Hottinguer & Compagnie, a powerful French merchant-banking firm, was founded in 1786 under the name of Rougemont, Hottinguer & Compagnie by Denis de Rougemont and Jean Conrad Hottinguer (1764–1841), a businessman from Zurich who immigrated to Paris in 1784. After a series of false starts and name changes, the company established itself in 1798 under the sole leadership of Hottinguer. Originally specializing in the coffee and cotton trades, Hottinguer & Compagnie soon became an important adviser and financier of the French state. In 1803 Hottinguer was appointed regent of the recently established Bank of France. By 1815 the firm had achieved a high national and international standing, with branches in Nantes, Le Havre, Marseille, and New York. Hottinguer & Compagnie played a prominent role in managing France’s war debt following Napoleon’s fall in 1815, and after 1826 it became an important lender to the Bank of the United States. The company continued to thrive thanks to its participation in the crucial financial events of the time, from the establishment of European railway systems in the second half of the nineteenth century to the two world wars and the Great Depression. More recently the firm split into several companies, collectively known as the Hottinguer Group and specializing in administering the accounts of individual investors, corporate finance, and international investment policy (DBF description begins Dictionnaire de biographie française, 1933– , 19 vols. description ends , 17:1315–6; Max Gérard, Messieurs Hottinguer, Banquiers à Paris, 2 vols. [1968–72]; The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the year 1830 [1830], 1:208; The American Annual Register; for the years 1827–8–9 [1830], 577; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 9 Nov. 1839; Paul Jacques Lehmann, “Les Hottinguer, Banquiers classiques de la haute banque,” La Vie Financière, 26 Aug.–1 Sept. 2005, 44–7; Commerce International, July 2007, 1–4; L’Agefi, 1 June 2010, 4).

The London Quarterly Review 14 (Jan. 1816; published 18 May 1816): 368–402, contained a severe attack on Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804. by Alexander de Humboldt, and Aimé Bonpland (London, 1814), trans. Helen Maria Williams, vols. 1–2 (for TJ’s French ed., see Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4157). The same work received praise in the Edinburgh Review 25 (1815): 86–111.