The founder Lucien Rosengart (1881 - 1976) was a gifted engineer and businessman who had established a successful engineering business by the time he was 24. In the mid-1920s, he saw the opportunity to produce a very small car for a segment of the market in France that he believed was not being properly covered by any of the major players. In 1923 he purchased a license to build the English Austin 7 and with support from the engineer Jules Salomon he purchased the old Bellanger factory in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. The site was a large one and in the early years the business appeared set to fill it. Beginnings At the plant on the Boulevard de Dixmude, in 1927 production began of the Rosengart LR2 automobile which appeared on the market in 1928, at the same time as the precursor of the first BMW automobile, also an Austin 7 built under licence, was appearing in Germany. Numerous variants of the Rosengart LR2 were produced and the car remained in production at least till 1939. The LR2 was promoted for its reliability. A production car driven by François Lecot covered per day for more than three and a half months until it had notched up without any major mishap, and in the same period an LR2 achieved a class win in 80 of the 81 sporting trials in which it participated. From 1931 the car appeared in modified form as the Rosengart LR4, now heavily differentiated from its Austin origins, and the model's robust character was demonstrated by several long distance trials. Variations on this model would survive until the 1950s, always retaining the original short wheelbase. A further substantial upgrade of Rosengart's small car took place in 1938 with the appearance of the Rosengart LR42N 4CV. In the early 1930s Rosengart teamed up with the German manufacturer Adler, offering license built copies of the Adler Trumpf and Trumpf Junior, small front-drive cars that bolstered its range. It also added a conventional rear-driven car along the lines of a stretched and widened Austin. The development of front-wheel drive models led to the elegant Rosengart Supertraction model in 1937 - which competed with larger cars like the Peugeot 402 and the Berliet Dauphine for the first time in Rosengart's short history. Unfortunately the larger cars failed to sell in numbers sufficient to justify the investment involved, and while the