The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal by Jo Johnson, Martine Orange

From the Publisher

Armed with little more than unlimited bluster and degrees from France's elite academic institutions, Jean-Marie Messier didn't just want to play with the big boys, he wanted to buy up their companies and beat them at their own game. From a secure perch atop a sleepy French water utility, Messier set out to conquer the global media industry. And in very few years, he built an international media powerhouse featuring MCA Records, Universal Studios, USA Networks, book publishers, theme parks, video game producers, and Internet companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Emulating his American counterparts, J2M, as he called himself, moved to New York and occupied a $17.5 million penthouse on Park Avenue paid for by Vivendi. He was viewed on both sides of the Atlantic as emblematic of an exciting new generation of French businessmen that could finally stand up to swaggering American CEOs. At its zenith, Messier's media empire would be second in size only to AOL Time Warner; his subjects would include many of the most admired entertainment executives in the world, including Barry Diller and Edgar Bronfman Jr. As stock valuations climbed out of sight, Vivendi shares led the pack, landing Messier's picture in every financial magazine. Smitten international investors dubbed him the poster boy for the new economy.

But in 2002, the sky fell and Messier along with it. Did the former Lazard Freres investment banker's love of arcane financial structures catch up with him? Or was his hastily assembled collection of disparate assets -- soccer teams, a chateau with a man-made rain forest, an agricultural lab in China, the rapidly devaluing media assets -- all simply bound for failure? On December 12, 2002, a fraud squad swooped down on the Parisian headquarters of Vivendi Universal and Messier's home, seizing files, documents, and e-mails in an attempt to unravel the cause of the sudden financial collapse of France's best-known company. Vivendi Universal is currently at the center of a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice and French prosecutors, as well as a stock market investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Messier became an emblem of everything extravagant about the Internet bubble, not only the inflated valuations, but also the corporate excesses and the catastrophic end. His story, as told by the two reporters who knew him best, combines a fascinating cultural clash and a study in global finance run amok.

Publishers Weekly

Messier was a wunderkind of French business who at the age of 37 was appointed chief executive of Generale des Eaux. He had already served in the finance ministry under Jacques Chirac and been a managing partner with the investment banking firm Lazard Freres when he assumed leadership of Generale in 1994, and the water management company was one of France's largest corporations. Messier, however, did not see Generale's future in water and sewage management, but in the media and information world. To accomplish the transformation, Messier embarked on a dizzying buying spree highlighted by the $42 billion purchase in 2000 of Seagram, a deal that included Seagram's Universal assets. For Messier, the creation of the newly minted Vivendi Universal (which also bought Houghton Mifflin in 2001) was not only a personal triumph, but also a statement that a French company could compete on the world stage. But as Johnson and Orange show, Messier created a gulf between himself and the French establishment that left him with few allies as he tried to save his company when business conditions declined in 2001. In their briskly paced, insightful work, Johnson, the Paris correspondent for the Financial Times, and Orange, a reporter for Le Monde, relate Messier's many missteps that led to his fall from the top of the media world. Part of Messier's undoing was the disdain many French have for America's domination of the media and the belief that in merging with Seagram, Messier had sold out French culture. Given the French attitude about America as documented by Johnson and Orange, the recent strain in French-American relations comes as no surprise. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Journalists Johnson (Financial Times) and Orange (Le Monde) draw on interviews with interested parties to produce an unauthorized account of Vivendi Universal CEO Jean-Marie Messier's rise and fall. Born in 1956, the precocious son of an accountant from Grenoble, Messier became a managing partner at the Paris investment bank of Lazard Freres at age 33, leaving in 1994 to become chief executive of Generale des Eaux, a large French-owned water supply company. Not truly interested in water, Messier set his sights on the media arena and began purchasing known American media properties. Partnering with Edgar Bronfman Jr. of family-owned Seagram and American media mogul Barry Diller, the French water utility became Vivendi Universal, a global media conglomerate owning MCA Records, Universal Studios, and other media units. Messier was subsequently praised by the French government for "reshaping France's business landscape," but his reckless overbuying placed his company's debt position in jeopardy, leading to his downfall. As Vivendi's stock price plunged, he lost support of partners Bronfman and Diller, and in 2002 he was asked to resign. Described as having looks and a nature similar to Napoleon's, Messier did not go down without a fight. While best suited for those especially interested in the media business, this cautionary business tale is an engaging read recommended for larger public libraries and business collections.-Bellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

The Rise and Fall of Jean-Marie Messier
Some have called Jean-Marie Messier the most ambitious French empire builder since Napoleon. In a mere six years at the helm as CEO of Vivendi Universal, he was able to buy up assets as big as MCA Records, Universal Studios, USA Networks, and a variety of other media assets, theme parks, video game producers and Internet companies. By 2002, he became the victim of his own ambition when it became clear that he had bought more assets than his company could manage. Investigative journalists Jo Johnson and Martine Orange examine Messier's great strides and mistakes, dissecting the problems that led to his ouster from his lofty position.

Shaking up the World
Vivendi started as a French water utility. Since 1994, it was run by Jean-Marie Messier, a flamboyant Frenchman who, in 2000, would shake up the world with the astonishing news that it had acquired Seagram - owner of the recording giant Universal Music - for $46 billion. Within the next couple of years, Messier would spend over $100 billion of Vivendi Universal's money to create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, one larger than all others besides AOL Time Warner.

The authors describe Messier's personality as "a strange blend of French technocratic arrogance, wanna-be Hollywood showmanship, and investment banker charm." They write that it was his own weaknesses and love of deal making, self-promotion and risk that led to his downfall and toppled his empire.

What was once a company that was seen as the boldest attempt by a foreign media group to challenge the American goliaths of the entertainment industry, would by early 2003 be mired in criminal probes by the U.S. Department of Justice and French prosecutors, as well as formal investigations by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the main French stock market regulator. A once proud beacon of hope for the image of French business would eventually become a source of great financial loss and an embarrassing blight on its international reputation.

The authors write that the story of Vivendi Universal and its charismatic leader contains more than just the tale of one man's hubris and the collapse of an industrial empire. They explain that it is the perfect prism through which to view France's ambivalence toward the United States and to globalization. Although Messier became a symbol of a new generation of French businessmen that had embraced the American version of entrepreneurialism over the state capitalism of Old Europe, he was eventually brought down by the American investors he courted. By the end of 2002, he was seen by police as a beaten, angry, bitter man.

Consumed by Ambition
The authors depict Messier as a deal maker who became so consumed by his own ambition that he became blind to the advice of his chief financial officer and refused to listen to reason even as the dominoes of his empire were tumbling at an incredible pace. They describe the fateful conference calls where powerful men traded barbs with each other, confidence in a leader quickly dwindled, and mild suspicion became outright contempt in the final days of Messier's reign. They recount his final days as Vivendi's stock prices plunged and Messier belligerently took shots at all his detractors, including the journalists and newspapers that challenged his decisions in the press.

