Obituary: Paul RicardJohn Lichfield
Thursday, 13 November 1997

Paul Louis Marius Ricard: born Sainte-Marthe-Marseilles, France 9 July 1909: married 1937 Marie-Therese Thiers (two sons, three daughters); died Signes, France 7 November 1997. In the late 1920s, Paul Ricard concocted an aniseed-based drink in a laboratory and went on to market it, brilliantly, as an old Provencal tradition. In doing so, he developed another idea, sports sponsorship, and his name became the most ubiquitous in France. Yellow and blue Ricard advertising signs, cycling caps, ashtrays and water jugs became as much a part of the landscape of post-war France as the Citroen Deux Chevaux or the motorised bicycle. One of Ricard's proudest achievements was to have two Ricard jugs smuggled into the grotto at Lourdes. Ricard was a classically French figure, famously bad-tempered but also famously generous. In other ways, he was at odds with French tradition: a great entrepreneur and a great salesman, who detested the power of the French state and bureaucracy, which he called the "mediocrate". In a fit of temper with state controls, he resigned from day-to-day activities in his company in 1968. Under his younger son, Patrick, the firm continued to prosper, merging with Pernod in 1975. Pernod-Ricard is now the third largest spirits company in the world. The young Paul Ricard, born in 1909 in a Provencal hill village later swallowed up by the suburbs of Marseilles, dreamed of being a painter. His father insisted that he must join the family wine business, which he did at the age of 17. In his autobiography, La Passion de Creer (1983), he told how he was first introduced to home-made pastis, otherwise known as "the thing" or "tiger's milk", by an old shepherd. All aniseed-based spirits had been banned in 1915, because they were suspected of undermining the French war effort. None-theless, the young Ricard began to experiment in a laboratory with a more refined version, using, among