“I was struck by his talent from our first meeting,” Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man, said in 2000. “He is my closest colleague as well as a confidant and friend without equal.”

Mr. Godé officially joined Mr. Arnault’s company in 1985, having assisted in a 1984 bid for Boussac, a bankrupt textile company that counted the Christian Dior fashion house among its assets.

A loyal second-in-command and adviser trusted like no other — LVMH has become infamous for the fast-moving revolving doors at its many fashion houses — Mr. Godé later led the charge in some of the group’s most high-risk business dealings. Among them were a two-year battle for control of LVMH with the Racamier family in the 1980s, which it won, and an attempted takeover of Gucci in 1999, a rare defeat.

He had the official title of LVMH vice chairman, but his reach stretched much further. As LVMH entered the digital age, Mr. Godé masterminded an aggressively protectionist strategy, suing the search giant Google and the online marketplace eBay for not doing enough to stop the sale of counterfeit goods. As part of that effort, he assembled an arsenal of diplomacy and lawsuits in a bid to enforce the same guidelines in the virtual world as in the real one.

“We have invested so much money to enhance and protect our brands and our brand experience that it is impossible to accept a scenario where someone else who has no understanding of this or interest in it would sell our brands and destroy that value,” Mr. Godé said in an interview in 2010.