After several requests from his board members to resign, Messier refused to relinquish his role as chief executive officer of Vivendi Universal. But, as depicted in the dramatic conclusion of The Man Who Tried to Buy the World, board members watched as Messier's charisma failed him. While corporate giant WorldCom shocked the world by falling into bankruptcy, Vivendi Universal's fate seemed just as bleak. As his loyalists turned on him, Messier was asked by his board to resign. Once he was finally ousted as CEO, the world watched as the empire he built was quickly dismantled and the Vivendi Universal he had created would cease to exist.

Why We Like This Book
The Man Who Tried to Buy the World offers a detailed glimpse of what happens when a leader oversteps his boundaries and forgets the basics of smart investing. Great investigative reporting and historical overview capture a modern tale of ambition, deception, control and demise that is highlighted with colorful details that bring the struggles of an international business titan into plain view where his giant dreams and human foibles can be seen with distinct and captivating clarity. Copyright © 2003 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Kirkus Reviews

Densely rendered account of a onetime French bureaucrat’s ill-starred media and utilities conglomerate. Journalists Johnson (Financial Times) and Orange (Le Monde) see Jean-Marie Messier, who briefly remade French water company Vivendi into a major New Economy presence, as symbolizing "a new generation of French businessmen . . . culturally more attuned to American entrepreneurialism" (and, indeed, they note that their journalistic version of events diverges from those in Messier’s memoir). Messier began as an enarqúe, one of the elite class of French officials, but his singular ambition propelled him to the front ranks of European CEOs. His repositioning of an obscure utility as a player in the coming wireless era showed Europeans the possibilities already grasped by moguls Messier admired, like the Bronfman family and Barry Diller (Messier eventually embraced Enron-esque excess, contributing to his downfall). Much of this account is spent on the authors’ recreation of Messier’s dizzying string of mergers and acquisitions, culminating with an enormous deal with the Bronfmans for their Seagram/Universal conglomerate, resulting in a narrative that at times requires an MBA to decipher. This complexity, of course, is reflected in unsavory reality: by 2002, Messier’s empire was crumbling, with board members fleeing, valuations dropping, and analysts (and the Bronfmans) alienated. By then Messier found few friends at home in France, where he’d infuriated many by adopting American-style CEO arrogance and dismissing "the French exception" (government subsidies for cultural production), igniting a furor within film studio Canal Plus. In less than a year it was all over: he was forced to resign,and Vivendi Universal’s assets were liquidated. Johnson and Orange boast great fidelity of detail, but the tone is arid, with little sense of the human cost of Messier’s downfall among the dizzying flow of moguls and mergers, despite plenty of victims (the Bronfmans foremost). Still, business types may find valuable this tale of unforeseen pitfalls in the race toward global synergies. Intriguing tale from the boom, though one hardly optimistic on globalization’s wisdom. Agents: Caroline Dawnay/PFD, Michael Carlisle/Carlisle & Co.

Product Details

• ISBN: 159184018X
  
• ISBN-13: 9781591840183
• Format: Hardcover, 288pp
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
• Pub. Date: November 2003

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Over the following days, in scenes that echoed events at Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom earlier in the year, the fraud squad descended on the homes and offices of some of the most illustrious figures of French capitalism, among them Marc Viénot, the seventy-four-year-old honorary chairman of Société Générale, France’s second largest bank, and onetime emblem of the French business establishment. Vivendi Universal’s board members, including Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of the Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton luxury goods group, and Serge Tchuruk, chairman of Alcatel, the telecommunications equipment manufacturer, all nervously anticipated the indignity of the domestic raid. The criminal investigations had started.

It seemed that with this dawn raid the crisis of corporate America had finally crossed the Atlantic. For several months after the collapse of the world’s second largest media group, it appeared that the Parisian business world had successfully buried the Vivendi Universal affair. “There is no doubt in my mind that the French will do everything in their power to attempt a cover-up. The French establishment does not eat its own,” cautioned Edgar Bronfman Jr., whose family lost over $5 billion when Vivendi Universal plunged into crisis in 2002. But the sudden flurry of criminal investigations and regulatory probes suggested that shareholders and employees might eventually receive a full explanation for the incredible collapse of the company.

Not since the failure a decade before of Crédit Lyonnais, the state-owned bank nicknamed “Crazy Lyonnais” for its bizarre and reckless lending, had some of the most powerful businessmen and bankers in France felt so exposed. In addition to the class-action lawsuits, Vivendi Universal was, by early 2003, in the throes of criminal probes by the U.S. Department of Justice and French prosecutors, and formal investigations by both the chief American regulatory authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the main French stock market regulator, the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (COB). Piece by piece, investigators in the United States and France started to reconstruct the last three years of Jean-Marie Messier’s roller-coaster ride at the helm of a dull water and sewage company that became a French media wonderstock and then took on the world.

“Anybody who either worked for the company or invested in the company should feel betrayed,” said Edgar Bronfman Jr. One of the documents unearthed during the raids on Vivendi Universal’s headquarters in December brazenly alluded to the fact that pressure was allegedly being brought to bear on the French investigators, who had started making preliminary inquiries in July 2002. One senior director of Vivendi Universal, Alain Marsaud, was discovered to have written a memo to Messier’s successor, Jean-René Fourtou, on September 17, 2002, just two months into the COB investigation. “We should take care to ensure that the pressure on the investigators does not become a matter of public knowledge,” Marsaud wrote. Vivendi Universal immediately denied interfering with the investigation, but the memo left many questions unanswered.

Two years earlier, Jean-Marie Messier had been feted as the “perfect Frenchman.” Vivendi, the French water utility he had run since late 1994, had astonished the world. In a deal of startling audacity, Messier launched the largest ever French takeover of a U.S. company. The $46 billion acquisition of Seagram—owner of Universal Music, producer of one in every three albums sold worldwide, and of Universal Studios, an icon of Hollywood—was the boldest attempt by any foreign media group to challenge the American goliaths of the entertainment industry. A new media major—Vivendi Universal—was born.

For the first time, France could take pride in a global champion in the media and entertainment industry that could fight back against American cultural hegemony. In total, Messier would spend more than $100 billion in pursuit of his ambition to create the world’s number one entertainment company. At its zenith, his empire would be second in size only to a then mighty AOL Time Warner. His deal-making addiction was fueled by the speculative hysteria that swept financial markets, driving media and telecom stocks to ludicrous valuations and media moguls to ever grander displays of machismo. Without his vision and personality—a strange blend of French technocratic arrogance, wanna-be Hollywood showmanship, and investment banker charm—Vivendi Universal would never have come into existence. Without Jean-Marie Messier’s weaknesses—a love of deal making, self-promotion, obfuscation, and risk—the dream of a French champion might have survived.

