PARIS


ONE rainy morning in April, members of the Bettencourt family, heirs to the vast L’Oréal cosmetics fortune, strode into the Palais des Congrès de Paris, the grand convention center here, for a meeting with L’Oréal shareholders.


One person was missing from their entourage: Liliane Bettencourt, the wizened matriarch of L’Oréal and one of the world’s richest women. Mrs. Bettencourt, 89, had stayed behind in her mansion in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, having given up the board seat she held for 17 years after a bitter family fight that captivated France and even shook the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy.


Taking her place was a willowy figure, Jean-Victor Meyers, Ms. Bettencourt’s 25-year-old grandson, a sheltered, publicity-shy scion with a taste for fashion but little experience in business affairs. His main qualification is his family name.


“This is a very important moment for me,” Mr. Meyers, with dark, gelled hair, a black suit and an easy smile, said on a video L’Oréal beamed over the stage to persuade shareholders to approve the transition. “My first thought is of my grandmother.”


His entree onto the 14-member board, as the youngest administrator at any publicly listed company in France, comes at a pivotal time for the family and for L’Oréal. The owner of the Body Shop, Lancôme, Maybelline and an eye-popping list of beauty products found in bathrooms around the world, L’Oréal rang up a record 20 billion euros in global sales last year, and it is angling to conquer one billion new consumers in the next decade to beat its rivals.


Stalking that news, though, is the question of whether Nestlé, the mighty Swiss food empire that in a longstanding alliance with the Bettencourts owns a big stake in L’Oréal, might one day make a play for the 30 percent of the stock the family owns through a holding company. (Nestlé, at just under 30 percent, is the second-largest shareholder.)


Whether Mr. Meyers, who has so far worked as a salesman at a Louis Vuitton store and an assistant product manager at L’Oréal’s Yves Saint Laurent cosmetic line, can stand tall in Mrs. Bettencourt’s stead is foremost in people’s minds. He has a degree in management. “But he’s only 25 years old, he’s inexperienced, and he seems to lack maturity,” said Cathy Boutard, a longtime shareholder who donned a red coat and Chanel pearl earrings for the meeting.


“We all miss Madame Bettencourt, and we have followed the scandal that’s happened with the family and that’s rocked L’Oréal,” she added. “It feels like she was pushed out, and it’s shocking.”


On the stage, Jean-Paul Agon, the chief executive of L’Oréal, hailed Mrs. Bettencourt’s lifetime involvement in the company, which her father, the chemist Eugène Schueller, founded in 1909 after concocting a new type of hair dye in Paris. Mr. Agon said the succession showed “the engagement of the Bettencourt-Meyers family,” now in its fourth generation.


Mr. Meyers, who will sit on the board alongside his parents, insists he’s ready. “I may be only 25 years old,” Mr. Meyers said. “But I’m sure of my experience with the family.”


THAT will prove a useful qualification. For years, Mr. Meyers has been thrust into the role of diplomat between his grandmother and his mother, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, whose maneuvers to keep a playboy photographer and others away from Mrs. Bettencourt’s 20 billion euro fortune erupted into a Balzacian scandal that became known in France as “l’affaire Bettencourt.”


Several years ago, the daughter grew suspicious that people in her mother’s entourage were trying to profit from her. She was especially wary of the photographer, François-Marie Banier, 64, a dandy who befriended celebrities including Salvador Dali and Johnny Depp, and whose friendship with Mrs. Bettencourt deepened after her husband’s death in 2007.