YOU NEED MONEY TO MAKE MONEY^271Boigues had already invested in foundries and forges, most notably
in a large plant at Fourchambault that was one of the pioneers of
coke-blast smelting when the method was reintroduced in France in
the 1820s.* The Boigues family, apparently of Catalan origin, had
settled in central France in the seventeenth century and established a
firm base in land ownership and strategic alliances. Their sons and
daughters had married into the moneyed aristocracy—new but the
more influential for that—people who bore titles of baron and count
or at the least had names with the telltale particule de. Thus Louis
Boigues's sister Marie married the comte Hippolyte Jaubert, nephew
and adopted son and heir of the rich and powerful comte François
Jaubert, a regent of the Banque de France.
This Fourchambault ironworks was itself the product of a marriage
between Boigues's money and commercial connections (Louis
Boigues was not a passive investor) and the technical knowledge of
Georges Dufaud, son of an ironmaster of the Old Regime. Dufaud
was one of the first graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique and a
pioneer of the new coal-based iron technologies. He had gone
through the fires of bankruptcy and returned—no mean feat in
France, where bankruptcy was almost invariably a stain for life. Now
he would be managing a multi-million-franc enterprise. His success
in this task (to say nothing of personal relations) would bring him
invitations to serve in high office and to take over other business
enterprises, all of which he refused. His heart and head belonged to
those forges and foundries and machine shops in the Nivernais.
His son Achille took over after him, while his daughters got
married, the first to George Crawshay, descendant of one of the
oldest and most important dynasties of British ironmasters, and the
second to Emile Martin, metallurgical entrepreneur in his own right
and later immortalized by his contribution to the Siemens-Martin
process for making open-hearth steel. All of this paid off in valuable
exchanges of knowledge and know-how. When Georges Dufaud
made one of his prospecting trips to Britain in 1826 (almost two
weeks to get from Fourchambault to London, but he may have
stopped in Paris along the way), he took the occasion to order a
steam engine and power bellows for Martin; recruited a top-notch
British engineer, also for Martin; and visited numerous British plants
and public works (Crawshay's introduction presumably helped),
- The factory was located just north of Nevers on the Loire River, about 230 kilo
meters south of Paris.