The ramifications of the Vivendi Universal story are only just being felt. They extend far beyond the personal disaster overwhelming Messier, whose reputation as one of the most brilliant business personalities of the era has been indelibly tarnished by the failure of his project. Few receive a second chance after presiding over failure on such a grand scale. France’s largest private-sector employer has survived its brush with insolvency, but only at the cost of being broken up and parceled off to the highest bidders. Vivendi Universal—as conceived by Jean- Marie Messier—has ceased to exist. Mere mention of Vivendi Universal and its fallen hero now provokes severe embarrassment within French business establishment circles. The damage done to the image of French business by his Napoleonic adventurism remains incalculable.

Vivendi Universal was far more than just a media colossus. At its peak, the empire had extended beyond traditional media into the Internet and mobile telecommunications, giving France a champion in the industries of the future. The French group had led the European charge into the new economy, launching more than one hundred Internet companies in two years, including Vizzavi, whose _1.6 billion budget made it by far the most expensive and ambitious start-up of the European Internet boom. In telecommunications, it controlled the largest private mobile operator in France and had interests in others as far afield as Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Hungary, and Poland.

Further still from the entertainment economy, the Messier empire provided the essentials of life to hundreds of millions of homes across the world. The original water business out of which the media empire had sprung pumped water into homes and factories in more than one hundred countries and to many great cities, including Paris, London, Vancouver, and New Orleans; it also built bridges in Spain; provided pest-control services in Papua New Guinea; cleaned beaches in Australia; monitored the impact of human activity on water purity in the Chilean Antarctic; treated sewage; hauled garbage; heated homes; and managed transport systems, including Connex trains in London and the southeast of England, buses in Washington, D.C., island hoppers in the Comoro Islands, trams in Nancy, and tourist trolleys in the Alps.

As the Messier empire collapsed in 2002, its three thousand subsidiaries revealed an absurd and, in some ways, wonderful collection of assets: the Citrus Technology Centre near the Three Gorges in China that aimed to produce the perfect orange; a seven-hundred-strong chain of gift stores that dominated the U.S. market for vibrators and other “wild ’n’ crazy” novelty gifts; a leaky palazzo in Venice; a brand of bottled water; the Paris Saint-Germain and Servette de Genève soccer clubs; the eighteenth-century château at Méry-sur-Oise, renovated at pharaonic cost to boast an experimental garden with a miniature rain forest, hot pools for the papyrus, and a giant igloo for the Siberian irises and arctic bramble; a town house in London; the chief executive’s $17.5 million Park Avenue apartment, renovated by France’s leading architect, best known for his work on the Louvre; a three-thousand-item art collection, replete with Dubuffet paintings, Miró tapestries, rare photographs, and antique drinking vessels; and a private air force that included a helicopter, a Falcon, four Gulfstreams, a Global Express, and a brand-new Airbus A319.

But the story of Vivendi Universal and its charismatic leader is about more than the hubris of one man and the breathtaking creation and collapse of an industrial and postindustrial empire. It is the perfect prism through which to examine France’s ambivalence toward America and to globalization. Messier had long presented himself as an exception to the “French exception,” the cherished idea that France can hold back the tide of globalization and preserve the country’s distinctive economic model in the face of an encroaching ultraliberal free-market capitalism. International investors welcomed the first Frenchman to master the American-inspired mantras of shareholder value.

During his rapid ascent, Messier came to symbolize a new generation of French businessmen that had become culturally more attuned to American entrepreneurialism than to the state capitalism of the Old Continent. “I am the most un-French Frenchman you will ever meet,” he liked to tell American journalists. When Messier debated live on television in April 2000 with José Bové, the small farmer who orchestrated attacks on McDonald’s fast-food restaurants across southern France, he did so in the name of a France ready to rise to the challenges of globalization rather than one set at all costs on defending the country’s singularity and exceptionalism. In the end, ironically, it was the American investors he so dearly wanted to seduce who brought him down.

That morning in December 2002, the police faced a different Messier: beaten, angry, and bitter. “My sole revenge will be my success,” he had promised on his return to Paris after a three- month holiday in Montana and the south of France. He had not kept his word. In early November he published, in French, Mon vrai journal (My True Diary), a vengeful and self-serving memoir of the events that led up to Vivendi Universal’s collapse and his demise as chief executive. Many advised Messier to lick his wounds in silence and await rehabilitation. They were ignored. Messier depicted himself as a prophet without honor in his own country, a crusader for a reformed, shareholder-friendly form of French capitalism who was unfairly deposed by a reactionary counterrevolution.

“The ‘Vivendi Universal affair’ has set back the development of French capitalism by a couple of decades,” Messier claimed. His chutzpah left his peers openmouthed. The self- conscious cockiness of j6m.com—his first autobiography, published in 2000, the title of which played on his nickname, Jean-Marie Messier, Moi-même maître du monde—was gone, to be replaced by self-pity, petulance, and bitterness at his desertion by the French establishment, at fickle journalists, at hapless analysts, at disloyal board members, and at the “bootlegger” methods of the Bronfmans that were used to bring him down. It was not persuasive. As Richard Lambert, editor of the Financial Times between 1990 and 2001, wrote in a review for The Times: “He has rushed out his version of the story in a book which will only convince his enemies that they were right to eject him.”1

The book shows that Messier, who frightened others for a time, had ended up frightening himself. “Dallas...Your pitiless world exists. I have encountered it,” he wrote. “Surveillance; espionage of my smallest acts, of my most insignificant human interactions; tapping of my telephones; manipulation of taped recordings; photos or purported photos; rumor- mongering and the passing of documents to my board or to newsrooms: the complete amateur James Bond.”2 His paranoia expressed itself in a naive cynicism about the motivations of all who questioned him. Messier’s favorite method of self-defense was to attack the credibility of others, often in the most offensive ways. To explain the mounting tensions with the Bronfmans and his credibility problem in Hollywood, he answered: “I am not a Hollywood Jew and I won’t ever be one.”3

To discredit Claude Bébéar—the chairman of the AXA insurance group, who did his utmost on behalf of the place de Paris, France’s Wall Street, to save Vivendi Universal from bankruptcy—Messier claimed he was motivated by jealousy of a younger man’s success in the United States and a need to be “acknowledged as the ‘godfather’ of French capitalism.” To call into question the work of the analyst who undertook hard-hitting research of an opaque and aggressive company, Messier dredged up trivial stories from the banker’s distant past and suggested hurtful psychological problems; board members who became angry when he did not give straight answers to simple questions were dismissed as “deranged,” while those who failed to back him to the bitter end were denounced as cowards whose hands he would no longer shake.

The authors of this book are, in fact, the only two journalists to be personally attacked in his own account of his downfall. Jo Johnson of the Financial Times is criticized for using “methods more worthy of a tabloid rag than a business newspaper” for probing immediately into excessive spending on executive perks, while Le Monde has the distinction of enjoying a virulent chapter all to itself.4 To discredit the French newspaper—whose only crime was to have been assiduous in exposing the weaknesses of his leadership and the fragility of his project— Messier alleged, unfairly, that editorial objectivity had been sacrificed to a crude personal vendetta. This, he claimed, was being masterminded by Le Monde’s editor, Jean-Marie Colombani, and executed by Martine Orange, its staff reporter on the Vivendi Universal story.

