Today, Dassault Aviation stands as a titan of the aviation industry, having produced some of the most iconic aircraft the industry has yet produced. But few know the story of Marcel Dassault, the company’s founder and whose vision guides the company even to this day!
One of France’s wealthiest and most successful businessmen at the time of his death, Marcel Dassault’s made lots of enemies, and ensured his aviation career was not as straightforward as you might think…
Early Life
The man who history would remember as Marcel Dassault was born as Marcel Ferdinand Bloch on January 22 1892 in Paris. Born into a French Jewish family, Marcel was the youngest of four children born to Adolphe Dassault, a doctor, and his wife Noemie Allatini.
Interestingly, through his mother, he was a grand-nephew of Moise Allatini, a mining tycoon from Salonica (then in the Ottoman Empire), a cousin of Darius Milhaud and a distant cousin of French banker Nissim de Camondo.
Other famous Bloch family relatives included French writers Francine Bloch and Jose de Berys (born Joseph Bloch) and French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
Educated at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet in Paris, Marcel developed an interest in technology and chose to pursue a career in the field. After graduating, he enrolled at the equally prestigious Breguet School, studying electrical engineering.
And it was here, at Breguet that Marcel’s true passion – aviation – would develop.
As he would often later lament, he developed an interest in aviation not because the school had been founded by one of France’s leading aviators at the time (Louis Breguet) but because of events that took place on October 19 1909:
That day saw French aviator and nobleman Charles de Lambert fly his Wright Flyer around the Eiffel Tower for the first time. By chance, Charles’ flight coincided with Marcel’s recreation and he watched from the courtyard.
Deciding then and there that aviation was his calling, he enrolled at the then-newly established National Aeronautic School (Supaéro), France’s premier aviation school, in Toulouse and graduated in 1913.
Incidentally, one of his classmates at Supaéro was a young Russian student called Mikhail Gurevich, a man who would later go on to co-found Mikoyan-Gurevich when he returned to the Soviet Union.
Their respective companies would go on to become rivals when the Cold War erupted, and their fighters would later square off on numerous occasions.
A Start in Aviation
Following graduation, Marcel found employment at the Chalais Meudon Aeronautical Laboratory, where he not only built on what he’d learned at Supaéro, but actively contributed to new developments in aviation.
Among his colleagues was Henry Potez, a fellow graduate of Supaéro, who worked with Marcel to design a brand new propeller for the First World War. What resulted was the Éclair propeller.
A revolutionary design by almost every metric, the French Army used the propeller on several new wartime fighters, including the SPAD S.VII, Caudron G.4 and Nieuport 12.
In 1916, Marcel and Henry were joined by Louis Coroller, a mechanic who’d graduated Supaéro in the same class as Marcel and had been a close friend, in founding a new aircraft manufacturer: Société d’Études Aéronautiques (SEA).
Ostensibly founded to produce SPAD S.VII fighters under license, Marcel and Henry used the company to submit their own fighter designs to the French Army. Though most weren’t of interest, the SEA IV was.
Derived from their earlier SEA II design, the French Army placed an order for 1,000 SEA IVs in 1918. The first SEA IVs were delivered in August and saw limited combat before the Armistice was signed in November.
With this peace, however, came ruin for most of France’s aircraft manufacturers. The end of the war saw the cancellation of almost all contracts for new fighters, including those for the SEA IV. All in all, only 115 of the original 1,000 order were ever built.
Before the year’s end, the three founders had agreed to liquidate the company and pursue other ventures.
For Marcel, this saw him dabble in real estate and to a lesser extent, furniture making and automobiles for the remainder of the 1910’s and majority of the 1920’s.
In 1919, Marcel Bloch married Madeleine Minckes, the daughter of a Paris cabinet maker who’d helped carve the SEA IV’s revolutionary propeller. The couple later had two children: Claude (born 1920) and Serge (born 1925).
Société des avions Marcel Bloch
In 1928, then-President of France Raymond Poincaré established a dedicated Air Ministry in the hopes of reinvigorating the country’s aviation industry, which had never recovered from its post-WWI collapse.
This, combined with his witnessing of the landing of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis after its transatlantic flight, convinced Marcel to get back into aviation. Accordingly, he incorporated Société des avions Marcel Bloch in 1929.
After an unsuccessful attempt at creating a tri-engine airmail aircraft, the company moved its focus towards military aircraft, such as the single engine MB.80 MEDEVAC and tri-engine MB.120 transport aircraft for the French Air Force (who subsequently used them extensively in their North African colonies).
The success of these two aircraft in particular led to rapid expansion by the company, who added new plants throughout France, most notably in Boulogne and Courbevoie, and formally separated its aircraft design and manufacturing businesses into two distinct divisions, making the design to construction process much smoother and allowing more aircraft to be built.
