Louis Renault (industrialist)

The fourth of six children born into the bourgeois Parisian family of Alfred and Berthe Renault, Louis Renault attended Lycée Condorcet. He was fascinated by engineering and mechanics from an early age and spent hours in the Serpollet steam car workshop or tinkering with old Panhard engines in the tool shed of the family's second home in Billancourt. He built his first car in 1898, hiring a pair of workmen to modify a used De Dion-Bouton cycle which featured a revolutionary universally jointed driveshaft and a three-speed gearbox with reverse, with the third gear in direct drive (which he patented a year later). Renault called his car the Voiturette. On 24 December 1898, he won a bet with his friends that his invention with an innovative driveshaft could beat a car with a bicycle-like chain drive They formed the Renault Frères company on 25 February 1899. Initially, business and administration was handled entirely by the elder brothers, with Louis dedicating himself to design and manufacturing. Marcel was killed in the 1903 Paris-Madrid motor race, and in 1908, Louis Renault took overall control of the company after Fernand retired for health reasons. Fernand subsequently died in 1909. ==World War I, interwar period and developments==

At the start of the First World War, in August 1914, in response to the then acute shortage of artillery ammunition, Renault suggested that car factories such as Renault could manufacture 75 mm shells using hydraulic presses rather than with the usual longer and costlier lathe operations. Identical methods were also used by Andre Citroën in his own factory. The resulting shells helped overcome the shortages, but as they had to be manufactured in two pieces they were inherently weak at the base thus sometimes letting hot gases detonate the melinite inside the shell. Over 600 French 75 mm guns were destroyed by premature explosions in 1915, and their crews killed or injured. Louis Renault was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur after the war for the major contribution of his factories to the war effort. His factories' mass production in 1918 of the revolutionary and highly effective Renault FT tank, which he had personally designed with Rodolphe Ernst-Metzmaier, was perhaps Renault's most significant contribution during that period. During the interwar period, his right-wing opinions became well known, leading to various cases of labour unrest with proletarian avant-garde workers at the Boulogne Billancourt plant. He pleaded for a necessary union between European nations. Louis Renault competed fiercely with Citroën, whom he called "le petit Juif" ("the little Jew"), growing increasingly paranoid and reclusive at the same time, and deeply concerned about the rising power of Communism and labor unions, eventually retreating to his country estate, a castle on the river Seine near Rouen. Renault remained in complete control of his company until 1942, dealing with its rapid expansion while designing several new inventions, most of which are still in use today, such as hydraulic shock absorbers, the modern drum brake and compressed gas ignition. ==World War II, arrest and death==

In 1938, Renault visited Adolf Hitler He put his factories at the service of Vichy France, which meant that he was also viewed as assisting the Nazis. Over a period of four years, Renault manufactured 34,232 vehicles for the Germans. He argued that "by continuing operations he had saved thousands of workers from being transported to Germany", During the occupation of France the company was under the control of the Germans, being already seriously ill at the time. The records for the exact period of his incarceration at Fresnes would later turn out to be missing. Renault was moved on 5 October to a psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne. at the request of his family and supporters, having gone into a coma. Louis Renault is buried at his country home Chateau Herqueville, in Herqueville dans l'Eure. ==Expropriation==

In October 1944, the provisional French government seized Louis Renault's company. The Minister of Information, Henri Teitgen, said at the time this was not a confiscation, rather "it was merely a step to get French industry back into production. Later a commission would examine the books, confiscate war profits, bring charges." On 1 January 1945, four months after Louis Renault's death, an order of General Charles de Gaulle's provisional government decreed the dissolution of Société Anonyme des Usines Renault and its nationalization, giving it the new name Régie Nationale des Usines Renault (RNUR). Thus, the company Louis Renault had created was nationalized on the official case of collaboration. Renault was charged posthumously with "guilty enrichment obtained by those who worked for the enemy". ==Aftermath and controversy==

In 1944, after the expropriation of his company and his subsequent death, Renault's last will and testament was opened to reveal that he had left his company to his 40,000 employees. At the time the company was nationalized, Renault's wife Christiane and her son Jean-Louis owned 95% of the company stock and had received nothing, and sought "to establish that Louis Renault was another of the more than 9,000 Frenchmen listed by the government as having been killed by "irregular executions" in the post-Liberation vengeance, In 2005, The Daily Telegraph said Renault had "felt that his duty was to preserve France’s manufacturing base. Military and Daimler-Benz officials arrived at the gates of his Billancourt factory to assess it for removal into Germany, together with its workforce. Renault fended them off by agreeing to make vehicles for the Wehrmacht." The 2005 Daily Telegraph report said Renault attempted to save his company from displacement and absorption by Daimler-Benz: A 2005 article in The Daily Telegraph said it could legally be argued that the Renault company, the "jewel in the country’s industrial crown" Robert Paxton suggested in his 1972 book, Vichy France: old guard and new order: 1940–1944, that the Renault factory might have been returned to Louis Renault and his family, had he lived longer. The Berliet truck factory in Lyon remained in Marius Berliet's family possession, despite his having manufactured 2,330 trucks for the Germans. Renault's were the only factories permanently expropriated by the French government. As of 2005, Renault officials avoid mention of Louis Renault. For the centennial in 1999 of the original Renault Frères company, celebrated by Régie Renault, the company ignored the grandchildren of Louis Renault. Despite the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which mandates just and preliminary compensation before expropriation, Louis Renault and his heirs were otherwise never officially compensated for their company. Renault returned to the private sector as a Société Anonyme (S.A) in 1996 when the French government sold 80% of the company. In 2011, his heirs again sought to restore Renault's reputation and receive compensation for what they see as the illegal confiscation of his company by the state. == References ==