THE VANISHING

In 1978, one of Paris’s most dashing and powerful men was violently kidnapped, leaving tout le monde wondering if he might escape— and how much it could cost.

- TOM SANCTON

His friends called him Wado, but the world knew him as Baron Edouard-Jean Empain. With his longish blond hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones, he could have been mistaken for a movie star. Tall, square-shouldered, and athletic, he had been a champion skier and horseman in his youth. Now, at age 40, he was the head of an industrial empire that comprised 174 companies and employed 136,000 workers in fields ranging from mining and metallurgy to banking, heavy construction, shipbuilding, munitions, and nuclear energy.

Empain was half American and half Belgian, but his headquarters, his sumptuous apartment, and his ancestral château were in France, where he enjoyed a position of almost unrivaled influence. His conglomerate was so central to French economic and security interests that the papers dubbed him “le Krupp français”—an allusion to the Krupp industrial dynasty, which supplied arms to German regimes for centuries, from the Thirty Years War to the end of the Third Reich. Hailed as a member of the “international gentry,” Baron Empain was the first foreigner to be named a director of Le Patronat, the powerful French employers’ association. His personal credo was that of the classic capitalist: “work, family, property.”