Madame Brigitte Macron, Monsieur the President of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Monsieur Bernard Arnault, dear sisters and brothers, dear friends, I cannot hide my pleasure as I prepare to tell you the reasons why our academy decided, by a very large majority, that Bernard Arnault would join us. This pleasure is multiple. First, because by electing an entrepreneur, our house respects the constant tradition of composing section 4, Political Economy, Statistics, and Finance, of our company, approximately half with great economists and the other half with great entrepreneurs.
Next, because regarding great entrepreneurs, I believe I can demonstrate that Monsieur Arnault belongs to that category if one relies solely on objective data. The importance of the company in France and in the world, its contribution to the prosperity of the French and European economies, its decisive participation in the dissemination and promotion of French, European, and global excellence in the world economy. I also believe I can draw your attention to the fact that the person elected today is an exemplary entrepreneur, in the lineage of the most renowned economists of the last few centuries, from Richard Cantillon to Joseph Schumpeter and Frank Knight.
I will also endeavor to decipher the culture of the company LVMH, which combines a tradition of family entrepreneurship. I believe this trait is very important. It is firmly rooted in the French provinces. The excellence, permanence, and modernity of the objects and products sold throughout the world. We will see that at the heart of this corporate culture, which has contributed to the group's global success, there are many simple convictions that are entirely personal to you.
A word, as the President has just invited me, about the section on Political Economy, Statistics, and Finance. By electing you as a member of our academy, this body has elected an entrepreneur succeeding a long lineage of entrepreneurs. Section 4 has always taken care to preserve the dual source: that of economists and that of entrepreneurs.
You enter a section of eight members which today includes four economists, among whom two Nobel laureates in economics, Jean Tirole and Philippe Aghion, and two remarkable economists, Pierre-André Chiappori, Minister of Finance of Monaco, and the dean of the section, Jean-Claude Casanova, who directs the journal Commentaire. Allow me a passing remark. Considering that there have been five Nobel laureates in economics of French nationality, I note that three of them are or have been members of our company, and that the last two to join us, Jean Tirole and Philippe Aghion, were elected or informally invited to submit their candidacy before being awarded the Nobel Prize.
By succeeding Denis Kessler, a world-renowned reinsurer, you join other remarkable entrepreneurs: Michel Pébou, Chairman of BNP Paribas, Dominique Sénéquier, President of Ardian, and the late Ivan Glasenberg, whom you knew so well and who himself so ardently wished for you to be among us. You now occupy the first seat of this section. Your predecessors are illustrious. The first holder is Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, the Abbé Sieyès, as we just heard, famous in particular for his legendary response in 1789.
'What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it wish to be? Something.' You therefore take up, Monsieur, the seat of a revolutionary clergyman of the Ancien Régime, but with a connection to the enterprise, since he intended to rebalance the power then in the hands of the aristocracy and the church in favor of those who produced the goods and services for the benefit of society as a whole: farmers, artisans, manufacturers, merchants, traders, jurists, and financiers. I insist on artisan.
Stendhal cites Sieyès in The Red and the Black. I quote: 'One finds in Paris elegant people. There may be in the provinces people of character.' You are, Monsieur, evidently one of these provincials of character, who has become the master of the elegant of Paris and, by extension, I believe I can say it, of the world.
Among your industrial predecessors, I note Émile Chasles, a general engineer of bridges and roads, your fellow student at the École Polytechnique, director of the Creusot works. Among the eminent business leaders who preceded you, I must also cite Michel Albert, who was our Perpetual Secretary and headed the Assurance Générale de France group for 12 years. Your immediate predecessor in seat number 1, Denis Kessler, was also, of course, an eminent business leader. The tradition dictates that it is you who evokes his memory.
I must now evoke your professional life. I was going to say your career, as one sometimes says for a senior civil servant, because Bernard Arnault could have been a civil servant. A student at the École Polytechnique, after a brilliant education at that school, he could have entered directly at the École Nationale d'Administration. No doubt he would have had a brilliant career. To be honest, his classmates expected him to make this choice, and they were surprised that he decided instead to join the family construction company, Ferret-Savinel.
It is that the young man you were had not only three great passions that you still feel today—sciences, music, and sport—but this young man was imbued with the culture and values of a medium-sized family company in Roubaix, in northern France. Very quickly, you deployed your activity and your imagination there. Very quickly, your father recognized your qualities as a business leader. It was at his request that at 26, you took the reins. You are also determined to change the nature of the company, which becomes a real estate company and no longer focuses on construction.
