Jácome Ratton

Jacques or Jácome Ratton (Monestier de Briançon, Hautes-Alpes, 7 July 1736 – Paris, 3 July 1820) was a Franco-Portuguese businessman, who was a leading figure in the mainly foreign group of industrialists in 18th century Portugal. He published his Memoirs (Recordaçoens) in 1813 in exile in London, which remain a significant source on Portuguese economic life in the period.

His father was Jacques (in Portugal called Jácome) Ratton (died Mâcon, France in 1779), the son of a Conseil du Roi (in effect a Public Prosecutor) in Mâcon of the same name, and his wife Jeanne Orsel. Soon after the birth of his eldest son by his marriage to Françoise Bellon (died Mâcon, 1794), daughter of Jacques Bellon and a mother of the Berard family, Jacques emigrated to Portugal, where his brother-in-law Jacques Bellon was already established in Porto, married to Marie Purat.

Jacques emigrated to Portugal soon after the birth of his son Jácome, who was brought up by his grandparents and educated in France, before joining his parents at the age of fourteen in Portugal - a pattern typical of the French mercantile community, that Jácome was to repeat with his own children. His Memoirs stress the importance of this - he is highly critical of the backwardness of the Portuguese mercantile classes, who he said hardly used double-entry bookkeeping and were generally unbusiness-like in their ways. In 1758 Jácome married Ana Isabel Clamous, daughter of the French Consul in Porto (again, a son would marry the daughter of another Consul), and in 1762, when France and Portugal were on opposite sides in the Seven Years' War, he became naturalised Portuguese. However the Introduction to the 1920 Coimbra edition of his memoirs mentions that, nearly 50 years later, his Portuguese has "irregularidades gramaticais". His father had moved to Lisbon and was in business, including a partnership with the brother-in-law in Oporto; after Jacome was established he retired to France. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, vividly described in the Memoirs, caused great losses for the business - 300,000 cruzados according to the Memoirs.

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