GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
The entrepreneurial but hated Louis Renault
IF THE TITLE OF THIS PAGE could be lightly modified, then Louis Renault is more accurately described as ‘Gone but not forgiven’. The French have loved many of the cars that sport his name. But they hate him. When the company commemorated its centenary in 1999, his descendents were pointedly ignored, and it’s rumoured that anyone who publicly suggests history has been unjust to Louis – which is, in fact, possible – can find strange things happen to them, such as a sudden visit from the taxman.
At the centre of this national heresy is Louis Renault’s fraught relationship with the Nazi regime and the Vichy government in World War Two. He’s vilified as a collaborator of the worst kind because, in 1940, he agreed to build 30,000 lorries for the Germans, and his huge Boulogne Billancourt factory in Paris was turned over to supporting the occupying forces. His defence was that, unless he complied, the plant would be stripped of equipment that would be transported to Germany, along with his 40,000 workers. ‘Give them the butter or they will take the cows,’ he’s supposed to have reasoned.
W hat a contrast to his role in World War One. Then, Louis pulled out all the stops to massproduce a tank – the FT – for France that played a vital role in the technological fightback. For that, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
Louis had been the driving force in terms of vehicle design since he and his brothers set up as Renault Frères in 1899. With Marcel killed on the 1903 Paris-Madrid road race, and Fernand finished off by ill health in 1909, Louis came to own all of it. And a spectacular success he made of it, too – at one time building more cars a year than Ford, and becoming one of France’s biggest and most successful enterprises by the ’30s.
He was superb at manufacturing and jealously proud of his empire in which he and his family held stakes of 95%. Yet therein lay his flaw. Greed and power turned him into a pint-size ogre, a paranoid Napoleon with a harsh disregard for his workforce. He toughed out a confrontation in the French General Strike of the late 1930s, but came to loathe all Socialist thinking. His idea of industrial relations was to crush and bully, and he’s widely held responsible for the antipathy for capitalism that persists in France to this day. It got worse. He showed his anti-Semitism by insulting his main rival, André Citroën, as ‘the little Jew’. In 1938, he visited Adolf Hitler in Germany, almost certainly to share sympathies.
His workers are said to have sabotaged trucks set for the Nazis, fitting wrong-length dipsticks so oil levels would be misjudged and the engines would seize. And the Allies pounded Billancourt.
In September 1944, after the German surrender, Louis was arrested and banged up in Fresnes Prison in Paris to await probable trial for war crimes. Yet he was already a seriously sick man; 13 days later he was moved to a psychiatric clinic, and on 24 October he died, aged 67.
The official cause of death was urine in his blood. But it seems likely that he was tortured and battered in prison. A nun working there said she saw one jailer hit him hard on the head with a steel helmet; if it’s true, then the blow was doubtless struck (in the mind of the anonymous assailant) on behalf of an entire nation, livid at Renault’s war-time profiteering.
Charles De Gaulle made sure Renault’s family would never see any inheritance. He nationalised the manufacturer in 1945, and the state has retained a stake ever since. Curiously, the Renault name was kept, although the firm’s post-war success was down to manager Pierre Lefaucheux, who turned the Louis Renault-conceived 4CV (that rear-engined concept not unlike the Volkswagen) into a huge success.
The Renault family has tried and failed to win compensation. Louis’s widow Christiane alleged in 1956 that he was actually murdered in prison, but that – along with claims that he’d only tried to do the best for his workforce – cut no ice.
Again, in 2012, Louis’s grandchildren argued in court that he’d had no choice but to work with the Wehrmacht, or his workers would have been repatriated to toil for Daimler-Benz. Their ‘revisionist’ attempts to get compensation were thrown out, despite the fact that Renault himself was never tried for his alleged wrongdoing.
Was he simply a scapegoat for a nation’s anger? The absolute truth about a giant of the global motor industry will never be known. None of the many great Renault cars can do much to shift the national perception that Louis was a traitor.
‘VILIFIED AS A COLLABORATOR OF THE WORST KIND BECAUSE HE AGREED TO BUILD 30,000 LORRIES FOR THE GERMANS’