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 François Coty (born Joseph Marie François Spoturno dit Coti; 3 May 1874, Ajaccio, Corsica – 25 July 1934, Louveciennes) was a French perfume manufacturer and the founder of the fascist league Solidarité Française, a paramilitary organization founded in 1933, during Edouard Daladier's government supported by the Cartel des gauches (Left-Wings' Coalition).
[edit] Early Life and FamilyJoseph Marie François Spoturno dit Coti was born on 3 May 1874 in Ajaccio, Corsica. He was a descendant of Isabelle Bonaparte, an aunt of Napoleon [1] :9 . His parents were Jean-Baptiste Spoturno and Marie-Adolphine-Françoise Coti, both descendants of Genoese settlers who founded Ajaccio in the 15th century. His parents died when he was a child and the young François was raised by his great-grandmother, Marie Josephe Spoturno, and after her death, by his grandmother, Anna Maria Belone Spoturno, who lived in Marseille[2]:39. After spending some years in military service, François met a fellow Corsican named Emmanuel Arène. A politician, writer, and future senator, Arène became François's mentor, offering him a job in Paris as his secretary. In Paris François married Yvonne Alexandrine Le Baron and took the more French-looking name Coty, a variation on his mother's maiden name. He also met Raymond Goery, a pharmacist who made and sold perfume at his Paris shop. Coty began to learn about perfumery from Goery and created his first fragrance, Cologne Coty [2]:49. [edit] PerfumerThrough Arène, Coty met Antoine Chiris, a senator and member of the Chiris family, longtime manufacturers and distributors of perfume. At the Chiris factories in Grasse, Coty studied perfumery and began work on a fragrance, La Rose Jacqueminot [2]:61. On his return to Paris in 1904, Coty set off to sell his scents to department stores, boutiques, and barbershops, but initially met with little success. His luck changed when he dropped a bottle of La Rose Jacqueminot on a countertop at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, the Parisian department store. Attracted by the scent, customers swarmed the area, demanding to buy the perfume. Coty's entire stock was gone in a few minutes and the store offered him a place on the selling floor for his products [1] :14. The success of La Rose established Coty as a millionaire and a major player in the perfume world. Coty was both a talented perfumer and a brilliant marketer. He was the first to recognize that an attractive bottle was essential to a perfume's success. Though La Rose came in a Baccarat bottle, Coty's most famous collaboration was with the great ceramist and jeweler René Lalique. Lalique designed the bottles for Coty's early scents, such as Ambre Antique and L'Origan, which became bestsellers. He also designed the labels for Coty perfume, which were printed on a gold background with raised lettering.[3] Lalique's designs for Coty were in the Art Nouveau style that was prevalent in the period, and incorporated classic Art Nouveau themes such as nature, flowers, and female figures [4] :261. Besides pioneering the concept of bottle design, Coty was responsible for making perfume available to a mass market. Before Coty, perfume was considered a luxury item, affordable only to the very rich. Coty was the first to offer perfumes at many price points. His expensive perfumes, in their Lalique and Baccarat bottles, were aimed at the luxury market, but he also sold perfume in smaller, plainer bottles affordable to middle and working-class women. [5]Coty perfume bottles, though mass produced, were carefully designed to convey an image of luxury and prestige[4]. Coty also invented the idea of a fragrance set, a gift box containing identically scented items, such as a perfume and matching powder, soap, cream, and cosmetics. [2]:24  Coty summed up his approach to business when he said:
In 1908, Coty relocated his manufacturing headquarters to Suresnes, just outside Paris. He acquired property in the area and began to build what would become "La cité des Parfums", a large complex of laboratories and factories that manufactured his products. "La cité" had 9,000 employees and was able to manufacture up to 100,000 bottles a day [1]. This allowed Coty to meet the burgeoning demand for his products in France and abroad. After World War I, demand for French perfume grew at a rapid pace. Many American soldiers had been stationed in France during the war. Once it was over, many brought back Coty perfumes to their wives and relatives and as a result, demand grew. Coty realized the importance of the lucrative American market and began to distribute his products in the United States. [4] :260,261 In 1922, Coty created an American subsidiary in New York to handle the assembly and distribution of its products in the American market. The American offices assembled their own Coty products from raw materials sent by the Parisian factories, thus avoiding the high tariffs on luxury products in the United States. This allowed Coty to offer more competitive prices on its products [4]:261. Later, additional subsidiaries were established in the United Kingdom and Romania [5] Coty soon expanded his product line to include not just perfume, but cosmetics and skin care. His most popular product was his Air-spun face powder, launched in 1934. Coty collaborated with famous costume designer Léon Bakst to create the look of the Air-spun powder box. [2]:83 It became so popular that soon afterwards Coty launched the Air-spun powder scented with his most popular perfumes, such as L'origan and Emeraude. [6]  [edit] Involvement in PoliticsHe was one of the wealthiest men in France; in 1929, his fortune was estimated at 34 million [7]. Coty owned two Paris newspapers, the working class L'Ami du peuple and the aristocratic Le Figaro. He also bought the hunting pavilion of Louveciennes near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, once the property of Madame du Barry. He built multiple large residences, but lived in a hotel on the Champs-Élysées. Coty was something of a recluse, disliking crowds of any kind, and hiding behind his public image. The company he founded in 1904 is now Coty, Inc., based in New York City. The movement he founded drew on the previous Coty-backed far-right leagues the Faisceau and the Croix-de-Feu World War I veterans organization. While Marcel Bucard's Francisme imitated Fascism and Benito Mussolini, Solidarité Française looked more towards the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler. On July 1, 1933, François Coty was found guilty in court for libel against Jewish war veterans' groups in France.[citation needed] Never anything but marginal, the group peaked during the February 6, 1934 rally in front of the Palais Bourbon, when it attempted, in alliance with other far right leagues, to topple the Third Republic (Coty had the ambition of having it replaced with a monarchy]). The group was outlawed in 1936, through a decision taken by the Popular Front government. The Stade François Coty in Ajaccio was named after him. [edit] Personal LifeCoty and Yvonne had two children, Roland and Christiane. Despite his marriage, Coty was well-known for his numerous mistresses and illegitimate children [1] :23. He was known to house his lovers in Paris' Hotel Astoria, and to lavish money and gifts on them. His premier mistress was Henriette Daude, a former Coty shopgirl who bore him five children. Coty's love life was widely publicized in the French liberal newspapers. [2] In 1929, Yvonne divorced Coty and married Leon Cotnareanu. Over the next few years, divorce courts ruled in favor of Yvonne, and granted her ownership of most of Coty's fortune and his newspapers. [2] :207 [edit] List of creationsFrançois Coty was a pioneer in the field of perfumery, creating many notable masterpieces, including: [8]
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