A man with controversial politics, Serge Dassault was nothing short of a genius. Inheriting his father’s company at the age of 61, Serge has transformed the company into one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world.
Working as his father’s right-hand for decades before his death, Serge was instrumental in expanding the company into civil aviation, fostering it until it comprised of over 70% of the company’s revenue.
He also served as a politician, media magnate, and returned the Dassault Group back into the family’s control.
Early Life
Serge Dassault was born on April 4 1925 in the French capital of Paris. Born with the name Serge Paul André Bloch, he was the second son of aircraft designer-turned real estate investor Marcel Bloch, and his wife Madeleine Minckes.
Interestingly, his father’s side of the family were incredibly well connected despite not being famous themselves. Among his relatives, Serge counted banker Nissim de Camondo, musician Darius Milhaud and writer Francine Bloch among others.
A notable ancestor of his was Moise Allatini (1809-1882), an Ottoman mining magnate from Salonica (now Thessalonica) who was the father of Serge’s paternal grandmother Noemie Bloch (1860-1928).
His mother’s family, however, were Lithuanian Jews who’d fled to France due to the numerous pogroms Jews were subjected to there and set themselves up as furniture dealers, becoming quite wealthy in the process.
Serge was only three when his father got back into aircraft manufacturing and established Société des avions Marcel Bloch in 1929 and 11 when the left-wing Front Populaire coalition nationalized his father’s company.
Despite his father losing ownership of his company, the French government allowed him to stay on as the new company’s administrator, originally with near-total freedom (though this was curtailed as time went on).
Educated at the prestigious Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris from 1936 to 1939, before moving to Cannes’ Lycée Carnot in 1940, the most prestigious school in the city where his family had fled to after the fall of France.
WWII
Though Serge and his family had fled to Cannes, a part of the country then not under direct German occupation, one of his father’s companies, Bordeaux-Aéronautique, continued to produce aircraft even after most aircraft factories had been closed or destroyed.
Knowing this, the Nazis attempted to convince Marcel to collaborate with them, but he refused. For this, he was imprisoned first by the Vichy Government (who were a satellite state of Nazi Germany) and later the Nazis themselves.
Released and rearrested on numerous occasions, Marcel and his entire family were arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944. First send to the Montluc Prison in Lyon, the family were soon sent to the Drancy concentration camp.
From there, they were deported to Buchenwald in August 1944 where they remained until the Allies liberated the camp in April 1945. Of the 1,500 French Jews deported to Buchenwald from Drancy in August 1944, only 20 survived the entire Dassault family among them.
Interestingly, whilst in the camp, both Serge and his father Marcel, were protected by members of the Breton Resistance and the Organisation spéciale (OS), the militant arm of the French Communist Party!
Despite their differing politics, the OS had always respected Marcel’s willingness to meet and exceed trade union demands prior to the war, and pitied him as he was the subject of brutal torture not just for being Jewish but for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis.
Following the war, the family returned to Paris and Serge returned to the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and completed his final year there in 1945.
He subsequently attended numerous engineering and prep schools until he got into France’s premier aeronautics school, Supaéro, his father’s alma mater, and graduated there in 1951.
Serge, along with his entire family, changed his name to Bloch-Dassault in 1946 and later to just Dassault in 1949 in honor of the nom de guerre used by Serge’s uncle, Darius, a famed general in the French Resistance.