The Cartier family: A century's worth of wealth went through the empire

The Cartier family is the story of wealth creation in the 19th and 20th centuries as it moved in waves from country to country

By the time the final chunk of the Cartier jewellry empire was sold off in the 1970s, its founding family was almost entirely dispersed and disinterested.

Almost everyone was wealthy—the Cartier family had an uncanny knack for marrying into money, then making even more of it. And even though four generations of Cartier men had worked tirelessly to create a business that elevated jewellry salesmanship from “mere trade” to an art form, their descendants were more interested in bobsledding in St. Moritz than hawking the company’s famous Tank watches. This rise and then—instead of a “fall,” let’s call it a “plateau”—is