Values and Career Choice, 1860–1878

Abstract

“Beneath the exterior of a man of the north,” Alexandre Ribot wrote late in life, “I have had something of the vivacity of the Midi.”¹ In this characteristic statement of balance, he referred to family ancestry at Toulouse in the south of France which, by the eighteenth century, had been firmly transplanted to the Flanders lowland. Alexandre Ribot was born at Saint Omer on February 6, 1842 into the secure environment that a banking family can give. The origins of the family’s success, however, lay twenty miles northeast at Calais, the port city on the Strait of Dover. The Ribotte family — the spelling of the surname changed only in the 1840’s - had adapted well to the active commercial life of the city. It was Alexandre’s father who realized the potential of this family of wholesale merchants and aubergistes. In 1827 he and a first cousin pooled their capital to found a company for the manufacture of tulle, and the rising market for this Calaisian export commodity quickly made the partnership a successful one. Less than a decade later, Alexandre Joseph Ribotte invested his profits and moved to Saint Omer to begin a new career. There he married Zoé Leducq, a young woman half his age. Alexandre, their first child, was born three years later. Two daughters followed to complete the family.