Died 1806
Restaurateur

Early Years. The son of Armand Roze, a landowner and merchant in Chantoiseau, France, Mathurin Roze added the aristocratic-sounding "de Chantoiseau" to his name before moving to Paris in the early 1760s. There he became involved in several business ventures and reform projects. His preoccupation with the financial health of the kingdom coincided with a concern for the physical well-being of the citizenry of Paris. He opened his first restaurant in 1766, and three years later he published a pamphlet describing a fiscal program designed to increase the money supply while neither increasing taxes nor encouraging inflationary pressures. The plan, which received some attention at court and for which Roze hoped to be acknowledged, instead landed him briefly in jail for distributing an incendiary tract. Despite this setback, Roze revisited the issue in 1789. On the eve of the...