Champagne queen with real fizz

ANNE-CLAIRE Taittinger-Bonnemaison is the kind of Frenchwoman most of us find utterly terrifying - and with good reason. She has seen off American corporate raider Asher Edelman and his compatriot Guy Wyser-Pratte, whipped 40 family shareholders into line, and begun streamlining the family champagne-to-luxury hotels empire.

Now she has cut a cute deal with Belgian financier Albert Frère that gives her four years to make the Taittinger group shipshape and maximise the wealth of one of Europe's richest dynasties.

Long-legged, slim, and immaculately turned out in classic designer tailoring, at the age of 52 Taittinger is the undisputed queen of the family, and one of only 30 or so women who really cut the mustard on the French business scene.

She runs the quoted group Taittinger, which controls the family's champagne production, and the quoted treasure chest of assets coveted by a string of break-up artists, the Société du Louvre.

You might not know the company, but you know its trophies: Baccarat crystal, Annick Goutal perfumes, and the Concorde group of 80 luxury hotels including the fabulous Crillon in Paris. But over the past two decades, the Taittingers have also built Europe's second-largest budget hotels empire, with another 820 hotels offering 51,798 rooms.

Best known is the 360-hotel Campanile two-star chain, which has started opening in Britain as well as Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands.

But Taittinger's Envergure hotel empire also has 160 Kyriad two-star hotels, 213 Première Classe one-star lodgings, a new Bleu Marine three-star brand and 30 Côte-à-Côte roadside grills. Together, these businesses generated net profits of e48.7m (£30.4m) last year on revenues of e687 million.

Taittinger, the daughter of former French Justice Minister Jean Taittinger, was levered into the chief executive's seat five years ago by her father.

She hadn't wanted the job. Independent and headstrong from childhood, she graduated in town planning from one of France's top Grands Ecoles and was setting up a Lyons industrial estate when she was swept off her high heels by her photographer husband Joachim Bonnemaison.

But Jean made a shrewd choice among the six Taittingers on the group board. Studious, steely, and ferociously hard working, Taittinger has welded the diverse interests of 40 third-generation family shareholders and started to focus the business, selling its bank, printworks and wood-stove foundry, Deville. Now, with backing from the Peugeot car dynasty, she has struck a deal with aptly-named Belgian investor Albert Frère under which the family retains a voting majority while she simplifies the group structure and unpicks family privileges.

After 150 years, it seems, there are too many graces and too many favours, among them services bought by the group from family members. Even Bonnemaison furnished pictures for the Baccarat catalogue.

Taittinger is the woman for the job. She has occasionally graced Paris and New York society gatherings, but says she hates going out, except to 'escape' to the company's anonymous hotel rooms, where she goes to bed with a book of poetry.

An exacting meritocratic scion, her determination has yet to meet its match. 'I like success when it is achieved after a lot of work, of struggle,' she says. So much for the champagne lifestyle.