, with a better mousetrap are pathological optimists, and seldom have the first idea about politics. Schueller wasn't for France; he wasn't for Germany. Schueller was for Schueller. An engineer who worked at L'Oréal said it best: "I think M Schueller is too much of an opportunist to risk engaging himself absolutely in favour of anyone."
Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell will be the keynote speaker at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business' Distinguished Leadership and Innovation Conference (DLIC)
2012 on March 29.
To find out more, please log on to: www.dlictt.com; e-mail us at: conferencing@lokjackgsb.edu.tt, or call us at: 645-6700, ext 299.