It’s an overcast day in Paris, which is slowly coming back to life after the August exodus. The leaves have already begun to fall off the Champs-Élysées trees, covering the boulevard in a light autumnal carpet. French politicians are being very French. “La tragédie française” is the headline of Le Point, amid the collapse of yet another government.
The latest prime ministerial defenestration — this time of François Bayrou, after a stint lasting less than a year — is clearly preying on my lunch date, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. He has recently co-written with his wife Elisabeth Bouchaud — an accomplished physicist turned theatre director — a play based on Albert Camus’ final work, The First Man, and hopes that the writer’s temperate political disposition will resonate again. “I’m very fond of people that try to find compromise. I think we need to hear his voice again, during these troubled times,” Bouchaud sighs. “In France in particular we are bad at finding compromise.”
Playwriting is just a highbrow hobby, however. With his mop of hair, owlish spectacles and academic mien, Bouchaud looks like the French physics professor he used to be, but in fact he runs one of Europe’s largest, oldest and least-known hedge funds, Capital Fund Management. CFM currently manages $20bn of assets, perhaps small by American standards but big by European ones, and its flagship fund is now closed to new investors, a tell-tale sign of success in the business of managing money.