Lawyer and Man of Letters

After completing his secondary education in Marseille and training as a lawyer, Eugène Rostand, the father of Edmond Rostand, the famous playwright, began his legal career at the Lyon bar. He returned to his native city after the war of 1870 and registered as a barrister, but he rapidly abandoned this profession to devote himself to literature. From 1865 to 1886 he published several books of poetry, including an adaptation of Catullus, which earned him a prize awarded by the Académie Française. In the 1870s, he also distinguished himself in the world of journalism – when he managed the editorial team of the Journal de Marseille – and, subsequently, in politics; he was elected to the Marseille City Council at the end of the 1870s.

Eugène Rostand and the French savings bank

A member of the Board of Directors of the Caisse d’Epargne des Bouches-du-Rhône at the age of 23, he became the youthful Chairman of this institution in 1886, a position he would hold until his death in 1915. During his period in office, he oversaw a major expansion in the savings bank in Marseille, taking care to reconcile the financial objectives of the bank with its activities of a more social nature. There is no shortage of examples of his pioneering achievements to illustrate this: he founded the “Marseille Company for Healthy and Inexpensive Housing,” which can be considered a forerunner of the HLM social housing bodies in France; he also created a true local network with the bank’s depositors.

The essential feature of his period in office can be seen in the 1890s in the extremely active campaign he fought to ensure that the French savings banks should be able – like their foreign counterparts – to dispose freely of the funds deposited with them in order to develop the local economy and to carry out more ambitious social activities at a local level. To do this, he would attempt – in vain – to bring about a change in the bylaws governing the Caisses d’Epargne.

Apart from his commitment in favor of the French savings bank, he also played a key role in the creation of the Banques Populaires network. He founded, in particular, the Banque Populaire de Marseille and, in 1889, launched the Centre Fédératif du Crédit Populaire. Up until his death he was actively involved in various social institutions at both a local and national level.