You go to the United States in the early 80s. From this American stay, you recount the following anecdote: your New York taxi driver knows absolutely nothing about France, its leaders, its history, its economy, but he knows Christian Dior. You then identified the memory power of this global brand several years before taking over Boussac Saint-Frères in 84 and becoming president of Dior in 1985.
Head of a company whose nature you changed at 26, president of Dior at 35, you are undeniably a man in a hurry. You say it yourself, I quote you: 'I am in a hurry. That is why I prefer tennis to golf.' I had indicated that sport was one of your passions. In a hurry, you continue to be so. From 87, you become a major investor within the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group. In 89, you are not yet 40, you take control of the LVMH group.
It is then, for more than 36 years, the methodical application of a new concept of business management: the creation of a global luxury company that did not exist in this form before you. I will come back to this. Each of your some 75 brands or more is global. Each is managed as a global, competitive company that must make its own decisions. But each benefits from the help and support of the world's leading luxury group. This is a decisive innovation that will be progressively imitated, then appropriated, adapted to the globalization of the world market.
Often, before proving its worth, a major innovation is decried. This was the case for yours, which, having proven its relevance, was then widely imitated. But beforehand, how much advice not to pursue this path? Similarly, you were strongly discouraged from some of your most successful investments. Sephora, for example, bought in 98, became the world leader in its field. But it is just one example. One is sometimes the victim of an optical illusion.
Once control of the LVMH group was established in 89, one might have the impression that your pace as an entrepreneur slowed down. But it is the opposite. You never cease to accelerate the pace in all possible dimensions, increasing from Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton the portfolio of your fashion and leather goods brands with Berluti, Céline, Fendi, Givenchy, Loewe, Rimowa, increasing likewise the number of wine and spirits houses starting from Hennessy and Moët & Chandon with Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart, Krug, Château d'Yquem, Château Cheval Blanc.
I know you are particularly proud of Domaine des Lambrays, which celebrated its 660th anniversary in 2025. Two-thirds of a millennium for one of your houses. I doubt anyone could say better. I could in the same way evoke your houses in selective distribution, your brands in perfumes and cosmetics, your houses in watches and jewelry. In this last activity, I would be remiss not to mention the acquisition of Tiffany & Co., if I am not mistaken, the most important acquisition in this episode of formidable growth, which allows me to say that it is the excellence of a great many advanced countries of which you are, in a way, the ambassador throughout the world.
I must also mention your presence in the development of the media. For example, Les Echos, Le Parisien, Radio Classique, Connaissance des Arts. It is said that you have other projects in mind, other projects perhaps already completed. You are present in prestigious publishing houses, in particular Citadelles & Mazenod and Group Madrigal, in support of the development strategy desired by Antoine Gallimard. You are a man in a hurry who knows where he is going.
The boss at 26 of a medium-sized construction company in Roubaix is today the head of the world's leading luxury group, whose turnover exceeds 80 billion euros, employing approximately 215,000 collaborators worldwide and nearly 40,000 direct collaborators in France. LVMH is the leading private recruiter for several years in our country. The economic activity of the group generates a total of approximately 58 billion euros in turnover, and each job in the group gives rise to four additional jobs in the French economy.
The group preserves and perpetuates approximately 280 different heritage skills. In total, more than 110,000 people are employed directly by or for the group in these heritage trades, and more than 330 apprentices have been trained by the LVMH Institut des Métiers d'Excellence since its creation in 2014.
The group's model in France relies on production carried out in nearly 120 workshops and manufacturing sites, mostly marketed in the rest of the world. The group's exports are on the order of nearly 24 billion euros annually, or about 4% of all goods exports combined. And the group's rapid growth over the last 15 years has contributed to considerably increasing the taxes paid in France by LVMH.
Corporate tax directly paid in France, production taxes, and value-added tax amount to more than 5 billion euros per year on average over the last few years. I would not be complete if I did not mention the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which since the inauguration of Frank Gehry's impressive work, is the visible heart of the group's art and culture promotion action.
The group also runs numerous programs for young people: the Institut des Métiers d'Excellence, prizes rewarding young fashion creators and innovative entrepreneur teams. The group is also a partner of numerous integration and inclusion programs.
I have just enumerated some of the objective reasons why my brothers and I elected you. It also seemed useful to me to analyze what others could say about you. I thought of British television. The BBC has a program that consists of scrutinizing business leaders and billionaires and rating them, they say, based on a serious multi-criteria analysis. To be honest, the title of the program, 'The Wolf in Cashmere,' was marked from the outset by a certain British humor.