According to Messier, Colombani was seeking revenge for Vivendi’s refusal in 1998 to sell the newspaper group L’Express, the French equivalent of Time. At one point, Messier claimed he had received a telephone call from the Corsican editor while he and his wife were being driven to a dinner with Philippe Camus, now the head of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company, owner of Airbus. The bogus dialogue is worthy of the worst schlock writers: “‘It’s Jean-Marie Colombani here. If you do not sell us L’Express, you will see what it means to have Le Monde against you for twenty years!’ We are into the fourth year. Le Monde, with Martine Orange in the lead, is running an anti-Messier campaign. Never mind the approximations, the methods, the hunt for moles at the heart of Vivendi. Only the end counts.”5

The evidence for this alleged campaign? Ten lead front-page articles over two years. “The harassment was permanent,” Messier wrote in My True Diary. “Never get angry with newspapers, in particular Le Monde. They are so powerful. And if they decide to use this power against you unscrupulously, under the pretext of revealing the truth to the readers, you will always lose.” To try to silence Martine Orange, Messier launched a _1 million lawsuit against her and Le Monde in May 2002 after she wrote an article that described how his wild ride at Vivendi Universal almost came to a shuddering end as early as December 2001. Soon proved to be wholly vexatious, the suit was immediately abandoned when he was fired and as the company plunged into the near-fatal liquidity crisis that Le Monde had foreshadowed.

Needless to say, Jean-Marie Messier chose not to cooperate with this book: “The answer is clearly no,” he replied in an e-mail. Yet even if he denied us formal meetings in the context of the book, over the past two years the authors have interviewed him on numerous occasions, on the record, off the record, in his private jet, in the back of his chauffeur-driven limousine, in London, Paris, and New York. Access to Messier was never the problem. As Rupert Murdoch, with whom Messier was obsessively and self-destructively competitive, once told the Financial Times: “Jean-Marie’s problem is that he’s never met a journalist he didn’t give an interview to.” Messier’s version of events coincides all too rarely with the eyewitness accounts given by the hundreds of people interviewed by the authors. This is still his story, as it actually happened, but almost certainly not as he might wish to see it told.

CHAPTER ONE

A Perfect Frenchman

On the sweltering summer night of July 3, 2001, the limousines of the cream of the French banking, business, and political worlds drew up outside the Centre Pompidou, the modern art complex in the heart of Paris. Several members of Vivendi Universal’s board, including Bernard Arnault of Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton (LVMH); Serge Tchuruk, chairman of Alcatel; and Marc Viénot, honorary chairman of Société Générale, were among the grandees escorted by svelte hostesses to the glass-enclosed rooftop of Chez Georges restaurant. Standing on a dais before his three hundred guests, the city spreading out behind him, Jean-Marie Messier was radiant. He could have hoped for no better going-away party than this.

A few months earlier, he had been informed that he was to be made a member of the Legion of Honor, France’s foremost decoration. Most countries have an honors system, but only in egalitarian France is the status symbol, a red band worn in the lapel of the suit jacket, put on such ostentatious display. Messier had decided the award ceremony would be a fitting occasion to mark his departure from Paris to conquer the New World. In early September, he and his wife, Antoinette, along with their five children, would move to New York to start their new lives in the splendid apartment being prepared for them on Park Avenue. He could depart with the blessings of the French Republic resounding in his ears.

Protocol dictates that only someone who is already a member of the Legion of Honor, and of the same or superior rank, can confer the award. As was required, Messier was entering the order at the lowest level. At any one time, there could be a maximum of 125,000 knights, two-thirds of whom tend to be soldiers. The senior levels of the order thin out sharply, with progression based on a combination of merit and the passage of a fixed amount of time at the previous rank in the hierarchy. There are just 10,000 officers, 1,250 commanders, and a mere 75, generally former prime ministers, constitutional jurists, and the most senior ambassadors, who hold the grand cross. To lend his ceremony special prestige, Messier had asked the president of the Republic, ex officio grand master of the Legion of Honor, to decorate him. Jacques Chirac had accepted.

But when Messier specified, as if he were Napoleon dictating the terms of his coronation to the pope, that the ceremony should be held for him alone and at the headquarters of Vivendi Universal, Chirac bridled: even in this era of triumphant capitalism, the president of the Republic was not a performing clown that chief executives could hire for private parties. If Messier wanted the presidential benediction, he could attend the same mass ceremony as everyone else. Crushed by Chirac’s snub, but unwilling to share the limelight on his big day, Messier decided instead to ask Bettina Rheims to preside over his ceremony. The fashionable French photographer, famous as much for her chic-porn glamour work as for the official portrait of Chirac that graced town halls across France, was a much better symbol for a modern media group than a septuagenarian politician....

Messier had let it be known that he would soon become the first chairman of a big French group to direct his business in person from the United States. Too many French acquisitions in the United States had failed because the chief executive was not there to run the show, he said. “If you are not there you are not the boss,” he explained. The French business world was surprised by this move and not a little put out at his decision to abandon them: how did he anticipate being able to run a group as deeply enmeshed in French politics and society as his from New York? Through Bettina Rheims, France’s leading business figures gave him some last advice before his departure.

In a subtle speech that was written with the help of her husband, the lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois, and the consultant Alain Minc, the former fashion model outlined their hopes and fears: “When a Frenchman says, ‘I want to build an international company with the objective of cultural cross-fertilization,’ we can only be happy. But then the chauvinist that we have in each of us tells us to hope that this immense enterprise will also remain French and that its chairman will, with all the means at his disposal, help French artists to regain the place that they once occupied in the world and that they have, today, to a certain degree, lost.”

Bettina Rheims lavished praise on the forty-four-year-old star of French capitalism: “It’s easy to see you in twenty years at the head of this company, which will by then have absorbed Disney, Fox, and who knows which others. Others will perhaps see you in the Elysée (Presidential palace).”

“Where will I be in a few years?” Messier responded. “Some imagine that I will be tempted by a political career; others see me as a hermit. Most probably, I will still be chairman of Vivendi Universal....When we look at Vivendi Universal today, we can legitimately say...” Messier paused as the recorded voice of Shania Twain, Universal Music’s top-selling female artist, filled the Chez Georges restaurant. Gripping the microphone, Messier then started to croon along to the country-lite barnstormer, triumphantly belting out that, like the cavalry, he had finally arrived. He topped it off by inviting the gathered grandees to look how far he’d come, yeah baby. As the cream of French society cringed, Messier turned to his five children—Anne-Laure, Claire-Marie, Jean-Baptiste, Pierre, and Nicolas—and proceeded to sing along to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

The various company chairmen who had followed and supported Messier in his ascension of the French cursus honorum over two decades were dumbfounded. Their astonishment turned to discomfort when Messier started to speak of his sadness at the death of his ten-year-old niece in an accident in the mountains and launched into Yves Duteil’s sentimental “Take a Child by the Hand.” In the front row, his brother, father of the young girl, dissolved in loud sobs. René Thomas, former chairman of the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), Jean-Louis Beffa, the financier Vincent Bolloré, and even Messier’s friend Nicolas Bazire, a director of LVMH and godfather of his son Nicolas, all looked at their shoes.

