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Hall of Fame Biographies

André Essel and Max Théret

Fnac

After the Second World War Young Socialists André Essel and Max Théret met up and conceived the idea of forming a new buyers club offering discounted photographic equipment.

Born in Paris in 1913, Théret's own political career was well under way by the time Trotsky was ousted by the Soviets in 1929. Before the rise of the extreme right, Théret, as a Trotskyist, was chiefly occupied with street battles against the French Stalinists. After joining the battle against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Théret returned to France, where he met up with the exiled Trotsky, forming part of his informal bodyguard. In the pre-war years, Théret helped support the Young Socialists movements by contributing to its various money-raising activities, fighting in the French army during the Second World War, he joined the Resistance during the Occupation, distributing leftist newspapers.

While nurturing his political career, Théret had also been developing a career in photography, beginning in 1932. Later, hunted by the Gestapo, Théret left the Occupied Zone in 1942, moving to Grenoble, where he worked for a photographer, taking photos of weddings, balls, and banquets. After the war, Théret trained as a photo laboratory technician, founded his own laboratory, and later constructed the first colour processing machine in France. In 1951, while working for the PTT telephone company, he founded Economie Nouvelle, a buying group that arranged discounts for members on products sold through participating merchants.

Essel and Théret met during this period and conceived the idea of forming a new buyers club through a magazine called Contact. By slashing the standard retail mark-up on its products, the pair remained true to their socialist convictions, making products more affordable. The new organisation was called Federation Nationale d'Achats des Cadres; starting up shop on July 31, 1954.

FNAC, as the store quickly became known, offered its salespeople training in their product categories, purchases were guaranteed for one year, all products were tested before being sold in the store and the company set up an independent testing operation to provide comparisons among products, with results published in the free Contact members' magazine. In 1957, FNAC added televisions to its stores, quickly followed by hi-fi and recording equipment, radios, and records.

In 1966, FNAC opened its store to non-member purchases and began to expand, opening a second store in Paris, near the Arc de Triomphe.

At the start of the 1970s the company began an even wider expansion, which included opening stores in the provinces, and a third Paris store, which would chiefly sell books, the company's newest product. In order to raise the capital for expansion, Théret and Essel sold 40% of the company to insurance firm Union Des Assurances, which in turn sold 16% of its shares to what would become investment bank Banque Paribas, in 1972.

In 1974, it began offering books at 80% off the listed price, sparking protests from the industry. FNAC continued its discounting policy, however, until 1982, when a law was passed limiting discounts on books. Meanwhile, the chain continued to expand, and in 1977 Essel and Théret sold their remaining shares to the Société Génerale des Cooperatives de Consommation (SGCC), the financial arm of the then-powerful Coop retailing group. Essel remained as head of FNAC until 1983. Théret, now a billionaire, went on to purchase a newspaper before losing most of his fortune in the 1980s and being fined for his part in the Pechiney insider-trading scandal in 1988.

In 1983 Essel stepped down (Coop rules required retirement at the age of 65) and SGCC president Roger Kerinec took over FNAC's leadership. Essel died in 2005, aged 86.