The BBC recalls the journey of your company, notes your dialogue with the New York taxi driver, of whom they say rather prettily that Dior is your Rosebud in Citizen Kane. The BBC notes your entry into China as early as 1992 in the basement of a hotel in Beijing. It notes that you are an excellent pianist, that you have always had a taste for the arts and painting, that you loved and bought Basquiat and Warhol when you were in New York.
It also credits you as an entrepreneur with your detestation of bureaucratic management. This note, they say, is very rare for a Frenchman. In total, the BBC gives you 10/10 on the wealth criterion, 8/10 on the toughness in business criterion, and 5/10 on the influence criterion.
The most contrasting notion is that of your legacy as a very great entrepreneur. The female journalist gives you 8/10 and her male colleague 3/10. I cannot help thinking that a woman tends to appreciate your choices of great creators and great couturiers, and that there is undoubtedly an element of jealousy towards you among men, at least among the BBC journalists.
In this program, I note that you take care in a very brief speech in English to pronounce the word 'entrepreneur' the French way. With elegance, the two journalists of this program immediately take advantage of your pronunciation to point out that the word 'entrepreneur' in English comes from French, recalling the famous gaffe of President Bush, who was highlighting how far France was from the market economy by giving as proof the fact that there is no French word for entrepreneur.
It is now time to return to the economic theory of the entrepreneur. The concept and the word in this exception were invented by two economists: one Franco-Irish, Richard Cantillon, the other French, Jean-Baptiste Say. The first in the 'Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General' in 1755. The second in his 'Treatise on Political Economy' in 1803.
Cantillon, already in the mid-18th century, considers the entrepreneur as directing production to satisfy demand. The entrepreneur himself bears the risk of uncertain markets, and this explains the uncertainty of his wages. I quote: 'when compared to other producers who have the certainty of their wages.' You are, Monsieur, clearly an entrepreneur according to Cantillon.
It goes further with Jean-Baptiste Say. He makes the entrepreneur a key piece of the economic dynamic. The entrepreneur is the intermediary between the different classes of producers and between them and the consumers. The main function of the entrepreneur, according to Say, is to combine the factors of production and to organize production. It is therefore an industrial conception of the entrepreneur.
Say separates the function of the entrepreneur from that of the capital holder, which Cantillon does not do. And since you are both deeply an entrepreneur and a holder of capital, I would say, Monsieur, that you are an entrepreneur according to Cantillon and according to Say.
The paradox is that this notion of the entrepreneur, today at the heart of economic reflection, was then largely put aside by the main economists. I have already mentioned the fact that the BBC journalists evoked President Bush's error. Beyond the word of French origin, the error appears obviously even more monumental, because the concept itself was created by two French economists, who were, by the way, both entrepreneurs.
It would then be necessary to wait for Schumpeter for an academic economist to take a specific interest in the entrepreneur as the bearer of innovations and therefore of creative destruction. The repeated assertion that your entrepreneurial inspiration and your company's culture must be a culture of creativity, inventiveness, and innovation, and the demonstration you have provided throughout the development of your group, allow me to affirm also that you are, Monsieur, an entrepreneur according to Schumpeter.
You will find within our ranks the most recent Nobel laureate in economics, Philippe Aghion, who has just joined us and has developed his theory of Schumpeterian growth. More precisely, I speak under his control, the theory of sustainable growth through Schumpeterian creative destruction. Cantillon, Say, Schumpeter.
I would now like to refer to a final economist, Frank Knight, to conclude this economic chapter. Knight highlighted the difference between risk and uncertainty in a fundamental work, 'Risk, Uncertainty and Profit' of 1921.
In his analysis, risk is a notion that can be quantitatively evaluated, a quantity susceptible of being measured. In the universe of risk, it is possible to calculate the chances of obtaining this or that result. One can evaluate the probability law of the various possible occurrences. For the scientist that you are, Monsieur, I would say that quantum mechanics with its wave function and the Born rule gives a good example of what Knight calls risk. One knows how to measure the probabilities associated with the various possible positions of the particle whose wave function is known.
But radical uncertainty in Knight's sense is very different. It corresponds to situations in which one does not possess enough information to be able to probabilize future results. The decision-maker must therefore take his own risks without being helped by an optimization calculation based on ex-ante probabilities. A priori, Keynes will take up Knight's analysis in 1937. I quote: 'It can be called uncertain, I quote, the prospect of a war in Europe, the interest rate in 20 years, or the obsolescence of a new invention. For on these subjects, there is no scientific basis on which to form a probability distribution. One simply does not know.' End of quote.
For Knight, radical uncertainty in his sense is at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. The entrepreneur is the pioneer who innovates, creates new products, new manufacturing processes, new market approaches in a radically uncertain economic context. He therefore takes considerable ex-ante risks because they are not measurable. If he succeeds, his first reward is to make an uncertain future certain, because the entrepreneur's exploration itself creates new domains of certainty.
