SUNDAY JOINT, 8-11-2024: "FRANCE CANNOT BE FRANCE WITHOUT GREATNESS," WHICH BRINGS US TO JOEL DE ROSNAY

Hey All,

The "greatness" quote, above, is from the towering, and toweringly insufferable, Cinquième République founder Charles de Gaulle, and maybe you're thinking, Just what you'd expect—nobody appreciates the French like the French. Or maybe you're more like, It's not bragging if you can back it up. I lean toward the second option. If you value culture in all it's manifest wonder—not counting comedy, punctuality, urban sanitation and efficient bureaucracy—France sits at the top of your Greatest Nation short list.

I cannot quite bring myself to say that Paris-raised Joel de Rosnay should, similarly, be atop your Greatest Surfer short list. But its not hard to make a case that de Rosnay for sure belongs on the Most Accomplished and Most Interesting lists—and Most Lucky, too, given that he was born to wealth and position and a lean, dark, long-faced handsomeness. In a 1959 press photo taken the day he married Stella Jebb (see photo below), the smiling top-hat-holding groom is identified as "Baron Joel de Rosnay," and while it turns out that "baron" is the lowest rung of nobility, it is nobility nonetheless. De Rosnay has spent a lifetime not referring to his peerage—but it is safe to say he was never poking around the cushions of his Citroën looking for gas money. Everyone in his orbit was rich or accomplished or most likely both. Shake the family tree and down come novelists, bankers, painters, fashionistas, civil engineers, ambassadors, Russian lords, even a UN Secretary-General with a Légion d'honneur medal pinned to his fine-worsted breast.

De Rosnay was born in Mauritius, on the family sugar plantation, in 1937. He grew up in Paris, learned to ski near the de Rosnay winter home in Switzerland, and learned to surf at their summer home in Biarritz. So far, so dilettante. Except de Rosnay became a dedicated and enthused rider of waves. In 1959, he cofounded the first French surf club, and a year later he won the French National Surfing Championships; in 1964 he was France's sole representative in the debut World Surfing Championships in Sydney; in 1965 he was runner-up to the French title. His entire first decade as a surfer, moreover, was done in parallel with his college and graduate studies and his early Paris-based career in the sciences. As for what that career was, exactly—you'll have to look it up on your own. The "Field of work" tab on de Rosnay's Wikimedia Commons page notes that he is associated with, in order, Biochemistry, Computer Science, Systemics, Future Studies, Epigenetics, Systems Theory, Surfing. His 1975 book The Macroscope is billed as an "easy to read" introduction to de Rosnay's thinking, and those of you who haven't spent the last two weeks joy-scrolling TikTok and Threads to confirm that maybe, possibly, American democracy has pulled out of its death spiral, might have the patience to make heads or tails out of de Rosnay's thinking. I have no idea what he's talking about. For ten years, de Rosnay was a director at the venerable Pasteur Institute in Paris; before that, he was an MIT researcher and professor. That's enough for me, the man's clearly packing cranial heat. He was (maybe still is) also a venture capitalist and has (or had) a biotech consulting firm, neither of which, plainly, has gotten in the way of his now-silver-haired physical élan—nay, greatness. See photo at bottom of page. De Rosnay's headline-making 1959 marriage to Stella Webb, furthermore, is now in its 65th year, and she is every bit the exemplary senior specimen he is. "For Joel and Stella," a 2018 Les Echos article on the de Rosnay clan noted, "glamour is almost a second skin."

And yet for all that, for nearly 50 years now Joel has, in the public imagination, played a distant second fiddle to younger brother Arnaud de Rosnay, the cleft-chinned playboy-surfer-starmaker who threw himself into fringing sets at La Barre as aggressively as he threw himself into the perfumed bedrooms of Paris, Milan and New York. Arnaud was an Avedon-mentored fashion photographer by profession, but a happy night-crawling dandy by nature, and unlike the suave but conservative Joel, Arnaud leaned into his aristocracy, reveled in it, played the part to the hilt. In 1967, during what one friend called his "glamour hippie" phase, Arnaud shot layouts for Vogue (models included Twiggy and Cher) and showed up in Biarritz in a chauffeur-driven Rolls with pearl-inlay door panels, fur-lined back seats, and a champagne-filled fridge. It was easy to eye-roll this loud, stunting peacock—Arnaud was as happy in front of the camera as behind it—but it was hard to look away, and harder still to not feel slightly, or massively, jealous.

Arnaud married a billionaire's daughter (back when a billion meant something), divorced, then married SURFER founder John Severson's stunning just-out-of-high-school daughter, Jenna, and the two sailboarded off into the sunset. Or Arnaud did, anyway. He was lost at sea in 1984, age 38, trying to speed-sail the Taiwan Strait. It was a dumb thing to do. Arnaud and Jenna had a newborn daughter. He launched in pre-dawn darkness out of Quanzhou, China, with no support boat, and much of the route was through an off-limits military zone. De Rosnay's body was never recovered. Surfing gained another glam-tragic hero. Three books have been written about him, the most recent being Arnaud de Rosnay: Gentleman de l'extrême.

Joel de Rosnay would be weighed down by the loss but not the past itself, and at 87 he remains a futurist. In this recent interview, he talks about the meaning and practices of la glisse, which roughly translates to "sliding" but is somehow more French (and therefore more interesting) and can, de Rosnay says, be applied to life itself, the idea being to remain upright and poised and stylish even when the terrain is difficult.

There is greatness is stability.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

PS: Click here to see Joel and Stella dancing at the 1965 World Championships reception party in Lima, Peru. First two shots. Pure joy. 

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Arnaud de Rosnay, Biarritz, 1964; Joel de Rosnay surfing at the '64 World Championships; Sonny and Cher, 1967, photo by Arnaud de Rosnay; Joel de Rosnay, center-right, Biarritz, 2007, photo by Jean-Pierre Muller; Légion d'honneur medal; Arnaud de Rosnay at La Barre, 1965, photo by Craig van Note. Joel de Rosnay, new wife Stella Jebb, alonside her father, Lord Gladwyn Jebb, 1959. De Rosnay at the '64 World Championships. Joel de Rosnay in his Paris office, 1983, photo by Sophie Bassouls. Arnaud de Rosnay, 1970, by Manuel Litran. Arnaud at La Barre, 1965. Maria Berenson shoot for Vogue, 1968, photo by Arnaud de Rosnay. Arnaud and Jenna de Rosnay, Tahiti, 1980. Joel de Rosnay near Biarritz, 2020, photo Nicolas Luttiau.]