Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Jacques Necker
Summary
Jacques Necker (ʒak nɛkɛʁ; 30 September 1732 – 9 April 1804) was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.
Necker held the finance post between July 1777 and 1781, when in the latter year, he earned widespread recognition for his unprecedented decision to publish the Compte rendu – thus making the country's budget public – "a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret." Necker was dismissed within a few months. By 1788, the inexorable compounding of interest on the national debt brought France to a fiscal crisis. Necker was recalled to royal service. His dismissal on 11 July 1789 was a factor in causing the Storming of the Bastille. Within two days, Necker was recalled by the king and the assembly. Necker entered France in triumph and tried to accelerate the tax reform process. Faced with the opposition of the Constituent Assembly, he resigned in September 1790 to a reaction of general indifference.
Necker was born on 30 September 1732 in Geneva to Karl Friedrich Necker and Jeanne-Marie Gautier. His father was a lawyer from Küstrin in Neumark, Prussia (now Kostrzyn nad Odrą, Poland). After publishing some works, Karl Friedrich was appointed professor of public law at the Academy of Geneva in 1725, and later served in the city's Council of Two Hundred. After studying at the Academy of Geneva, Necker moved to Paris in 1748 and became a clerk in the bank of Isaac Vernet and Peter Thellusson. Soon after he managed to learn Dutch and English. On one day, he replaced the first clerk in charge of trading on the stock exchange, and through a sequence of trades, he made a quick profit of half a million French livres. In 1762, Vernet retired and Necker became a partner in the bank with Thellusson who managed the bank in London, while Necker served as his managing partner in Paris.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.