Pereire brothers
The brothers' grandfather was Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, one of the inventors of sign language for the deaf, who was born in Spain and established himself in France in 1741, where he became an interpreter for King Louis XV.
Jacob Rodrigues Pereire (as he went by in French) married Miriam Lopès Dias, a Sephardic Jew from Bayonne, in Bordeaux in 1766.
Several of the Pereire children married into established families of French haute finance and business elite.
Eugène Pereire, Isaac's elder son, led much of the remaining family business upon his father's death in 1880.
His granddaughter Noémie Halphen married Maurice de Rothschild from the family of the Pereires' longstanding competitors.
These included: Even though the Pereires were not involved, their success with the Crédit Mobilier was taken as a model for the creation in 1856 of the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft, the Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt [de], and the Stockholms Enskilda Bank.
[1]: 38 In November 1871, Isaac acquired the conservative newspaper La Liberté from Émile de Girardin, and heavily influenced its editorial line in the later 1870s.
Without a doubt, had the Credit Mobilier not been there to steer and move them forward, the policy of the Empire, as it would have been forced to compromise with the Haute Banque, could not have been as bold and unconstrained as it was.
[5]In 1852 the Pereires bought a vast estate in Gretz-Armainvilliers and commissioned their favorite architect Alfred Armand [fr] to build a palatial country house there in the early 1860s, the Château d'Armainvilliers, to rival the Rothschilds' nearby Château de Ferrières; it was bombed by mistake by the US Air Force in 1944 and demolished in 1950.
In 1855 they acquired their urban mansion, the Hotel Pereire on 35-37 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, initially built in 1713, and had it extensively renovated until 1859, also by Armand.
These included the Gare Saint-Lazare, first opened in 1842 as one of the main railway stations in Paris;[1]: 92, 385 the Parc Monceau neighborhood in Paris, on grounds around the park which they purchased from the Orléans family in 1861;[2]: 156 the Rue de la République [fr] in Marseille, started by Jules Mirès [fr] and continued by the Pereires; and the holiday resort of Arcachon, developed from 1862.
