Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

His parents were Baron Maurice de Rothschild and Swiss Baroness Noémie Halphen, who divorced while he was a child. His mother was the granddaughter of financier Eugène Péreire of the Sephardic Jewish Péreire family of Portugal who were also banking and railroad rivals of the Rothschilds. His paternal grandfather was Baron Edmond de Rothschild. His cousins were Élie de Rothschild, Guy de Rothschild and Alain de Rothschild. In 1940 he was taken as a child by his mother to their family home, Château de Pregny in Pregny-Chambésy, in neutral Switzerland after his father, a senator in France, had refused to vote for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain in World War II and had been declared a noncitizen. As wealthy Jewish refugees, the reaction by the locals in Switzerland was so hostile that Edmond could not go to the local school but instead attended an international school in Geneva.

His father returned to Pregny after the Second World War having inherited three separate fortunes from the heads of the Naples, Frankfurt and Paris branches of the family bank. His father died in 1957 leaving his son about a billion francs (about $200 million USD).

In 1958 he married Bulgarian Veselinka Vladova Gueorguieva but they separated after two years; the marriage was later dissolved. In 1963, he married Nadine Nelly Jeannette L'Hopitalier, a French actress of working-class background. She was Roman Catholic, but converted to Judaism. She later stated: "It would not have been possible to have the name Rothschild and be a Catholic...Nor would it be right for the son of a Rothschild to be half-Jewish and half-Catholic." They had one son, Benjamin de Rothschild, shortly after their marriage.