Serge Dassault

Serge Dassault (French: [sɛʁʒ daso]; born 4 April 1925) is a French heir, business executive and politician. He serves as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dassault Group and a conservative politician.

Serge Dassault is the son of Marcel Dassault, from whom he inherited the Dassault Group, and Madeline Dassault (née Minckes). Both his parents are of Jewish heritage but later converted to Roman Catholicism. Since the elder Dassault's death in 1986, Serge Dassault has continued developing the company, with the help of CEOs Charles Edelstenne and Éric Trappier.

He studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, the École Polytechnique, Supaéro and HEC Paris. During the Second World War, he was jailed when his father was sent to Buchenwald for refusing any cooperation with the German aviation industry.

His group also owns Groupe Le Figaro.

He is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement political party, as is his son Olivier, who is a deputy in the French National Assembly. He is a former mayor of the city of Corbeil-Essonnes, a southern suburb of Paris. In 2005, he inaugurated the 2 millioneuro Islamic cultural centre (comprising a mosque) in his city of Corbeil-Essonnes. In December 1998, he was sentenced to two years' probation in the Belgian Agusta scandal, and was fined 60,000 Belgian francs (about €1,500).

In 2004, he became a senator, and in this position, he has been an outspoken advocate of conservative positions on economic and employment issues, claiming that France's taxes and workforce regulations ruin its entrepreneurs. In November 2012, responding to the Ayrault government's plan to legalise gay marriage, he controversially said, during an interview for France Culture, that authorising gay marriage cause "no more renewal of the population. [...] We'll have a country of homosexuals. And so in ten years there'll be nobody left. It's stupid".

Dassault married Nicole Raffel on 5 July 1950. They have four children: Olivier, Laurent, Thierry, and Marie-Hélène.