Armand Donon

Pierre Armand Donon (, Pontoise - , Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French banker. During his heyday around 1860 he was known as the banking partner of Charles, Duc de Morny, a key figure of the Second French Empire, with whom he partnered for the early development of Deauville.

Biography

Pierre-Armand Donon was the son of merchant Pierre-Amédée Donon (1792-1880) and his wife Marie-Caroline-Armande, née Morand. He studied in Paris at the Collège Sainte-Barbe.

By 1845, Donon was a partner at Calon jeune & Cie, a private banking house. On , immediately after the 1851 coup d'état, he co-founded the new bank Donon, Aubry, Gautier & Cie together with partners and Jules Gautier.

On , Donon married Henriette-Félicité Staub, the daughter of a prominent Parisian taylor.

In 1859, Donon was instrumental in the creation of the Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC), which was supported by the politically influential Duke of Morny, as a competitor to the Pereire brothers's Crédit Mobilier on the model of successful British depository banks such as the London and Westminster Bank. In 1863, feeling a loss of direct control over the CIC, he created the Société des Dépôts et Comptes Courants (SDCC) and became the new institution's chairman. As the SDCC and CIC were effectively competitors, Donon stopped attending board meetings of the CIC in August 1866 and formally left the board in 1871.

In 1859, together with Morny's physician Joseph Francis Olliffe and Morny himself, Donon bought 177 hectares of seafront land west of the Touques river in Normandy, which formed the basis for the later development of Deauville.

From 1868, Donon was mayor of the village of Lonrai in the Orne department, where in 1863 he had acquired a large, newly built country house. He ran unsuccessfully for deputy of Orne in the legislative elections of 1871 and 1876.

From the late 1870s, Donon engaged in increasingly reckless risk-taking at the Société des Dépôts et Comptes Courants and withheld the relevant information from his board. In 1887, the private bank Donon, Aubry, Gautier & Cie which Donon had created in 1851 went into liquidation. The SDCC's situation became untenable and developed into a panic in 1891, when the Bank of France provided emergency liquidity and eventually liquidated the bank on . The SDCC was subsequently absorbed in 1892 by the Comptoir national d'escompte de Paris. In 1892, Donon relinquished his role of mayor of Lonrai and sold his mansion there. On , Donon was convicted and sentenced to six months imprisonment, which he served at the La Santé Prison, and a fine of three thousand francs. On , he was stripped of the Legion of Honour that had been awarded to him on .