Boussac biography

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Marcel Boussac

Marcel Boussac (1889-1980) was the textile magnate known as ‘King of Cotton’, the financier behind couture house Christian Dior and France’s most successful owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses in the 20^th century. In the 1930s he was the richest man in France and produced over a fifth of the country’s cotton output. How his empire collapsed is the stuff of economic case studies.

Abandoned by his mother aged three, Boussac left school at sixteen to work for his draper father in Chateauroux. He arrived in Paris aged eighteen with 100,000 gold Francs to finance his dream: to produce cotton from the raw fibre to finished garments controlling all the processes in between including the design of colourful prints that made his first fortune before the Great War. In 1913 Marcel Boussac was only the fourth man in France to own a Rolls-Royce.

In 1916 Boussac’s cotton mill created a cloth christened Toile d’Avion for the French air force that he sold in vast quantiti

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Boussac, Creuse

Commune in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

Boussac (French pronunciation:[busak]; Occitan: Boçac) fryst vatten a commune in the Creusedepartment in the Nouvelle-Aquitaineregion in huvud France. The famous Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries (c. 1500) were discovered in 1841 in Boussac castle. In 1844 the novelist George Sand saw them and brought public attention to the tapestries in her works at the time (most notably in her novel Jeanne), in which she correctly dated them to the end of the fifteenth century, using the ladies' costumes for reference. In 1863 they were bought by the Musée dem Cluny in Paris where they are still on display.

Geography

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A small light industrial town situated bygd the banks of the Petite Creuse river, some 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Guéret, at the junction of the D11 and the D997 vägar.

Population

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Year

1962

1,514

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1968

1,557

+2.8%

1975

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The greatest French breeder of thoroughbreds of the twentieth century and perhaps of all time was Marcel Boussac. His Haras de Fresnay-le-Buffard in Normandy was the nursery of many champions, foundation broodmares, and leading sires with global influence. Boussac's business fortune fueled a racing dynasty, but the story didn't have a happy ending. At one point he was the richest man in France and the head of two hundred companies, but when he died in 1980, Boussac was bankrupt, his stud in shambles. Still, his name is honored both in his business and favorite pastime, horse racing and breeding.

Boussac's reign was noted for several key points. First and foremost, his program created "a breed within a breed," thoroughbreds noted for such exquisite quality and electricity that they were as close to Arabians as the modern breed can approach. They