The Life of the Richest Woman in the World Marked by a Public Rift with Her Mother and Family Ties to Nazis

The granddaughter of French pharmacist and founder of the leading global beauty company L’Oreal, Eugène Schueller, is the richest woman in the world. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers has a fortune of nearly 88 billion dollars, most of which comes from her ownership stake in the company. On Bloomberg’s list of the richest people, she ranks 13th and is worth $16 billion more than last year.

The Business Insider portal has brought the story of this seventy-year-old woman who was born, as they say in English-speaking areas, with a ‘silver spoon’ in her mouth. However, as her case has shown, the life of an heiress is not always a blessing. Her grandfather founded the company that would later become known as L’Oreal in 1909, and after his death in 1957, all the wealth and control of the company was inherited by Meyers’ mother, Liliane. Liliane and her husband, French politician André Bettencourt, loved being part of the Paris elite, and their glamorous parties were widely known. However, unlike her parents, Françoise preferred to stay out of the public eye and enjoyed her peace, reading books or playing the piano instead of attending parties.

Rift with Mother

As Vanity Fair once noted, during her teenage years, Bettencourt Meyers and her mother grew distant, and Liliane once even stated that her daughter ‘always lags behind her by one round’ and that she is slow, sluggish, and even cold. During her university years, this distanced daughter began to engage in writing, publishing several books mainly dealing with religious themes from Judaism, Catholicism to Greek mythology, and in her latest work ‘Regard sur la Bible’ published in 2008, she analyzed the Holy Scriptures.

However, even though she pursued her passions, Bettencourt Meyers had no intention of letting go of her inheritance. That is precisely why she embarked on a lengthy legal battle with photographer and her mother’s boyfriend François-Marie Banier, who, as she accused, deceitfully took $1.3 billion worth of cash, artworks, and even life insurance policies from her mother. Bettencourt, who suffered from dementia, stood against her daughter and claimed that she had willingly gifted that immense wealth to Banier.

Bettencourt Meyers told French newspapers in 2009 that Banier’s goal was crystal clear: to distance her mother from the family and exploit her, which, she claimed, would not happen. Banier was charged in 2015 with ‘abus de faibless’ or ‘exploitation of the vulnerable’, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and ordered to pay $158 million in damages. However, in the end, the whole story concluded with a secret settlement. Although she won the lawsuit, an investigation was conducted against Bettencourt Meyers for witness bribery. She admitted to giving a certain amount of money but insisted it was a loan, not a bribe. However, due to that counterclaim, her lawyers advised her to settle with Banier to prevent further escalation.

Connection to Nazis

However, even before the trial concluded, the relationship between mother and daughter was permanently damaged. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2008, Liliane stated that she did not see her daughter nor had any desire to, while a lawyer involved in the case stated that ‘the mother massacred the daughter, and then the daughter the mother’. The unfortunate mother, due to poor mental health, had been under family care since 2011 and could no longer manage her assets. This toxic relationship was not the only dirty laundry that surfaced during the trial. As Business Insider recalls, journalists unearthed a well-kept family secret, namely that Bettencourt Meyers’ father, André, and her beloved grandfather, Eugène, allegedly sympathized with the Nazi party.

Eugène publicly praised Adolf Hitler’s tactics in the early days of Nazi Germany and was investigated after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis. During the 1930s, he was part of a secret society that planned to overthrow the French republican government, and the group was later linked to political assassinations, while insiders claimed that Eugène held meetings in L’Oreal’s offices. Bettencourt Meyers’ father, according to Time, wrote antisemitic pamphlets for pro-Nazi newspapers during the war but later changed his stance and joined the resistance movement. Despite the scandals, the family’s wealth grew over the years, and Bettencourt Meyers came into her first serious money – several tens of billions of dollars – after her mother’s death in 2017.

In addition to money, she inherited a house decorated in Art Deco style located in a prestigious part of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine. Besides that house, she also received a luxury residence overlooking the British coast, where she lived with her husband Jean-Pierre Meyers, the son of a rabbi who perished in Auschwitz. The couple has two sons, Jean-Victor and Nicolas, and, as reported by the media, they are raising them in the Jewish faith. Jean-Victor is in the management of L’Oreal alongside his mother, who controls 33 percent of the company’s shares. In the first half of 2023, shares of this cosmetics giant rose by 29 percent, and they hold successful brands such as Maybelline, Essie, Garnier, Urban Decay, Lancôme, and Kiehl’s, and have licenses to sell and distribute beauty products from Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino.

As Business Insider continues, Bettencourt Meyers is not the only billionaire of French origin, as LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, who is worth $175 billion, is also on the list. The family’s wealth has soared to $93 billion this year, and Bettencourt Meyers donates part of her money through the Bettencourt Schuller foundation, which she co-founded in 1980. Although she is a co-owner of one of the largest cosmetics companies in the world, part of the public finds it particularly interesting that she can never be seen – made up.