Accounts of the karaoke ceremony filtered across the Atlantic. By the time Messier arrived in New York on September 2, 2001, just over a week before the terrorist attacks, Fortune had prepared a welcoming cover spread: “The haut monde of Paris is still talking about how Messier turned the Legion of Honor ceremony on its head. This reaction is, of course, exactly what he intended. Messier revels in being a provocateur. He’s not just France’s most famous businessman; he is the country’s first rock-star CEO....Is he the next mogul?” BusinessWeek was no less admiring: “Not since Napoleon has France produced an empire builder as ambitious as Jean-Marie Messier. In five years of voracious dealmaking, the 44-year-old dynamo has transformed a financially ailing French utility into Vivendi Universal, the world’s number two media company behind AOL Time Warner.”

Back in Paris, the business community was less gushing. “That time, he really went too far with his American boss number, or rather what he imagines American behavior to be,” one of his guests later recalled. Others, in resignation, contented themselves simply by saying: “That’s Jean- Marie!” Tacky and mawkish certainly, but what self-confidence and panache! Nonetheless, this sort of thing could go only so far. Someone should take him in hand because if they weren’t all so fond of him...The reality was that many found it hard to be too cross with Messier: during the course of his astonishing career, the young chairman had seduced them all.

Jean-Marie Messier was custom-made for success in the French cursus honorum. From an early age he was singled out to be groomed for power in the most exclusive institutions of the French Republic. In many ways, in fact, his career coincided with the demise of this system, reflecting the shift in power away from the administrative elite toward the private sector and the market. He was at once one of the last of the great technocrats and the first of a new breed of liberal businessmen. The economic history of France is written in his résumé. As an adviser to Edouard Balladur, finance minister between 1986 and 1988, he ran the privatization program that gave birth to a French equity culture. As a managing director at Lazard Frères, then by far the leading Parisian investment bank, he helped French firms compete for international capital and seize the acquisition opportunities that globalization had suddenly made available to them.

Born on December 13, 1956, grandson of the chauffeur to the local prefect and son of a chartered accountant from Grenoble, Jean-Marie Messier was, by all accounts, a precocious child. His mother, Jeanine, says he could read by the age of five and liked to calculate the day-on-day percentage variation of the share prices displayed on the television.1 The reality is doubtless more banal, not least because share prices rarely featured on French television before the major privatizations of the mid- to late-1980s. Still, there is no doubt that for this typical provincial middle-class family of the 1960s, education was the key to social success and personal fulfillment. The French meritocracy had served the Messiers well. “Our family climbed the social ladder in two generations,” Messier liked to say. “That’s why I don’t believe people who say it’s broken.”2

Although the Alpine university town played a leading part in the turbulent events of May 1968, the social upheaval bypassed the Messier household. They talked about the economy, which was still at that point enjoying the prolonged postwar boom, known as the “trente glorieuses”—the thirty glorious years. Strongly Catholic, the family supported social causes, notably those in favor of the handicapped after the death of Jean-Marie Messier’s disabled elder sister. Otherwise, the most memorable event in his childhood would seem to have been a trip at the age of ten to Rome, where he sang in a visiting choir at St. Peter’s Basilica and sat on a friend’s shoulders to watch the pope say Mass. Without stretching himself, Messier obtained his scientific baccalaureate at the age of sixteen from a Grenoble lycée. Perhaps through lack of anything better to do, he appeared condemned to collect diplomas: the literary baccalaureate followed the scientific one a year later.

After the normal two years of grueling preparatory classes, he was offered a place at the Ecole Centrale, a good university in Paris. He was rejected, however, by the more prestigious Ecole Polytechnique. “For the first time in my life I felt challenged,” he said, describing the setback as his personal “Rosebud.”3 Against the advice of his teacher, who recommended that he settle for the certain offer rather than risk being refused again by the university of his choice, he decided to work at his mathematics for another year in the preparatory classes. His determination was rewarded: “Those were my best years. We had total freedom in all subjects,” he said.

For more than two hundred years the Ecole Polytechnique had represented the acme of the French educational system and had imbued a sense of destiny in its pupils. Its statutes proclaimed its aim as being “to train men with the aptitude to become, after specialization, the top managers of the Nation.” The institution was controlled by the ministry of defense, and its students wore a ceremonial uniform that included a sword and a distinctive two-cornered hat. They marched in the annual July 14 Bastille Day parade in Paris and undertook a year’s compulsory military service at the start of the three-year course. An extraordinary mystique, a series of special rituals, and a private language tie those who have attended the school, known as “X.”

On graduation from the Ecole Polytechnique, Messier contemplated going to business school in the United States. However, this plan collapsed after Total, the French oil group, refused to sponsor him through Harvard Business School—because, according to Messier, its analysis of his handwriting had revealed a worrying lack of ambition. In any event, Messier’s final grades at the Ecole Polytechnique were good enough for him to go directly to the Ecole Nationale d’Administration without taking its competitive entrance exam. By entering ENA, Messier joined an even more exclusive cohort. Located close to government ministries in central Paris, ENA has since its creation by General Charles de Gaulle after the Liberation of France in 1944 accepted just 120 of France’s brightest students each year. All university graduates, they are trained over twenty-seven months to hold the highest positions in France.

Known as énarques, these young men—rarely are there any women—can count themselves members of the most ruthlessly effective old boys’ club in Europe. Enarques automatically use the familiar tu form rather than the formal vous when speaking to fellow graduates, irrespective of their ages. In a culture obsessed with secrecy, the closely guarded ENA alumni directory, a Who’s Who of the country’s leading decision makers, carries the home phone numbers of nearly all of its graduates for their exclusive use—right up to the contact details for presidents and prime ministers. They are represented in the highest offices of state: the current president, Jacques Chirac, is an énarque, as were three of the last four prime ministers: Edouard Balladur, who occupied Matignon (the prime minister’s official residence) between 1993 and 1995; Alain Juppé, between 1995 and 1997; and Lionel Jospin, between 1997 and 2001. Enarques dominate the senior ranks of France’s powerful civil service and public companies. They currently run about half the companies listed on the Paris stock exchange.

The Parisian school’s dominance of French public life has led in recent years to growing criticism from parliamentarians eager to loosen that stranglehold. “Spain has the ETA, Ireland has the IRA, and France has the ENA,” some of the school’s critics like to say. When French populists need a target, ENA has long been a favorite. But during the 2002 electoral season, hostility toward énarques became more intense. Members of parliament debated ending ENA’s state funding, while newspaper columnists dueled over the merits of the French system of elite formation. The college’s ethos was at odds with the growing feeling that the government needed to heed “la France d’en bas,” the term coined by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Lionel Jospin’s emphatically non-énarque successor, to denote the overtaxed “little guy.” A survey commissioned by ENA in 2002 showed that 66 percent of French people believed énarques had too much political power. It also canvassed énarques currently in business or government, who agreed that the school bred an “aristocracy” and “arrogance among the elites.”

