Turns Out France Has an Oligarch Problem Too

As recently as 1957, it was news when an American, the oil man H.L. Hunt, ranked among the five richest people on earth. In those days, the only path to that kind of wealth was oil, and the other four richest people were all Mideast monarchs: King Saud of Saudi Arabia; Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah of Kuwait; Sheikh Ali Bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar; and the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan (who’d lost his royal title in 1948 when Hyderabad was absorbed into India with the end…