Alphonse and his brother Gustave developed somewhat of a rivalry with their English cousin Nathaniel de Rothschild who had moved to Paris after marrying their sister Charlotte.

Nathaniel worked at de Rothschild Frères bank and in 1853 he purchased the Château Brane Mouton vineyard in Pauillac in the Médoc wine growing region.

Just three months before their father died in 1868, Alphonse and Gustave convinced him to buy the more prestigious First Growth Château Lafite vineyard in Pauillac when it came up for sale.

Initially, Alphonse had an influential supporter for his position through his long friendship with statesman Léon Say, a former employee of the Rothschild's Chemin de Fer du Nord who became the French Minister of Finance in 1872.

France made a dramatic financial recovery and repaid the reparations bill ahead of schedule which, under terms of the armistice, brought about an end to the German occupation of northern French territory in 1873.

The collapse of the investment bank Société de l'Union Générale precipitated the 1882 stock market crash that triggered a downturn in the economy.

In 1889, the Comptoir d'Escompte de Paris bank went into receivership and shortly thereafter the Panama scandals erupted, culminating in an official enquiry into the matter conducted in 1893 by the French parliament.

His intense pressure pushed back the abrogation project of the décret Crémieux filed by the chief of the provisional government, Adolphe Thiers in 1871.

He eventually purchased a rural property near Touques, Calvados in the Lower Normandy region where he built the Haras de Meautry horse breeding farm.