Tom Sancton - The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping That Brought Down an Empire

His friends called him Wado, but the world knew him as Baron douard-Jean Empain. With his longish blond hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones, he could have been mistaken for a movie starsome people compared him to Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Tall, square-shouldered, and athletic, he had been a champion skier and horseman in his youth. Now, at age forty, he was the head of an industrial empire that comprised 174 companies and employed 136,000 workers in fields ranging from mining and metallurgy to banking, heavy construction, shipbuilding, armaments, and nuclear energy.

Empain was half American and half Belgian, but his headquarters, his sumptuous apartment, and his ancestral chteau were in France, where he enjoyed a position of almost unrivaled influence. His conglomerate was so central to French economic and security interests that the papers dubbed him le Krupp franaisan allusion to the Krupp industrial dynasty that supplied armaments to German regimes from the Thirty Years War to the end of the Third Reich. Hailed as a member of the international gentry, Baron Empain was the first foreigner to be named a director of Le Patronat, the powerful French employers association. His personal credo was that of the classic capitalist: work, family, property.

The stars seemed to be aligning nicely for Empain in this pivotal decade of the 1970s. He had the good fortune to seize the helm of the Empain group during the surge of economic expansion known as the trente glorieuses, Frances three decades of rapid growth following World War II. The oil shock of 1973 marked the beginning of a slowdown, but for the young baron, it was another stroke of luck: In 1975 his Framatome subsidiary won a monopoly to build sixteen new nuclear plants after the government decided to base its energy needs almost exclusively on atomic power as a hedge against oil dependency. As a result, Empain became one of Frances most powerful figures, known to the press as Monsieur Nuclairerespected, even feared, by the countrys political leadership. The authoritative daily Le Monde dubbed him the shining symbol of transnational capitalism.

Despite the rising inflation and unemployment triggered by the oil shock, it was a dynamic decade, a time of modernization, innovation, and dramatic technological advances. Under a thicket of cranes, the very face of Paris was changing. One of the biggest urban transformations of the 70sthe demolition of the historic Les Halles central food marketoccasioned a massive excavation to build an underground shopping mall and a central hub joining the subway system with the suburban train network. To the west of the capital, work continued on the bristling clutch of Manhattan-style skyscrapers that loomed on the horizon at La Dfense. On the Left Bank, the sleek fifty-eight-story Tour Montparnasse, the first (and so far only) skyscraper in the heart of Paris, was completed in 1973. At the Place Beaubourg, the Pompidou art center, a controversial construction wrapped in multicolored, industrial-looking pipes, opened its doors in 1977.