François Coty

Joseph Marie François Spoturno was born on 3 May 1874 in Ajaccio, Corsica. He claimed to be a descendant of Isabelle Bonaparte, an aunt of Napoleon Bonaparte. His parents were Jean-Baptiste Spoturno and Marie-Adolphine-Françoise Coti, both descendants of Genoese settlers who founded Ajaccio in the 15th century. His parents died when he was a child and the young François was raised by his great-grandmother, Marie Josephe Spoturno, and after her death, by his grandmother, Anna Maria Belone Spoturno, who lived in Marseille.

After spending some years in military service, François met a fellow Corsican named Emmanuel Arène. A politician, writer, and future senator, Arène became François's mentor, offering him a job in Paris as his secretary. In Paris, François married Yvonne Alexandrine Le Baron and took the more French-looking name Coty, a variation on his mother's maiden name. He also met Raymond Goery, a pharmacist who made and sold perfume at his Paris shop. Coty began to learn about perfumery from Goery and created his first fragrance, Cologne Coty.

Coty and Yvonne had two children, Roland and Christiane. Despite his marriage, Coty was well known for his numerous mistresses and illegitimate children. He was known to house his lovers in Paris' Hotel Astoria, and to lavish money and gifts on them. His first mistress then second wife was Henriette Dieudé, a former Coty shopgirl who bore him five children. Coty's love life was widely publicized in the French liberal newspapers, to the detriment of his public image.

Coty had a penchant for acquiring and remodeling property. His first major purchase was the Château de Longchamp in 1906, near the Bois de Boulogne, once the property of the famous French civic planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Coty used it as a laboratory in which to design his fragrances, bottles, packaging, and advertisements. The renovated Longchamp included a glass dome by Lalique and a stone tower designed by Gustave Eiffel.

In 1912, he bought the Château d'Artigny near Tours and set out to rebuild it. Over a period of 20 years, Coty rebuilt d'Artigny in a grandiose fashion, installing custom-built kitchens, ballrooms, and a large fresco depicting himself, his family, friends, and even his mistresses. During the 1920s, he resided with his family in a mansion at Avenue Raphael in the Bois de Boulogne, which Coty had rebuilt with etched-glass panels, a stair rail, and a glass ceiling designed by Lalique.

Coty's most famous acquisition was the hunting pavilion of Louveciennes near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, designed by Claude Nicholas Ledoux for Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV. Coty had Louveciennes rebuilt to match Ledoux's original plan, but enlarged it to include a perfume laboratory and a third story. He also bought the Château Saint-Hélène in Nice, the Villa Namouna in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, and Le Scudo in Ajaccio, Corsica. Though he owned multiple large residences, Coty often lived in a hotel on the Champs-Élysées. He was something of a recluse, disliking crowds of any kind, and hiding behind his public image.

After 1929, Coty's fortunes began to diminish considerably. Both Figaro and L'Ami du peuple had been losing money for years and his perfume business had been affected by the 1929 Wall Street crash. But it was his divorce that most contributed to his financial ruin.

In 1929, Yvonne divorced Coty and married Leon Cotnareanu. Their divorce settlement stipulated that Coty would pay his ex-wife several millions of francs in three installments, but in 1931 Coty defaulted on the last payment, citing financial hardship. Over the next few years, divorce courts ruled in favor of Yvonne, and granted her ownership of most of Coty's fortune and his newspapers.

He died in 1934 at his home in Louveciennes, of pneumonia and complications after an aneurysm.

In 1963, Yvonne sold Coty to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, with the stipulation that no member of the Coty family would be involved in the company. Under Pfizer, the company began to distribute its perfumes almost exclusively through drugstores, instead of in department stores as it had previously done. In 1992, Pfizer sold Coty to the German company Joh. A. Benckiser GmbH, which owns it today.

In 1923, after a close race, Coty was elected senator of Corsica, but his victory proved short-lived. The French Senate annulled his election in 1924 after accusations of bribery.

In 1922, Coty bought Le Figaro, a prestigious conservative newspaper with an upper-class readership. Coty changed the newspaper's name to Figaro and moved its headquarters to the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées. Under Coty's ownership, the journal, once moderately conservative, adopted an extreme right-wing stance on politics and the economy. Figaro printed many fierce anti-Communist articles, and was notorious for its strong opposition to the government. He also subsidized "half a dozen extremist papers, including the Action française (to which he gave over five million francs), Cassagnac's Bonapartist Authorité and Le Flambeau, the organ of the Croix de Feu."

In 1926, Coty worked with Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to create a fund to stabilize the French currency. He offered to lend 100 million francs to the French government, but was left out of the group appointed to oversee the fund, possibly because of his controversial political views. He then took his money to New York and donated a sizable sum to the French Hospital in New York.

Disappointed once again, in 1926, Coty launched L'Ami du peuple, a newspaper aimed at the working class. Priced much lower than other competing newspapers, it soon gained a huge readership. He wrote a long series of incendiary articles that did not go unnoticed; on 1 July 1933, he was found guilty in court for libel against Jewish war veterans' groups in France and in September 1933, he sent a telegram to the Geneva Jewish Community, in which he recanted his anti-Jewish charges and asked that the telegram be read at the Jewish Conference for a World Jewish Congress.

Coty gave financial support to what later became far-right organizations, such as the Faisceau and Croix-de-Feu, a World War I veterans organization; however, he ended his support after a few years. In 1933, surrounded by courtisans, parasites or scoundrels, misled by more seasoned politicians, he published "A Reform of the State" and founded his own movement: French Solidarity. After his death in July 1934, the movement became more radical.

Coty was a Bonapartist, nationalist, fervent defender of a strong Republic with a preponderance of executive power, like a number of his fellow citizens, in this period of the Third Republic. He wrote two books: Against Communism, 1928 and Save our colonies, 1931. In "A Reform of the State", he proposed the election of the President of the Republic by direct universal suffrage, including women's votes, with a term of seven years and the possibility of holding two terms, as well as the creation of a supreme court. These measures were in part, later adopted by the Fifth Republic, established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958.

The Stade François Coty in Ajaccio was named after him.