It is a boutique as much as it is a family home. On the rooftop terrace, a private garden with beehives and apple trees yields a little honey and apple jelly. This is in the very heart of Paris, at 24 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, just steps from the Elysée presidential palace. Insiders call it "24 Faubourg." More than in its factories scattered across France, it is here, in the historic store that also serves as company headquarters, that the heart of the Hermès empire beats. Since 1880, six generations of the family have succeeded one another in that space.
Their patient accumulation of capital was consecrated over the summer. For the first time, the family descendant in charge of the group topped the ranking of the 500 largest professional fortunes in France compiled by business magazine Challenges. With an estimated wealth of €163 billion, Axel Dumas and his family outpaced their rival, LVMH owner Bernard Arnault, who had dominated the list without interruption since 2017.
Hermès now surpasses LVMH, whose headquarters are found at the nearby Avenue Montaigne – yet this all sits within a 1.5-kilometer radius, in Paris's 8th arrondissement. France's economic and political capital is an unrivaled locus of wealth concentration, as evidenced in a report authored by Jérôme Fourquet of polling institute IFOP and Marie Gariazzo of social and consumer studies group Observatoire Société & Consommation, and published by think tank Fondation Jean-Jaurès on Thursday, September 4.
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