By late 1934, there was so much demand for the company’s aircraft – especially the MB.200 bomber – that Bloch’s factories didn’t have enough capacity.
Seeking more, Bloch reached out to his old friend Henry Potez, now France’s wealthiest aviation industrialist, to come to an agreement, where Bloch would use part of Potez’s spare capacity and pay Potez rent in return.
As a part of this agreement, they also joined one another in acquiring the Boudreaux-based Société Aérienne Bordelaise (SAB), famed for its heavy bombers and transport aircraft, in 1935.
Independently, both Marcel Bloch and Henry Potez began purchasing large amounts of stock in Lorraine-Dietrich, an automobile and aircraft engine manufacturer, until they were both the company’s two largest shareholders and controlled the majority of shares overall.
Unlike most other industrialists, both in France and abroad, Bloch encouraged trade unionism. Though it cost him more money personally, Bloch engaged with trade union representatives directly (rather than via a middle man or not at all like others) and listened to their demands.
And many times, he heeded their advice.
When they asked for a work’s paid leave in 1935, he gave it to them willingly. When the government declared that all employees should be given two weeks’ paid leave in 1936, Marcel gave his employees three.
And this wasn’t surprising, Marcel Bloch was one of the richest men in France and Société des avions Marcel Bloch was one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the country with millions of Francs in contracts waiting to be fulfilled.
He couldn’t afford to have his employees out on strike, and knew that a happy workforce was a productive one.
Nationalization
But all was not well. In 1936, a coalition of left-wing parties known as the Front Populaire gained power in France and began the process of nationalizing the arms industry, including aircraft manufacturers.
Six separate aircraft manufacturers (SNCASE, SNCASO, SNCAN, SNCAO, SNCAM, SNCAC) were created, corresponding with the geographical locations of each companies’ factories.
Formally nationalized on January 16 1937, both SAB and Société des avions Marcel Bloch were merged into SNCASO, forming the lion’s share of the company.
A further nationalized company, SNCM, was created for aircraft engines, which absorbed Lorraine-Dietrich, then still partly owned by Marcel Bloch and Henry Potez.
And whilst the former owners of many of these factories left the aviation game all together, Marcel saw the nationalization of Société des avions Marcel Bloch as a blessing in disguise.
As one of the few former owners who hadn’t ruled out departing the industry (at least not publicly), Marcel Bloch was put in charge of SNCASO by Pierre Cot, the Front Populaire’s Minister for Air.
Though he had lost ownership of his company and the control that went with it, Marcel was now in charge of a slightly larger manufacturer and had almost complete independence as to what direction to take the company.
But as with all good things, this eventually came to an end as the Front Populaire made numerous amendments to the nationalization act until the Minister for Air virtually dictated Marcel’s job to him.
Using the money he received from the nationalization, Marcel Bloch also sought to make profit.
He founded Société anonyme des avions Marcel Bloch (SAAMB), a design bureau he led and which designed many aircraft which were later produced by SNCASO under license, earning him a hefty fee per aircraft built by the new company.
Buildup to War
In 1937, the French government became increasingly weary of war with its eastern neighbor, Germany, who had been rapidly rearming itself over the last few years in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Not wanting to be out-gunned if war did break out, the French government likewise launched a rearmament program. Developing new aircraft (to counter the increasingly more powerful Luftwaffe) was a priority for the French Air Force.
To that end, Société anonyme des avions Marcel Bloch designed, and SNCASO built, several all-new aircraft including the MB.150 fighter and MB.170 twin-engine bomber.
Knowing of Bloch’s prior experience producing the Éclair propeller, SNCASO was also tasked with producing the propellers for other French aircraft manufacturers’ aircraft. To accommodate this, a new factory was built in the Western suburbs of Paris in 1938.
Perhaps not surprisingly, SAAMB designed these propellers and SNCASO produced them under license.
WWII
When war finally broke out in September 1939, the French Air Force placed orders for thousands of new aircraft from SNCASO. Marcel frantically tried to satisfy these new orders before the significant fighting broke out. But it was too little, too late.
By June 1940, what few aircraft SNCASO had been able to make had been destroyed by the Germans and France itself had fallen. A condition of France’s surrender to Germany meant that all production of arms had to cease, including the production of aircraft.
With what he saw as the end of the war, Marcel retired to his villa in Cannes in the south of France (which was also in a part of the country not under German occupation).
Marcel was pressured to collaborate with the Germans, but he refused. For this, he was arrested by the Vichy French Government where he was interned in a number of prisons before being released and placed under house arrest in January 1941.
