A Brill Calendar: November 17

The Rapacities of the Family de Geer

Few family-trees exemplify the historical coherence of the Low Countries as strikingly Louis de Gaillarmont's.

De Gaillarmont was a 16th century country squire who owned a castle carrying his surname near Liège, on the banks of the small river Geer, a tributary of the Meuse. Together with all his family, he left his ancestral home in 1596, fleeing to a world less hostile to his interests than that of the southern, Roman Catholic lands; seeking refuge in the prosperous city of Dordrecht, nearby Leyden.

The timing, place and character of his son, also a Louis – Dutch ‘Lodewijk’- born November 17, 1587 - coming from ‘de Geer’, his new surname – combined to create an astonishing mercantile career, with all Europe for its hunting grounds. The word ‘tycoon’ didn’t exist yet; but when Louis Jr came to meet his Maker in Amsterdam, on June 19, 1652, he had created an industrial empire unlike any business conglomerate before; especially in its stupendous diversity. This empire covered enterprises from the industrial casting of canon to the manufacture of paper, from mines to real estate, from wharves to kilns, from waterfalls to city shops, from banking to insuring.

The origins of the Europe-wide Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648), until the two World Wars the most appalling one in a humiliating variety of ways, were his stepping stone to his full stature & power. He was even naturalized as subject of Sweden and knighted a Baron. No belligerent party or warmonger called in vain on de Geer for supplies and financial arrangements. It is seldom indeed, that one single individual can be seen as a multinational commercial network of enterprise in his own right.

As historical poignancy and irony will have it, a very, very far descendant, Dirk Jan, ‘Jonkheer’ (Esquire) de Geer headed the Government of the Netherlands, when the Dutch Cabinet fled to London during the first stage of another (still) European War, in May 1940.