The perfume magnate who bought both the far-right leagues and a mass newspaper
In 1928 he launched a daily at ten centimes a copy and drove its circulation toward a million. The paper lost money, which was not the point: it was cheap enough to be read everywhere, and the language grown on its pages became the language of the columns that filled the square in February 1934
A Corsican who built the largest fortune in the European perfume industry of his day. He bought Le Figaro in 1922 and founded the cheap mass daily L'Ami du peuple in 1928, using both as instruments of anticommunist, antisemitic and antiparliamentary agitation. He financed Georges Valois's Faisceau and the early Croix-de-Feu, and in 1933 created and funded Solidarité Française outright. His career is a large part of the answer to the question that hangs over the French leagues of the 1930s: who paid for them. The organisation he had founded was on the Place de la Concorde as a column on 6 February 1934, and he died that July, ruined by a divorce settlement and his debts.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1874–1904Born at Ajaccio in Corsica; starts in perfumery in Paris
- 1905–1920Builds one of the great fortunes of the perfume industry
- 1922Buys Le Figaro
- 1925–1928Finances Valois's Faisceau and the early Croix-de-Feu
- 1928Founds the mass daily L'Ami du peuple
- 1933Creates and funds Solidarité Française
- 1934.07Dies after a divorce settlement and financial ruin
Related historical events
Turning perfume into a mass-market industry
The turning point in Coty's perfume business came in 1904, when he founded his company on the strength of La Rose Jacqueminot, taking a French-sounding version of his mother's name as his trade name. He began at the luxury end, but the decision that set him apart was to widen the market rather than keep the perfume a status luxury. By combining cheap synthetic materials with natural essences he cut production costs, and by selling the same scent at several price points, including plainer and smaller bottles, he made perfume affordable to middle- and working-class women. Coty still treated perfume as a luxury; he insisted it should be sold to a far broader public.
Production acquired its scale at the "Cité des parfums" he built from 1908 at Suresnes outside Paris, a complex of laboratories and factories with 9,000 employees capable of making up to 100,000 bottles a day. Distribution was equally unusual. Instead of selling only through his own shops, he supplied other retailers and department stores from 1905, deliberately building a national and then an international market. He also pushed beyond perfume into creams, soaps, bath salts, lipsticks and even stationery marketed under one brand name, a precursor of the scented product line. His L'Origan powder sold 16 million units a year in France, with 30,000 metal powder boxes a day in the United States alone.
This expansion was not a matter of product mix alone. A strategy that spent heavily on presentation, down to the Lalique bottles, raised sales while reinforcing Coty's insistence on controlling nearly every aspect of the business himself. Even as the American company grew from a million dollars' profit in 1923 to fifty million dollars in sales in 1929, its absorption of the European subsidiaries, combined with deep price cuts during the Depression, ended by eroding the brand's prestige. The assessment that he turned perfume into a mass-market commodity and the criticism that the organisation behind that market depended too heavily on its founder are two sides of the same process.