Simon Lazard

From the first they dealt in gold dust, in exchange for goods to miners, then as separate purchase of precious metal bullion (or, in reality, a crude dore bar), which they shipped back to France for assay and sales. Beginning with a shipment in March 1851 of $5,000 in nuggets and dust, by 1853 they had shipped over a quarter-million dollars' worth of precious metals. Simon’s initial trade-dust and bullion business expanded to include currency exchanges and banknotes.

Profits from these activities were funneled into real estate investments, offerings of loans and mortgages, and other businesses, part of what had become a bank in all but name. About 1860, looking for new business opportunities, Simon purchased a part of the Mission Woolen Mills and, later, the Pacific Woolen Mills, which profited from government contracts especially during the Civil War.

Simon, or rather Lazard Frères & Co., expanded its investments, especially after the 1859 silver discovery of the Comstock Lode in Nevada. With Joseph Aron, Elie and Simon managed silver-bullion shipments between California and Paris and helped finance the Sutro Tunnel Company to bore four miles into the hill below the lode. Aron served as the tunnel-company president before moving to New York City in 1876. The firm also loaned funds to operations and became part owners, usually through mortgage foreclosures of mining properties, including the Brunswick mine on the lode and the rich Raymond & Ely silver mine at Pioche, Nevada. These sometimes risky speculations continuously caused rifts among the more conservative brothers and their extended family.

Family

Simon Lazard was born to a Jewish family on April 8, 1828, in Frauenberg, Moselle, Lorraine, in northeast France. He was the son of Elie Lazard (1796–1831), a farmer, and Esther (née Aron, 1798–1875). His father died when he was three, and his mother was remarried to Moïse Cahn (1796–1872), also of Frauenberg. He was the fifth oldest of the household’s eleven children, seven fathered by Elie and four by Moïse, a close-knit family. Note: In early American newspapers, for the younger half-brother and half-sister Cahn siblings, the name Cahn Lazard was sometimes used, recognition of a connection to their elder Lazard half-siblings. That name is used here.

Family in America

As the dry goods business grew, more help was needed and younger members of the family were brought from France to San Francisco. During the 1850s and early 1860s, younger half-brothers Simon Sylvain Cahn Lazard (1837-1871) and David Cahn Lazard (1843-1916) became salesmen, clerks, or bookkeepers, while cousins fr:Alexandre Weill (banquier) and Henri Weill, and Maurice Kremer and Solomon Lazard (before they opened their own store in 1852 Los Angeles) worked for the firm. (cousins Alexandre and Henri’s sister, Esther Weill, married Lazard brother Maurice; Alexandre Weill strengthened his bond to the Lazards by marrying their youngest sister, Julie Cahn Lazard, in 1867). The brothers Lazard also helped with their brother-in-law Theodore Weill’s tobacco-importing firm (sister Lisa [1826-1908] was his wife, and half-sister Adelaide Cahn Lazard [1838-1892] married his partner, Joseph Aron, who was the later Sutro tunnel project president). The closeness of the Lazard-Cahn-Weill-Aron family and primogenitor laws has been pointed to as one of the financial and social strengths of the Lazard Frères firm in the nineteenth century.

In 1867, Simon Lazard married Eve Rose Hélène Foy (1846-1915) and was the father of six children, including Lazard Frères banker André Lazard, an economist and sociologist fr:Max Lazard and Esther Lazard Fould, married to French industrialist fr:René Fould. He died at his home at 48 rue des Belles Feuilles in Paris, February 24, 1898.

Simon was also active in the wider social and political movements. In October 1850, he joined with 12 other young men to form San Francisco’s Eureka Benevolent Society. They provided funds and help with those who might be in want. During the early years, antiforeigner sentiment was felt for non-English speakers and as tensions rose some anti-French violence was threatened. Civil law calmed the situation, but, in 1851, Simon with his multi-lingual brothers became American citizens, he said that it was "a mere formality, but the law required me.” Simon became active in the People’s Reform Party, organized to expose fraud in local government, cut taxes, and expand the liberal vote. He also was active later in the French Benevolent Society of California. Lazard Frères also donated funds to an odd mix of causes: the Polish independence movement, the National Sanitary Fund of the Civil War era, a Jewish child threatened by Italian priests in Rome, and a national French Patriotism movement of the Franco-Prussian War era. In 1871, when those in San Franciscans raised funds to aid the victims of the Franco-Prussian War in France, they sent the 112,000 francs to Simon to distribute.