Messier’s classmates recall him as smiling, likable, helpful, but not especially impressive. Short and stout, licks of brown hair lolling onto his forehead, he appeared ill at ease with sophisticated students from the smart Parisian lycées, who formed two-thirds of the intake. Unused to debating the comparative merits of Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre and irredeemably untrendy, he settled the question once and for all in his own mind. He was provincial and proud of it. From then on, he ducked the cultural questions that mattered to Parisian intellectuals. He became a highly focused, efficient machine. At ENA, Messier had a reputation for dropping people who were no longer useful to his career and for putting his considerable ability to charm to work only on those in positions of power. He had set his sights on graduating at the top of his class so that he could become an inspecteur des finances. This provoked him to make lengthy and often redundant interventions in the classroom, where being seen to be engaged with the material was an important step toward securing a good grade. Familiar with such tactics, Alain Minc, then teaching at ENA, called Messier to his office to calm him down. He assured the student that he had noticed him and that he would have a good mark at the end of the year: There was no need to draw attention to himself.

After leaving ENA in 1982, Messier married Antoinette Fleisch, the level-headed daughter of a French general, and secured the place in the finance inspectorate he so wanted. There he encountered an even more exclusive and tight-knit corps of politically connected public servants trained in the art of implementing ministerial orders. These were the storm troopers of the French public service. At short notice, they would find themselves parachuted to take over branches of the sprawling state, with the expectation that their brilliant minds would rapidly solve the problems facing lesser mortals. They dominated the treasury and the ministry of finance, and moved silkily in and out of the public and private commercial sectors.

Just as Messier joined their ranks, another inspecteur des finances, Jean-Yves Haberer, was drawing up plans for the nationalization of a large number of French financial groups. Even as Margaret Thatcher was embarking upon a pioneering privatization program in the United Kingdom, François Mitterrand’s France was heading in the other direction, with a policy of “socialism in one country.” Haberer would later find himself rewarded with the chairmanship of Crédit Lyonnais, the state-owned bank. In many ways, his calamitous reign at Crédit Lyonnais, which collapsed after he bankrolled Giancarlo Parretti, a former Italian waiter, in his purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, was a prototype for Jean-Marie Messier’s at Vivendi Universal a decade later. “With Crédit Lyonnais, I was trying to build the big French and European bank that would strengthen our national identity,” Haberer later explained to a parliamentary inquiry. Replace the word “bank” with “media group” and multiply the sums of money involved by ten, and the idea is the same.

It was difficult to stand out in a group that counted among its members a president of the Republic, several prime ministers, governors of the Bank of France, and all the principal bankers of the place de Paris. In the evenings, he would go to a small club, the Association pour l’etude des Expériences Etrangères, known as the A3E—the Association for the Study of Foreign Experiences—where he would encounter the future power brokers of the French business world.* Every Sunday the group would meet at the home of Charles de Croisset, future chairman of CCF bank. It would include the likes of Baudouin Prot, managing director of BNP Paribas, the French banking group, and Nicolas Bazire, who would later succeed Messier as an adviser to Edouard Balladur before becoming a director of LVMH. Against the backdrop of the left-wing government’s nationalizations, the group’s discussions focused on the need for a rapid liberalization of the French economy. When it came to his turn to present a paper, Messier chose a theme of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization policy in the UK. The subject was topical. Messier could not fail to be noticed. Jacques Friedmann, an inspecteur des finances who acted as a headhunter for the political center-right, was the first to spot him. A close adviser to Jacques Chirac, Friedmann had discovered Alain Juppé and persuaded him to embark upon a career in politics that would see him rise to become prime minister. Barely thirty years old, Messier, with Friedmann’s imprimatur, soon found himself devising the opposition’s privatization program.

When the right came back into power in 1986 on the basis of an election manifesto of privatization, the young inspecteur des finances was not forgotten. Friedmann recommended him warmly as an adviser to Camille Cabana, secretary of state in charge of privatization. But Messier was quickly disappointed. He soon realized that real power lay elsewhere, at the economy and finance ministry, then run by Edouard Balladur, a heavyweight figure in Chirac’s government. When a ministerial reshuffle presented him with an opportunity, Messier dumped Cabana and, with the backing of Friedmann, hurried off to join Balladur at the seat of power. The right faced a problem, however. While the Chirac government approved of the free market, there were limits to its liberalism. With an underdeveloped French stock market, a lack of pension funds, and little domestic money available for investment, privatized French companies ran the risk of takeover by predatory foreigners. Messier led the handful of people at the finance ministry who set about reconciling the conflicting objectives of liberalizing the economy and preserving the French identity of the country’s privatized corporations. It was his responsibility to ensure the jewels of French industry would not be plundered by foreigners once they were exposed to the stormy international capital markets.

Messier’s staff revived the old idea of “core” shareholdings, or noyaux durs. A small group of friendly French investors would acquire large stakes in the newly privatized groups and take boardroom seats. These powerful alliances were intended to scare off hostile foreign bidders. In extreme versions, cross-shareholdings developed in which two companies would buy a stake in each other and their chairmen would sit on each other’s boards. It was a system that seemed to offer protection and support, but which was riddled with conflicts of interest. The original idea was for these arrangements to last for two or three years, by which time the newly privatized groups would have become strong enough to fend for themselves. But once in place, the mechanisms stuck, and contributed to numerous failures of corporate governance. Board members often ended up fighting turf battles instead of maximizing value for all shareholders. The problem was worsened by the concentration of executive and supervisory functions in the hands of one man, the president–directeur-générale. While their UK counterparts tended to split responsibilities between a chief executive and a nonexecutive chairman, a single imperious PDG, addressed as “Monsieur Le Président–Directeur Générale,” dominates most French boards, much like an all-powerful U.S. chairman and chief executive.

