The death in Paris on July 7 of Amschel Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild banking family, was officially declared by a London coroner as suicide last week.
The 41-year old banker, regarded as a possible future chairman of the British merchant bank N. M. Rothschild, was found dead, hanging from the girdle of his dressing gown, in his room in the Hotel Bristol.
Amschel Rothschild, a loving father with GBP30 million in land and personal holdings (about HK$360 million), killed himself after urging wealthy friends to support the Samaritans.
Had the pressures of family business become intolerable for a man regarded as the natural heir to the Rothschild banking empire, that was famously called 'the sixth great power of Europe'? He passed his final moments in solitude, reflecting perhaps on recent deaths among family and friends, business problems and friction in his marriage. Taking the cord from his bathrobe, he attached one end to a towel rail and tied a knot. He wrapped the rest of the cord around his neck, tied it again and strangled himself.
The sight that greeted his Algerian maid when she came in to turn down the bed sheets would rock the financial world and throw Europe's oldest banking dynasty into a crisis.
'He was a very private individual. There was always a sense in which you never really knew him,' one friend said.
Amschel Rothschild was born into a world of exquisite privilege and expectation. Over two centuries, his family had built up a reputation as one of the most brilliant and successful in the world. It was a genetic inheritance of which Amschel was acutely aware, and which, ultimately, he found too heavy a burden.