In responding to openly antisemitic attacks against him, centering around the huge licensing fees paid by SNCASO to SAAMB prior to the war, Marcel was once again sent to prison where he caught diphtheria in March 1943.
Sent to the Écully prison-hospital near Lyon, he stayed there until March 1944 when he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy concentration camp. In August 1944, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration, as both a Jew and political prisoner.
Savagely beaten and tortured by the camp’s guards whilst still suffering from diphtheria (not to mention the brutal reality of Buchenwald), Marcel was practically paralysed by the time the Allies liberated the camp in April 1945.
Société des avions Marcel Dassault
Even in spite of his near-paralysis and his doctors’ lack of enthusiasm for his recovery, Marcel would not stop his aeronautical endeavors. As he would later recount, he would not let the Nazis win.
Upon his return to Paris, Marcel Bloch took control of SAAMB and acquired a number of bombed-out factories previously used by SNCASO. When the Marshall Plan was enacted to rebuild Europe, these factories were rebuilt.
On November 10 1945, SAAMB reorganized as a limited liability company and took the name Société des avions Marcel Bloch (as Marcel still owned the rights to the name).
In 1946, he and his family changed their name to Bloch-Dassault after the nom de guerre of Marcel’s older brother Darius, a famed general in the Resistance. In 1949, it was again changed to just Dassault and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism.
Interestingly, the name “Dassault” is derived from the French term “char d’assault” meaning “tank”! In response to their founder changing his name, the company was officially renamed Société des avions Marcel Dassault in 1947.
Much like its similarly named predecessor did before it, Société des avions Marcel Dassault began producing aircraft for the French military, starting with the MD 315 Flamant (Flamingo) in 1947.
Jet Pioneer
Keen to prove his new company as well as establish its dominance over the state-owned manufacturers, Marcel personally began designing France’s first fighter jet, which he called the Ouragan (meaning “Hurricane” in English).
Designed as a private venture, as the French government was unwilling to place firm orders for the jet, Marcel found enthusiastic buyers in newly-independent countries like Israel and India who were keen to acquire the latest fighter aircraft for survival.
Eventually, the French Air Force did place an order for the Ouragan and it entered service in 1952. The success of the Ouragan kickstarted the postwar French aviation industry and marked the first real time their aircraft had been exported on a mass scale.
Supersonic successor aircraft didn’t take long to appear, resulting first in the Mystère family in 1951 and then the Mirage family in 1956.
Named in honor of his favorite childhood book, Le Docteur Mystère, the Mystère IV in particular gained international fame when the US purchased 250 of them as a part of a NATO treaty.
With the success of both the Ouragan and Mystère families under his belt, Marcel designed a radical delta wing aircraft called the Mirage, named so because just like a desert mirage, the enemy would see it, but never reach it.
The Mirage III entered service in 1961 and became famous in Israeli service during both the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, as Israeli fighter aces obliterated their Arab foes using Mirages.
Naturally, this raised not only Dassault Aviation’s international profile, but that of the aircrafts’ designer, Marcel Dassault, and a slew of Mirage family jets followed.
Later Life
Weary that only producing military aircraft opened him up to the possibility of his new company being nationalized by a future government, Marcel took a more serious interest in commercial aviation.
In the early 1960’s, he and his team began designing a ten-seat corporate transport/military liaison aircraft. What resulted was the Dassault Falcon 20, the first in Dassault Aviation’s now-famed Falcon line of aircraft.
Though airline customers never materialized as Marcel had hoped, it proved popular with corporate and military operators alike and more variants, such as the Falcon 10 (1971) and Falcon 50 (1976) soon followed.
Following the development of short-haul jet airlines such as the Boeing 737, Dassault designed and built their own. Known as the Mercure, it is the only commercial aircraft built by the company, owing to only 12 units ever being built.
In 1971, Dassault absorbed Bréguet Aviation and changed its name to Avions Marcel Dassault-Breguet Aviation (AMD-BA). In 1990, AMD-BA was formally renamed Dassault Aviation.
When the Socialists under Francois Mitterrand came to power in 1981, they again wanted to nationalize Marcel’s company. Now more experienced, Marcel did something never before seen and successfully thwarted the nationalization of his company.
He did this not by moving his assets abroad or another trick, but by voluntarily surrendering 26% of the company to the French government, and floating another 24% on the stock market, with all returns to be invested in the company.
Though this diminished his overall control in the company, he was still the largest single shareholder in the company. Plus, some control was better than no control.
Prior to nationalization, Dassault had began several joint ventures with other aircraft manufacturer’s, such as with Britain’s BAC (SEPECAT Jaguar) and with Dornier (Alpha Jet), both of which were used extensively by the French Air Force and other air forces across the globe.
