For Baron Guy de Rothschild banking was the springboard for dominance on the French social and cultural scene. In an age that, with rising affluence, was paradoxically descending into drabness, he persistently added style and even splendour to the high life of Paris. He did so with the panache of a previous age.

Rothschild did not flaunt his wealth. By the time he was born the family had long ceased to be “nouveaux riches”. They were an anchor of high society and Rothschild used his wealth publicly and privately to enrich the social and cultural life of three generations. The parties he gave, particularly with his second wife, Marie-Hélène, were memorable. To the Château Ferrières, their stately home outside Paris, they invited 800 guests in l971 for a ball to celebrate the centenary of the writer Marcel Proust and a year later they followed this with a Surrealist Ball, attended by Salvador DalÍ.

The European social scene has not seen the like of those parties since, and rarely saw them before. Three years on Rothschild decided to give Ferrières to the University of Paris. Encouraged by his wife he acquired as the new family home the Hotel Lambert on the Île St Louis in Paris.

Everything Rothschild undertook in the business, social or cultural sphere was underpinned by vision and taste, and always guided by a high intelligence that was twinned with shrewdness and even at times cunning. He had an unshakeable belief that private wealth needed to be spread for the public good as well as for the enrichment of the top slice of society to which he belonged.

Guy Edouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild was born in 1909 and educated at the lycées Condorcet and Louis-le-Grand in Paris and by private tutors. His formal education ended at the age of 22. But for the next 76 years he continued to grow as a man of the widest culture. His interests ranged far beyond banking. On the turf, for instance, he was a regular presence at Chantilly, outside Paris, as well as at Ascot and Epsom. But he only once won the Prix du Jockey Club at Chantilly, also known as the French Derby.

The foundation of it all was the bank, set up in 1812 by a son of Amschel Meyer Rothschild, the founder of the family fortunes in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Guy de Rothschild joined the bank in 1931 as the Depression was still at its nadir. In the ensuing years he helped to navigate it back to prosperity and a certain measure of security. Then came the German invasion but after the Munich Agreement Rothschild had transferred his bank’s headquarters from Paris to La Bourboule near Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne. That became part of the territory governed from Vichy by the Nazi puppet Marshal Pétain and the Rothschild companies were forcibly sold under antiJewish laws.

Rothschild served as a company commander in the 3rd Light Mechanised Division during the Battle of France in the spring of l940. After an engagement in which only three of his unit’s 27 officers survived he was evacuated from Dunkirk and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He later joined his parents in New York, but returned to Britain to join General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. He made his way back across the Atlantic on a cargo ship that was torpedoed by a German submarine. He spent seven hours on a raft before being rescued by a British corvette and on arrival in London celebrated his survival with an 1895 bottle of the family’s Château Lafite.

During the forced sale of the family business interests, Rothschild had engineered buy-back options and after the war he rebuilt his banking fortunes in Paris, and branched out into oil and mining. One of his outstanding gifts was talent spotting. He came across an administrator called Georges Pompidou and gave him a key role in the bank. Pompidou rapidly rose to become managing director, until de Gaulle, who was possibly Rothschild’s superior in talent spotting, and was also then President of France, poached Pompidou to become Prime Minister. After handling the l968 student unrest Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle as President.

Rothschild lost the family bank a second time when François Mitterrand’s newly elected Socialist Government nationalised it in l981. He wrote in Le Monde: “A Jew under Petain, a pariah under Mitterrand – for me that is enough.” With that he flew to New York to run a smaller Rothschild bank.

Three years later Rothschild’s elder son David was given permission to start a new bank in Paris, first called Banque Paris Orléans because the Mitterrand Government had banned the name Rothschild. Jacques Chirac removed the ban as soon as he became Prime Miniser in l986, and the bank later forged links with N M Rothschilds in London run by Evelyn de Rothschild. As Baron Guy put it: “We are a family, not an impersonal corporation.”

With his charm, shrewdness, exceptional ability and world-wide connections, Rothschild did everything in his considerable power to maintain the family links, the family identity and the family wealth. He was also a proud Jew, though never a religiously observant one. He gave up the presidency of French Jewry’s representative body, the Consistoire, when he married Marie-Hélène and thereby “out of the faith”.

A talented golfer, Rothschild represented France and won the Grand Prix de Sud-Ouest in 1948.

He had first married Alix Schey de Koromla, a distant cousin and member of a Hungarian Jewish family in l937. After his divorce from her he married Marie-Hélène van Zuylen de Nyevelt de Haar in l957. She was also a distant cousin although a Roman Catholic. She died in l996 and Guy de Rothschild is survived by two sons.

Baron Guy de Rothschild, banker, wine grower and horse breeder, was born on May 21, 1909. He died on June 12, 2007, aged 98