Messier would later defend the device. “The logic of the noyaux stables was to say, ‘We are privatizing companies that are small and weak compared with their international competitors. We must give them a minimum level of protection when we throw them into the bath.’ If there was an error at the time, it is not in the principle because we had to give them a way of defending themselves.” He handled the privatization of some of France’s best-known companies, including Saint-Gobain, Société Générale, and Paribas, the investment bank later acquired by Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP). It was a position of phenomenal influence that Messier used to its full advantage. The most powerful businessmen would arrive at the finance ministry, cap in hand, to negotiate a piece of the action. They would be greeted by a cherubic, rosy-cheeked Messier, who later admitted to fattening himself up to look older than his years. At first he watched the comings and goings of French industrialists with fascination, but he soon mastered the complex web of relationships that still characterizes the country’s business life. Modest and still smiling, he listened and made himself available at all hours. Balladur displayed complete confidence in him, as did many leading industrialists. The media soon got wind of the young man in the finance ministry being credited with single-handedly reshaping the French business landscape. When the possibility of the next step arose, all professional careers were open to him. By the time the June 1988 elections ended “cohabitation”—the term given to describe the situation in which the two branches of the French executive, the presidency and the government, are occupied by politicians from opposing political parties—Messier had received seventeen offers of employment, including one from Générale des Eaux. With the defeat of Jacques Chirac, then the incumbent prime minister and the center-right’s candidate for the presidency, executive power had been reunified in the hands of the Socialists, led by François Mitterrand, who won a second seven-year term as president. The privatization program enacted by the Chirac government since 1986 was expected to grind to a sudden halt. France’s returning Socialist Party had by then adopted a policy known as the “ni-ni” rule—neither privatization nor nationalization. For Messier, this meant that it was time to look elsewhere. His days of calling the shots from the finance ministry were over.

He had seen it all coming. In late 1987, before the defeat of the Right, he had decided to join Lazard Frères, the go-go merchant bank of the 1980s. After privatizing vast swaths of French banking and industry, he proceeded to privatize himself. Based in the chic Eighth Arrondissement, on the edge of the parc de Monceau, Lazard Frères called the shots in Parisian business. The bank existed in an atmosphere straight out of Balzac, with plush red sitting rooms from the Second Empire, ushers patrolling the corridors, warning lights flickering over the doors of occupied meeting rooms, and, above all, an atmosphere of ferocious jealousy and intrigue. Michel David-Weill, the chairman whose family controlled the bank, encouraged the internal competition: one way or another, the business would end up going to Lazard, he reasoned. Many found the atmosphere intolerable, but not Jean-Marie Messier. He passed the first few months at the New York office, where he learned about the “information superhighway” and the imminent convergence of television and telecommunications; but in 1989 he returned to France to exploit his political connections. At the tender age of thirty-three, he became a managing partner of Lazard Frères in Paris.

France is a country run by networks, and Messier’s address book began to bulge. He would be seen at concerts, at the opera, in the smartest Parisian restaurants, and as the host of grand dinners and lunches in the bank’s dining rooms. Aware that power in France was shifting away from the old administrative caste, Messier cultivated a more entrepreneurial set and became president of the Club of 40. This brought together forty entrepreneurs who were younger than forty years old when the club was founded. Messier argued that the club was the opposite of the old-style network: “My idea of networks is ‘Let’s get people talking who should logically succeed together and who don’t know each other or have different specialities.’ That is not the network in the sense of everybody being the same and working together because everyone is the same—that is the old-style network.”4 Its members, who would meet at the Hôtel Raphaël at least once a month, included Patricia Barbizet, who would later become the right hand of François Pinault, founder of France’s most prominent retail group, Pinault Printemps Redoute; Jean-Marc Espalioux, then finance director of Générale des Eaux; Philippe Germond, at that time a manager with Hewlett-Packard; and Agnès Touraine, then working her way up the Hachette publishing group. Several of its members would later become his most loyal lieutenants at Vivendi Universal.

At the same time, he continued to cultivate his media image. Philippe Villin, a friend from ENA who had become number two at Le Figaro, helped by inviting him to many of the breakfasts and lunches the right-wing newspaper organized with the leading businessmen of the day. During the summers he would be found at Villin’s villa at Cavalaire, near St.-Tropez, where the newspaper’s socialite director entertained the rich and powerful. Within a short time of arriving at Lazard, Messier styled himself as the linchpin of French finance. More than two hundred people were invited to celebrate his tenth wedding anniversary in 1993. The networking bore fruit. After seeing Messier at the Orchestre de Paris, Didier Pineau-Valencienne, chairman of Schneider Electric, hired him to advise on the electrical components group’s $2.2 billion takeover of Square D, a U.S. company. After friendly approaches failed, Pineau-Valencienne, egged on by Messier, decided to launch a hostile bid, never before attempted by a French group in the United States. Then the biggest French acquisition in the North American market, the deal sealed Messier’s place as one of the leading bankers in Paris.

After Square D, many of the bank’s most sensitive dossiers landed on his desk. He helped Jean- Luc Lagardère, France’s media-to-missiles magnate, recover from a disastrous foray into French free-to-air broadcasting, and Bernard Arnault to develop his luxury goods group. The right’s victory in the 1993 elections and Edouard Balladur’s appointment as prime minister, a post he would hold until his defeat by Jacques Chirac in the race to be the right-wing candidate for the 1995 presidential election, further increased Messier’s prestige and influence. The return of the right to government saw the launch of a second wave of privatizations, this time of the Elf oil group, the BNP, and the Rhône-Poulenc chemicals group, then run by Jean-René Fourtou. Lazard’s success owed much to Messier. “Edouard Balladur thinks...Edouard Balladur says”— Messier never missed an opportunity to flaunt his ties with the prime minister. Other partners in the investment bank found themselves abandoned by their clients. “You understand,” they would be told, “he’s close to Balladur.” His success inspired jealousy among his peers, but the rainmakers adored him. Antoine Bernheim, the veteran investment banker and chairman of Generali, the Italian insurance group, said he considered his former Lazard Frères colleague “one of the most remarkable personalities of his generation...I very much regret that he did not choose to pursue his career at Lazard.”5

However, Messier knew he would never reach the top of the merchant bank. One man stood in his way: Edouard Stern. “Would I have been able to tempt him away without Edouard?” Ambroise Roux, the man who eventually lured Messier to run Générale des Eaux, would later ask. Stern was young, a talented financier and, most importantly, son-in-law of Michel David- Weill. Messier was under no illusions as to what this meant. In this type of organization, family ties always took precedence. At thirty-seven, he recoiled at the idea that his career could be blocked, and decided to leave Lazard. Didier Pineau-Valencienne, who professed to love him almost as a son, was the first to think of him as a possible successor at Schneider Electric. In his eyes Messier had the ideal qualifications: he was young, knew the group, and would accept his legacy. Messier indicated that he would accept. He met him more and more often to talk about the group and even appropriated Pineau-Valencienne’s motto, a few lines from the poet René Char, as his own: “Create your luck, seize your good fortune and embrace risk: they’ll get used to you.”* In May 1994, when the chairman of Schneider was arrested by the Belgian authorities for fraud, Messier was there to support the executive’s family and mount the defense. The business world assumed the succession was in the bag.