Following Dassault’s withdrawal from the pan-European Eurofighter program, the company began developing its own 4.5 generation fighter called the Rafale (French for “Gust of Wind”) that entered service in May 2001.
It was also the last Dassault aircraft for Marcel Dassault to have direct input in – though many aspects of its design that were designed by Marcel were changed following his death.
Other Interests
Though aviation was undoubtedly Marcel Dassault’s largest passion, it was by no means his only one.
Aside from nearly crippling his body and forcing him to start from scratch, WWII also got Marcel properly into politics. When Charles de Gaulle launched the RPF in 1947, Marcel was among its first members and won election as the Deputy for the Alpes-Maritime constituency in 1951.
After taking a brief hiatus from politics in December 1955 when he lost re-election to fellow conservative politician Philippe Olmi (the grandfather of French writer Veronique Olmi), Marcel re-entered politics as a Senator for the Alpes-Maritime départment between April 1957 and 1959.
He concurrently served as a Deputy for the Oise constituency from December 1958 until the end of his Senate term. He remained the Deputy for Oise until his death in 1986.
Marcel also diversified his business holdings beyond aviation. In 1954, Marcel expanded into the media industry by acquiring a small, unprofitable weekly news magazine directed to women called the Semaine de France. Completely shifting the magazine’s direction, the Semaine de France was renamed the Jours de France in 1958.
In keeping with his passion for aviation, Marcel ensured that the magazine had a section dedicated to the latest aviation news (which often saw the paper do stories on Dassault’s latest aircraft and unofficial PR flack) and Marcel himself had a column called “le Café du commerce” where he wrote about everything business-related.
It later ceased publication in 1989 before being restarted as a quarterly magazine by the Dassault family-owned Groupe Figaro in 2013. Groupe Figaro (acquired by Marcel’s youngest son, Serge) also publishes other major French publications such as the Le Figaro newspaper. In 1962, Marcel was also one of the founding shareholders of Minute.
In 1952, Marcel Dassault founded Banque commerciale de Paris with the help of his friend, fellow politician and veteran banker, Alvin Chaladon.
In 1971, it merged with Banque Vernes to become BVCP, one of France’s largest banks. Marcel held 30% of the capital in the new bank. Much like Marcel’s aviation holdings, BVCP was nationalized in 1982 and privatized in 1987.
The same year he founded Banque commerciale de Paris, Marcel acquired nos. 7 and 9 rond-point des Champs-Élysées from the Sabatier d’Esperyan family and renamed them Hôtel Marcel Dassault.
Interestingly, both remain in the possession of the Dassault family. No. 7 is used by Artcurial, an auction house owned by Dassault Group, whilst No. 9 remains in the possession of Dassault Group itself.
In 1955, Marcel acquired a 19th century castle and vineyard and renamed it Chateau Dassault. Much like Hôtel Marcel Dassault, it remains in the ownership of Marcel’s descendants.
During the 1980’s, Marcel also got involved in the stock market, architecture and cinema, becoming both a screenwriter and producer for a number of French films directed by directors Claude Pinoteau and Marcel Jullian.
Death & Legacy
After a 17-day long stay in Neuilly-Sur-Mer’s American Hospital of Paris, Marcel Dassault, the titan of France’s aviation industry, passed away on April 17 1986.
His death was announced by a hospital spokesperson and tributes to him came in from all over the globe, especially from fellow aviation pioneers. Even the French government, led by Socialist Jacques Chirac, paid homage to him!
The Chirac Government organized his funeral to be held at La cathédrale Saint-Louis-des-Invalides, a first for a French businessman and Jew. He was then buried in the Passey Cemetery in the heart of Paris.
Survived by his wife and two sons, his net worth was estimated to be 7 billion francs at the time of his death, or roughly $700 million at the time.
His second son, Serge, a fellow alumni of Supaéro, took his place as Dassault’s Chairman and remained involved in the company’s operations until his own death in 2018. He similarly became a politician like his father before him.
In 1973, he was inducted into the International Aviation Hall of Fame and in 1991 the rond-point des Champs-Elysées in Paris was renamed the rond-point des Champs-Elysées-Marcel-Dassault in his honor.
As one of France’s most famous billionaires, and one who had a distinctive look – his wardrobe was seemingly stuck in the 1930’s – and sound, Marcel Dassault inspired numerous fictional characters.
Perhaps the most famous is Laszlo Carreidas, the Tintin character erroneously called “the millionaire who never laughs” and who, in The Adventures of Tintin book Flight 714 to Sydney offers Tintin and his friends use of the Carreidas 160, his private jet.
Less famously (at least in the English-speaking world), Marcel Dassault inspired Régis Franc’s Tonton Marcel (“Uncle Marcel”) in an alternate universe where Dassault Aviation was fully nationalized in 1982.
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