Death of Denis Kessler: a look back at an extraordinary life as a boss

It was early February. Denis Kessler had been very discreet for a few months. We no longer met him at conferences or at social cocktail parties at the CAC 40, we only rarely saw him at the Paris Opera, discreetly drying his tears after the curtain fell. There was this tenacious rumor about a disease, but nothing had been officially announced. And then, on January 23, we learned from a press release that the president of the Scor group, a reinsurance giant with nearly 20 billion euros in turnover, had had the head of its managing director. He was the second leader ejected in less than two years… So we thought that Kessler had not said his last word, that he must be in good shape, even in very good shape. Request an interview by text message. The theme: “What the hell is going on at Scor?” Why so much turmoil at the head of the company? DK’s response: “OK for a coffee with a sugar candy.” »

He was expecting us on February 9, at 10 a.m., on the sixth and top floor of the ultra-modern Scor building of which he was so proud, on avenue Kléber. His assistant had installed us with a coffee in the meeting room equipped with the latest technology (note the total absence of switches, the fingerprint of the index finger of the boss being the essential sesame), adjoining his office with a view of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. After a few minutes of waiting, his footsteps began to echo in the hallway. This one was a little lighter than usual, it’s true, the man having shed many pounds, but the range of the voice had lost none of its power and elasticity. It was always impressive to see how Denis Kessler was able to switch abruptly, in the middle of a conversation, from bass to treble, according to his enthusiasm or his irritation.

“So, how’s it going at the Point?” On that freezing winter’s day, Kessler had defended himself against what the Tout-Paris business accused him of having become one of those bosses who cling to power and their remuneration and take malicious pleasure in to shoot their dolphins one after the other, like in an Agatha Christie novel. Because, before Laurent Rousseau, the director general resigned last January, it was Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, former all-powerful chief of staff of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who had cleared the floor in May 2021 after four short months. “Pff… The State Councilors think they know everything… But the reinsurance business is extremely technical, it can’t be improvised. Ribadeau-Dumas was not ready and he understood nothing about the sector…” Feeling that facts and appearances were against him, that he had to finally agree to dub a successor, he had promised, sworn, spat, that this time, it would be different, like in a romance novel, with the new CEO, Thierry Léger, a former Swiss Re. He had even assured us that he would be leaving his beloved company next year. It was February 9th. He floated in his costume, but the gaze was sharp, the volume high, and the verb still incisive. He died four months later, at age 71, on Friday, June 9.

Denis Kessler, a native of Mulhouse, son of a commercial agent deported to Dachau for acts of resistance during the Second World War, is a specimen apart in the circle of great French bosses. This man has had a thousand lives. In order, but we probably forget some, he was: a brilliant HEC student with a Trotskyist tendency, quick to organize strikes to lower tuition fees; an exceptional academic in economics driven by his professor, mentor and unfailing friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn; the poor manager of a Parisian restaurant opened with his childhood friend who became boss of Le Monde, who died suddenly in 2021, Érik Izraelewicz; a super-lobbyist at the head of the French Federation of Insurance Companies; a number two of the media and explosive Medef in tandem with Baron Ernest-Antoine Seillière, who embodied a harsh and uninhibited bosses, fighting in particular with all his might the 35 hours imposed by the government of Lionel Jospin. His thousand and first life consisted in taking the reins in 2002, at the age of 50, of an unknown company, evolving in an ultra-complex sector (reinsurance), then in a state of deep coma.

Scor, whose business is therefore to reinsure risks already covered by conventional insurers, had entered into a downward spiral after losing a billion dollars in the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center: customers then ask for guarantees impossible, bankers cut lines and rating agencies downgrade society. “I was stimulated by the complexity, but the situation was abysmal,” Kessler said. My action at the head of the company has been like an incredible chase. He recapitalizes the group, designs a strategic plan and cuts down the loss-making subsidiaries with an axe. The strong in subject – doctoral student, doubly aggregated (economic sciences and social sciences) and youngest elected to the EHESS – devotes himself body and soul to his new object of study: insurance or the science of major risks.

“The Old Testament is a little treatise of reassurance,” he liked to point out. All disasters, which are suffered as divine punishments, are described: the seven plagues of Egypt, the earthquake of Jericho, the tsunami in the Red Sea or the Flood. For Professor Kessler, the Lisbon earthquake, which occurred on November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, marked the beginning of modernity. “Contemporaries then thought: God could not have wanted to kill thousands of worshipers praying in churches. This is how statisticians came into existence, substituting for the divine and fatality a scientific understanding of the laws of nature. “Mission accomplished for Kessler, which turns Scor around and makes it a world champion. At the same time, the one who is renowned on the Paris market for his Homeric anger on his frightened collaborators becomes one of the best paid bosses in the insurance sector.

With his success at Scor, he had his revenge, he who had hoped to succeed Claude Bébéar at the head of AXA but had lost the game against Henri de Castries. Influential, he joined many boards of directors, such as those of BNP Paribas, Bolloré, but also Dassault Aviation, of which he was always close to the leaders. Since 2013, he had been a member of the “Comité des sages” – a voluntary function – which had been created by Serge Dassault to manage his succession at the head of the family group. He had even become its president, and called a meeting followed by a lunch with the other members (Henri Proglio, Jean-Martin Folz, Alain Lambert…) every month at the headquarters of the Dassault group, at the roundabout of the Champs- Elysees. “Even so… It’s not given to everyone to chair the committee of wise men of such a prestigious and strategic group for France”, he told us again last February with pride, while categorically refusing to deliver every detail of the work of this top-secret committee. On September 4, 2018, an event took him by surprise and made him mad with rage. Its largest shareholder, the mutualist Covéa, known for its Maaf, MMA and GMF brands, had put 8 billion euros on the table to acquire the entire capital of Scor. Kessler knew nothing; he sees red and declares total war on his boss Thierry Derez. A very violent fight then ensues, to the delight of many law firms and banks in Paris. Kessler is on a loop, he thinks about it from morning shaving to night when he goes to bed, he puts all his energy and all his aggressiveness into the fight. The fight will last almost three years and will end in June 2021. The two groups sign a settlement agreement ending the dispute which threatened to lead to a criminal trial. Covéa is on its way.

Denis Kessler is also a boss known for his freedom of speech – in other words, for his “big mouth”. The “at the same time” is not in his genes. The former economics professor extolls the virtues of the market, he is liberal from head to toe and proud of it. He groans, or rather he howls against a bloated State, against a France incapable of reforming itself, against a country which drags its level of indebtedness like a millstone, against a French education system which is going straight into the wall. “For forty years I have seen the procrastination and denial in which politicians, legislature after legislature, maintain our country, for lack of lucidity and courage. This sentence dates back to an interview given to Le Point in 2012, but he could have said it yesterday.

During our last visit, the president of Scor had given us a small pocket book mixing French and Latin versions that he was particularly fond of. It was called Nothing New Under the Sun (Nihil novi sub sole, in Latin). In this collection of texts from Latin literature, we can read texts on insecurity in the city, the corruption of the powerful, the influx of foreigners, natural disasters, power and profit… see that, two millennia earlier, in Antiquity, the same problems and the same findings had already been posed. “These texts are incredible, they are astoundingly modern. There really is nothing new under the sun! Everything is an eternal restart. Denis Kessler, an atypical, eruptive, brilliant boss, capitalist, economist and philosopher, died on June 9, 2023.