Jacques Balsan
French aviator and businessman (1868-1956)
Louis Jacques Balsan (September 16, 1868 – November 4, 1956) was a French aviator and industrialist, who was the second husband of society beauty Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough. He married her immediately after her divorce from the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1921.
Early life
Balsan was born on September 16, 1868, in Châteauroux, France. He was the son of Auguste Balsan and Marie (née Dupuytren). Among his siblings was brother Étienne Balsan, the first patron of Coco Chanel, and sister, Viscountess de Villeneuve-Bargemon of Davenescourt, France.
Through his mother, he was descended from Guillaume Dupuytren, the anatomist and surgeon who treated Napoleon Bonaparte and, today, is best known today for his description of Dupuytren's contracture, which is named after him and which he first operated on in 1831 and published in The Lancet in 1834.
Jacques Balsan came from a manufacturing family who created and ran Balsan (Company) which supplied the French Army with uniforms from the time of Napoleon onwards which were the origin of the famous cloth "the blue horizon". The family's textile factories were situated at Châteauroux.
Career
At the age of 24, Jacques Balsan entered the family business and traveled the world, buying wool.
Passionate about ballooning, in September 1900, while in the balloon St.
“Jacques Balsan” enters the record as french aviator and businessman (1868-1956). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jacques, Balsan and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacques Balsan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.