As for the second reward of the entrepreneur according to Knight, it is the entrepreneurial profit associated with new ideas and concepts that have proven ex-post to be correct in this radically uncertain ex-ante universe. The entrepreneur's profit for Knight is therefore the exact opposite of rent, which consists of exploiting a privileged situation in a fixed and predictable universe.
Let us see if you are an entrepreneur also in Knight's sense. Monsieur, let us start with the very concept that presided over the formation of your global group. Managerial innovation is at the heart of the concept. When you had and launched the idea, there was not yet a group of global dimension sitting on a large number of brands likely to benefit from considerable synergies in terms of innovation, productivity, independence ensured through the group's recruitment of exceptional personalities, etc., etc.
In terms of multi-house and multi-brand global management in the luxury sector, you had the idea to create and embody the concept. You created an industry. The first proof that it was a profoundly new concept is that, as I have already said, not only had no one had the idea before you, but the idea itself appeared losing from the start. Many, including eminent entrepreneurs and financiers, had advised you against creating such a global group.
A second proof of the relevance of this concept is the economic success that rewarded, in Knight's sense, the inventiveness and audacity of the entrepreneur in a world not only naturally risky but also radically uncertain. Finally, the ultimate proof that you aimed correctly, your concept is now imitated within your own sector.
This capacity for managerial innovation coupled with audacious risk-taking in particularly uncertain areas is your personal trademark. I have already mentioned Sephora, a company specializing in the sale of beauty products. For the purchase of Sephora, you were formally advised against by a number of renowned entrepreneurs. You bought it in 98, integrated it into the group, and globalized it. Sephora is now the world leader in the sector.
This flair, this capacity to imagine the impact of a new concept, often considered far too audacious and risky by the consensus of a particular profession, you also demonstrated it in advising other entrepreneurs. Thus, you encouraged Steve Jobs, who was asking you for advice, to launch his own global network of Apple Stores. The industry at the time was convinced that Apple was going to fail.
I conclude that you are indeed, Monsieur, an entrepreneur according to Knight. I would like to make three concluding remarks on your company's culture, on the relevance of the group's tradition of excellence, and on this success as an entrepreneur according to Knight.
On the company's culture, you constantly affirm your passion for creativity, inventiveness, and innovation. You say, I quote you: 'At our place, we don't do marketing. At LVMH, we don't follow fashion, we create it.' I was also struck to hear you cite the following proverb, which has a somewhat Maoist or Chinese scent: 'In a river, only dead fish swim with the current.'
But the Polytechnicien that you are also likes to refer to Albert Einstein: 'Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, while imagination encompasses the whole world and stimulates progress.' I have just cited both yourself and Einstein.
Naturally, on excellence, you and your group are the ambassadors of French, European, and global excellence, as I have said, of the antiquity of this tradition of excellence everywhere in the world. How to combine modernity with the permanence and intangibility of a great and ancient tradition? Fashion is a good metaphor for this paradoxical alliance. In the 'New Heloise,' Jean-Jacques Rousseau states, I quote: 'Fashion dominates the provincials, but Parisians dominate fashion and know how to bend it to their advantage.' I paraphrase Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At LVMH, we dominate fashion and we help everyone, not just Parisians, but the whole world, to bend it to their advantage.
Finally, my last concluding remark on the entrepreneur and his success. You are therefore, as I said, an entrepreneur according to Cantillon, Say, Schumpeter, and Knight. I insisted on Knight because there is a very strong link between the radical uncertainty of the future, the uncertainty of objectives in Knight's sense, and what you call the dream. You call on your company not only to make people dream but also to dream itself and of the extraordinary, out-of-the-ordinary objectives it wants to set for itself.
'To know how to dream'—in quotes, it's your formula—is a formula that breaks down word for word: the knowing and the science, the doing and the making, the dream of the clients and of the company, but also 'to know how to dream' as a whole seems to me to be the key to your success.
Montesquieu says in his 'Thoughts': 'I have always seen that to succeed in the world, one had to appear a little mad and be wise.' Let us apply the recipe. To appear mad is to resolutely engage in new, unexplored, and uncertain paths in a long-term perspective. It is to have above all the ambition to embody one's dreams. To be wise is to be the most meticulous and attentive manager in daily management.
It is a bit of what you summarized before the students of Oxford in 2016: 'I am pessimistic in the short term and resolutely optimistic in the long term.' I find that it is a good formula to succeed in the world, to use Montesquieu's expression. I thank you for your attention.