But Messier had plans, and they did not include Schneider. His eye was on the big prize: Générale des Eaux. The company was like a state within a state. Surprisingly, in view of the scale of state ownership in France, water management had long been considered a private-sector activity. Générale des Eaux had won its first municipal contract in 1853, under the reign of Napoleon III. From its origins in water supply and sewage, the group had gradually expanded into other local utility services. A move toward greater decentralization in 1982 encouraged local mayors to contract many other public services to private companies. Used to negotiating with local authorities, Générale des Eaux had the political contacts to ensure that it was the prime beneficiary. Its influence became tentacular. In some towns, it controlled almost everything: water, sewage, heating, transport, cable television, cinemas, school and hospital catering, hospital and clinic management, contracts to maintain public spaces and public housing, and even dry cleaning and pest control. As the owner of France’s second-largest construction company, it was also one of the biggest land and property owners in the country. It owned more than a third of La Défense, the modern high-life business district to the west of Paris, and prestigious commercial centers such as the Carrousel du Louvre in the heart of Paris.

The unofficial power and influence of Générale des Eaux seemed even greater. Guy Dejouany, its long-standing chairman, was a connoisseur of France’s electoral map. Its primary rival in the public utilities market was Lyonnaise des Eaux, run by Jérôme Monod, former boss of Jacques Chirac’s political machine. Both groups used all the means at their disposal to win municipal contracts. Taking advantage of the deliberately opaque party funding laws, they became important sources of financing for the major political parties. Both companies had “their” mayors and “their” deputies and made the influencing of local officials their core competence. However, by the mid-1990s, Générale des Eaux was in a bad way, and beneath its solid appearance, was collapsing under its debts. The income from its various business lines was insufficient to cover losses from speculative property developments. Worse still, the justice system had just embarked on what would become an epic investigation into political party funding and corruption. Générale des Eaux and Lyonnaise des Eaux were among the judges’ primary targets. The business establishment, frustrated at the stench of scandal that had hung over the place de Paris since the collapse of Crédit Lyonnais under Haberer, demanded that Dejouany take action to put his house in order.

At the age of seventy-three “and a half,” as he liked to add, Dejouany was still without a successor. Several brilliant young men had been enthroned as his heir apparent in the past, but none had survived the wily old chameleon. He could dither no longer. He needed to put forward a name and do so quickly. Four years earlier he had used Messier’s services for the acquisition of a small U.S. company called Air and Water Technologies, and he held a favorable impression of the young banker. “Why not Messier?” Dejouany asked Ambroise Rouxone, one of the most influential behind-the-scenes operators in France, and deputy chairman of Générale des Eaux, at the end of 1993. A friend since their days at the Ecole Polytechnique, Roux supported the idea. They agreed to put Messier to the test by asking him to find a formula that would allow Générale des Eaux to take control of Canal Plus. A large minority shareholder in the pay-television channel since its creation in 1984, Dejouany wished to increase his 20-percent stake in the company that at that time represented Générale des Eaux’s principal source of profit. Canal Plus’s founding chairman, André Rousselet, a close friend and adviser of the Socialist President François Mitterrand, cultivated a tetchy independence from both his shareholders and the right-wing government.

Conveniently for Dejouany, the new right-wing government of Edouard Balladur had just relaxed the law that limited any one shareholder from owning more than 25 percent of a national broadcaster, taking the threshold up to 49 percent. Dejouany informed Messier that he wished to control 49 percent of Canal Plus without spending a single centime. The Lazard banker quickly found a solution, arranging a shareholder pact between Générale des Eaux and two other shareholders: the Havas publishing, advertising, and media conglomerate, which owned 24 percent, and Société Générale, with 5 percent. The three together would reach the magic figure. With the agreement of the others, Générale des Eaux could exercise control in the name of all three. When Rousselet heard of the pact, he resigned from the company he had founded, claiming to be the victim of a political coup. “Edouard [Balladur] has killed me,” he wrote in a tirade that was published on the front page of Le Monde. Dejouany was doing the dirty work for the new Balladur administration, which cared little for the independent-minded television station that had long been protected by Mitterrand and the Left, he claimed. Observers commented that Rousselet had blamed the wrong man: “It wasn’t Edouard that killed him; it was Jean-Marie.”

The episode marked the beginning of Messier’s relationship with Pierre Lescure, then Rousselet’s number two at the pay-television company. For a time, there would be a sense that Lescure’s role in the coup against his boss had been ambiguous, which, in some people’s minds, initially diminished his legitimacy as a successor. In any event, Lescure was the prime beneficiary of the coup d’état against Rousselet, and he owed his premature promotion to Jean-Marie Messier. The success of the operation convinced Dejouany to name Messier as his successor. He gave Ambroise Roux the job of negotiating his arrival. At the time it was said that Edouard Balladur had strongly supported the nomination of his protégé to the head of Générale des Eaux. Dejouany later disputed this: “Edouard Balladur was hostile to the recruitment. When he was presented as the favorite to win the [1995] presidential election, he feared being criticized for placing his men in positions of influence. He telephoned Ambroise Roux during the summer of 1994 to try and stop the operation. ‘Too late,’ Roux replied. ‘The patient is already on the operating table.’ Afterward, Balladur continued to hold it against me and would hardly speak to me.”

At the beginning of November 1994, Messier, at the age of thirty-seven, was named chief executive of Générale des Eaux and designated successor to Guy Dejouany. Only one board member, Jacques Calvet, chairman of the car manufacturer Peugeot, opposed the appointment: “How can anyone even think of entrusting a group with two hundred thousand employees to someone who has never managed more than his own secretary?” The likable young banker stood in sharp contrast to his predecessor. Messier brought a breath of fresh air into the oppressive world of Générale des Eaux, a group that deliberately refused to draw up an organization chart and lacked clear lines of responsibility. Dejouany did not even permit meetings. “Three is a demonstration,” he would say when more than two people entered his office. Its headquarters on the rue d’Anjou, a small Paris backstreet, was a labyrinth whose lights would be extinguished at half past eight every evening, the moment Dejouany left the premises. Barely installed as chief executive, Messier created a committee of senior managers and started collegial discussions about the most important issues facing the company—notably the crisis in the group’s property arm and the numerous legal threats. Information started to circulate. Messier also announced the end of all clandestine party financing. “Between the loss of a market and illegal financing, the choice is clear: it is better to lose the market,” he decreed.

A lump in his throat, Guy Dejouany could not hide his emotion in front of the shareholder meeting at La Défense. On June 10, 1996, at the end of a long speech, Dejouany turned the page after forty-three years at Générale des Eaux. To the end, to Messier’s intense annoyance, Dejouany tried to play for extra time, to obtain a year or two more as chairman. But even those closest to him said it was time to go. Everyone wanted to draw a line under an era of scandal. Barely a day passed without investigating judges launching fresh corruption probes into Générale des Eaux. Dejouany himself had been questioned about alleged corruption by a judge from Réunion in May 1995 in a case concerning the water-supply concession on the island. The affair, it seemed, was serious. A court case was in the offing that could even threaten him with prison. The pressure on him to leave with honor while there was still time was acute. In the end, the state prosecutor announced that the case against Dejouany was to be dismissed only on June 11, the day after he had handed over the chairmanship to his chief executive. “You will be the ninth chairman in 143 years,” he told Jean-Marie Messier. “Try not to bring down the average.”