Who Founded AXA?

Little is recorded about le Carpentier beyond the founding act itself. In 1817 he and 17 other property owners in Rouen created the Compagnie d'Assurances Mutuelles contre l'Incendie for the departments of the Seine and the Eure, covering their own buildings against fire; insured properties carried a plaque with the letters P.A.C.L. The first claim, in 1819, came to FFr7.5, and because that sum could not be divided among 1,264 shareholders the company invented a reserve fund, the mechanism that let it survive the fire at Rouen Cathedral in 1822. Competition from La Providence in 1838 and La Paternelle in 1843, and the shift of risk from farm buildings to factories and machinery, pushed the mutual to split into property and movables companies under Adolphe Lanne, manager from 1832; the two merged again in 1881 under the name Ancienne Mutuelle, which it kept until the 1970s. That provincial mutual, and its legal form, are what Claude Bébéar inherited in 1975. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Claude Bébéar built modern AXA. After joining in 1958 he spent 17 years inside the business, including 1964 to 1966 in Canada creating the life insurance arm of the group subsidiary Provinces Unies, before becoming chief executive in 1975 following Sahut d'Izarn's death and the settlement of a strike that had paralysed the company in April 1974. The same year he created the reinsurer AMré, later AXA RE. In 1978 the Anciennes Mutuelles became Mutuelles Unies. He took control of the Drouot Group in 1982, bought Présence in April 1986, merged with Compagnie du Midi in 1988 to become France's second-largest insurer, and was elected Manager of the Year that year. In July 1991 AXA took control of The Equitable in the United States, in 1995 of National Mutual in Australia, and in 1996 of UAP, a company twice its size. Guardian Royal Exchange and Nippon Dantai followed in 1999. He chose the name AXA in 1985 and launched AXA Hearts in Action in 1990 to pool the group's philanthropy. When he handed the group to Henri de Castries in May 2000 AXA had 140,000 employees, 50 million customers and revenues of ~$90.4 billion (EUR 80 billion). He founded the Institut Montaigne and chaired it until 2015, and remained Honorary Chairman of AXA until his death. Claude Bébéar was born in 1935.