#16 - Old Story

Today, everybody talks about impact, as if this concept was revolutionary… but entrepreneurs have always been investing for impact ! And not only with impact.

As I was discussing this topic with Matthias Colboc , a young talented journalist, I came to mention the Delessert family. They are an exemple (pointed out to me by Guillaume DESNOES ??) both of early capitalism and “impact investing” in France.

Matthias wrote an article on the family which I translate (and adapt slightly) hereafter:

The origins of financial planning

The origins of savings in France can be traced back to a name, or rather, a family: the Delesserts. Originally from Geneva, Benjamin Delessert settled in Lyon in 1725. He founded a family business trading in silks and banking. étienne Delessert, his youngest son, took over the business in 1777 and moved to Paris. There, he managed the portfolios of the capital's rentiers and built up a solid reputation. As a result, in 1787 he and his partners initiated the first experiment in provident insurance : the "Royale-Vie".

This "Compagnie royale d'assurances sur la vie", or "Royale-Vie", was one of the first attempts in this field. But they did not provide savers with a real, stable guarantee - a sine qua non for such an undertaking. Speculation reigned supreme, in the hands of chance and overly risky bets. The revolution of 1789 put an end to the Compagnie Royale. But the idea remained. In 1795, étienne's son Benjamin Delessert took over the family business.

Before "Royale-Vie", there were already a number of charitable organizations dedicated to fighting poverty and need - in the purest spirit of Christian charity. The poor, the sick, the infirm... had their places of survival, their means of seeing tomorrow - but what about the day after? Or the day after that? At the time, it was a band-aid, an attempt to treat the disease directly; but there was no question of getting to the root of it. For the public authorities of the time, the issue was neither forward-looking nor truly structural.

Basically, how could we prevent the misery we were trying to cure on a day-to-day basis?

The notions of foresight and thrift, in the sense of saving, keeping for the eventuality, tried to remedy this evil, and the "sacred asylum of foresight" gradually came into being. Until then, there had been nothing but haphazard attempts, with petty bourgeois and blue-collar workers gambling away their meagre savings in the national lottery - without any real lasting success. On the whole, the periods leading up to and following the Revolution were economically complicated. With regular bouts of inflation and highly volatile stock markets. It was a complicated time for those who didn't own land.

Financial Enlightenment

The Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment advanced perceptions of foresight. In 1791, Mirabeau became an advocate of savings at the National Assembly. Debating a draft "life tontine and amortisation plan", he uttered these words:

"Since beggary is almost the same among the richest peoples and among the poorest nations, it is not therefore in the inequality of fortunes that we must seek the true cause, it is entirely in the improvidence of the future, in the corruption of morals and above all in this continual consumption without replacement which would turn all land into desert, if nature were not wiser than man."

Man had not yet taken power over Nature...

But coming back to the Delesserts: even if savings and foresight seemed to be in the air at the time, the individual initiatives of Etienne and then his son Benjamin were absolutely essential to this societal evolution. According to historian Séverine de Coninck, the influence and trajectory of the Delessert family is closely linked to two elements:

On the one hand, religion. Of Protestant origins, the family's Calvinist philosophy was tinged with sobriety. Gone were the glitz and glamour of Parisian high society and its lavish lifestyle.

As Séverine de Coninck explains, this religious discipline strengthened the bonds between the members of the Delessert family and formed a kind of moral line around which each would develop in the economic world of the time. With this approach, the historian illustrates the importance of family ties. Taking the example of the wills left by various members of the Delessert family, she evokes a solidarity worthy of "a veritable apology for the family".

On the other hand, a "philanthropic vocation". Benjamin, étienne's eldest son, was behind the family's main philanthropic endeavours. He was involved in food distribution, helped restore the old Philanthropic Society and took part in the works of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Prisons.

But it is his actions in favour of economic foresight that left a lasting mark in history. In 1818, he founded France's first savings bank, the "Caisse d'épargne et de prévoyance de Paris", today one of the pillars with "Banque Polupaire" of BPCE, the third largest bank in France.

Investing for Impact

The legal status of Société Anonyme (SA) is nowadays more closely associated with France's large CAC 40 companies. But in the 1807 version of the Code of Commerce, this status is restricted to public-interest endeavours too large to be carried out by one family. It is only in 1867 an 1893 that this status will be relaxed to become what we know today. So in 1818, Benjamin Delessert's Caisse d'Epargne was at its core what we would call today an Impact Company.

Some of you may have noticed that I renamed this letter "Makers of Change". I hope to alternate thoughts about the levers of change with examples of those who actually push these levers, sometimes too discretely. There are many people out there doing great things! And just as many stories to get inspiration from. Also, the previous name, "Φ4δ", was a bit of a pain to type on a French keyboard... :)

As usual, these letters are meant to open a discussion. If you have other examples of early impact companies, or of people doing great things today and that you think I should feature in upcoming letters, please share in the comments below!