2023-08-09 12:50:00
“Arriving at Ferrières, it was like going back in time, only with more luxury and with a more refined taste. The women wore dresses, bras, large headdresses, tiaras, lots of jewelry… It was really the Proust era”, recalled the actress Marisa Berenson about the ball that, in 1971, she gave the matrimonio Rothschild in his chateau on the outskirts of Paris. The event, organized in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the French writer, brought together more than 300 people who, throughout the evening, were joined by as many others at a later dinner.
Great personalities from finance, politics, culture and society who did not necessarily have to have read In Search of Lost Time, they met in Ferrières. Names like Audrey Hepburn, Grace of Monaco, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton attended an event that was photographed by Cecil Beaton, hired for the occasion by the Rothschilds, who spared neither effort nor money to recreate their particular world of Guermantes. The waste was such that many doubted that the couple could repeat a similar feat the following year, thus forgetting the power and tenacity of the couple.
From the beginning of their relationship, Baroness Marie-Hélène Naila Stephanie Josina van Zuylen van Nyevelt van de Haar and her husband, Guy de Rothschild, formed an unusual marriage. The particularities of her marriage did not happen so much because Marie-Hélène had divorced her first husband, a French count dedicated to agricultural exploitations and senator, but to the fact that, for the first time in the history of the family of bankers, a Rothschild was going to marry a woman of a non-Jewish religion.
In order to carry out the union, Marie-Hélène had to receive a papal dispensation and Guy was forced to resign from the presidency of the French Jewish community. After solving such problems without risking their prestige and social position, it was clear that getting through the Proust party was no problem for Marie-Hélène and Guy Rothschild. Proof of this is that, the following year, they surprised the world with what may be the most bizarre and excessive high society event of the 20th century that, this time, it was impossible to overcome.
twice as big
In 1959, two years after marrying Guy Rothschild, Marie-Hélène decided to take back one of the family’s many properties. It was the Château de Ferrières, a spectacular fortress located on the outskirts of Paris that had been ordered built by James de Rothschild in the 19th century with a single instruction for the architect: that it be “twice as big” as Mentmore Towers, the castle that the family had in Buckinghamshire.
The result was an imposing building surrounded by 30 square kilometers of forest, with an impressive hall entrance hall 18 meters high, decorated with caryatids, 80 bedrooms for guests and a library with more than 8,000 volumes.
Used as a military installation by the Germans, first in the Franco-Prussian War and, later, in World War II, after its restoration in the early 1960s, Ferrières became one of the most important meeting places for European high society. Countless receptions and parties took place in its facilities until, after the one held in 1972, the barons decided to get rid of the property. “Some gossips say that this may well be the last dinner in Ferrières,” commented the correspondent for The New York Times at the end of the Time.news of the event, while advancing some possibilities. “The alternatives are to tear down the castle, burn it down, or turn it into an orphanage.” Finally, the castle was ceded to the rectory of the University of Paris in 1975.
head to birds
“Dress suit, evening dress and surreal heads” was the dress code established in the invitation that the Rothschilds sent to their guests at the party they would give on December 12, 1972. The card was decorated with clouds and, to know their content, had to be read in front of a mirror, because the texts were written backwards.
Once at the Ferrières castle, whose façade was illuminated with colored spotlights that gave the impression that the building was engulfed in flames, the guests ran into members of the service who, disguised as a cat, dozed on the stairs.
Unawakened by the arrival of strangers, the helpful cats accompanied them to the doors of a maze that they had to go through to reach the rooms where dinner would take place. There they were with the other guests, all of them dressed in the mandatory surrealist headdress with the exception of Salvador Daliwhose work inspired many of the creations, but did not wear any because he understood that his head was surreal enough on its own.
Unlike the Empordà painter, Marie-Helene de Rothschild He wore a stag’s head that wept real diamond tears, Audrey Hepburn He had his head in a bird cage Helen Rochas she carried a gramophone on hers and another guest had an apple covering her face, in reference to the son of man by Magritte.
The dining room did not clash with the surreal concept of the party either. The dishes were covered in hair, the tables were decorated with dismembered dolls, the menu included proposals such as goat cheese baked in “postoital sadness” and the dessert recreated with sugar and other sweets the body of a life-size woman.
Surrealists from the ‘enlightened’
The Rothschilds’ surrealist party was undoubtedly one of the events of the 1972 season. Although the media gave a good account of it at the time, it was not until the late 1980s that the inclusion of some of the photographs of the event in the book Legendary Parties, 1922-1972 by Jean-Louis De Faucigny-Lucinge gave rise to countless theories about the evening.
The fact of being able to see the strange headdresses and the similarity that details such as the tailcoat, the black and white checkerboard floor of the palace or the top hats that some guests wore with Masonic iconography, gave rise to conspiracy theories that turned a surreal party into a meeting illuminati. According to these versions, a select international oligarchy of which the Rothschilds would be a part would have taken advantage of the event to opaquely decide the fate of the world, as it would have been doing since time immemorial.
Emerged at the end of the 18th century around an exchange house in Frankfurt am Main, the Rothschild dynasty soon became one of the most important in the world, thanks to its good relations with the monarchies of the European continent that, in exchange for help finance, would have given them power and noble titles.
The financial aid of the Rothschilds was key to finance, for example, the war of the English against Napoleon, the independence of Brazil from the kingdom of Portugal, the creation of Rhodesia, the development of the railway, the construction of the Suez Canal, the exploration of raw materials throughout the world and their exploitation, such as the Rio Tinto mines in Spain. In fact, and despite the decline in its power in recent decades caused mainly by the stock market crash of 1929, the persecution suffered at the hands of the Nazis during World War II and the expropriation of part of its companies during the government of Françoise Mitterrand, the role of the Rothschilds has been decisive and notorious in the development of world history in recent centuries.
As Ricardo Piglia stated in his Emilio Renzi notebooks, “paranoids also have enemies”, so there is no need to resort to conspiracy theories or urban legends to season facts that, like the surreal party of 1972, They are nothing more than events of an opulent class with eccentric tastes that enjoys unquestionable power, which is openly and without veiling.
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