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"  The story of Louis Renault, the founder of the French car company that still bears his name, is a movie waiting to be made. A young genius pioneers motorcar design and single-mindedly forges a powerful industrial empire. In the process he acquires vast wealth, mistresses and a beautiful wife, enviable real estate, and his country&amp;#039;s highest honors. But in the first chaotic months after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the enemies he has made with his despotic management style begin settling scores, bringing accusations that land him in prison, strip him of his company and his honor, and lead, within weeks, to his death. Today, because of a groundbreaking French law passed in March 2010 that allows ordinary citizens to challenge the constitutionality of government laws, Louis Renault is back in the headlines. Sixty-eight years after he was accused of Nazi collaboration and his company was confiscated, his grandchildren have reignited l&amp;#039;affaire Renault by contending that the nationalization of the Renault empire, on January 16, 1945, by Charles de Gaulle&amp;#039;s provisional government \u2014 without any compensation to his heirs \u2014 was unconstitutional. The latest scene in this drama took place in the impressive Palais de Justice in Paris. The courtroom&amp;#039;s soaring ceilings and windows belie its cramped space. At 10:25 a.m. on December 14, 2011, the cast surges into the room. Some squeeze into the two rows of benches; the rest remain standing. All rise as Judge Magali Bouvier takes her seat behind a large judicial bench. Thierry L\u00E9vy, a distinguished Samuel Beckett look-alike representing the Renault family (dressed, like all the lawyers, in the traditional black robes of the French court), occupies the front row with his associates. The lawyer for the defense, the elegant and prosperous Xavier Normand-Bodard, representing the French state, takes a seat farther down the same row. He is followed by Jean-Paul Teissonni\u00E8re, the severe and combative counsel for the National Confederation of Labor (CGT), and Alain Levy, a scholarly sort representing the interests of the national federation of deportees (FNDIRP). H\u00E9l\u00E8ne Renault-Dingli, one of the industrialist&amp;#039;s eight grandchildren and a handsome and spirited woman of 49 now spearheading the family&amp;#039;s efforts to contest the constitutionality of the nationalization, is lucky to have found a seat behind the opposition lawyers. A line of burly gentlemen, representatives of the metal workers union that helped orchestrate Renault&amp;#039;s downfall, stands against the back wall, arms folded across their chests, seemingly on guard against any rehabilitation of his wartime reputation.  Thierry L\u00E9vy argues that the failure to compensate Renault&amp;#039;s heirs after the nationalization represents a fundamental violation of their constitutional right to property. The most colorful statement comes from Teissonni\u00E8re. &amp;quot;I am stunned by the judicial, financial, and moral audacity of the Renault heirs,&amp;quot; he declares, asking the court to reject what he terms their &amp;quot;revisionist&amp;quot; move. L\u00E9vy calls the accusation &amp;quot;outrageous and defamatory.&amp;quot; (He later adds, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think they understand the case,&amp;quot; which, from a legal standpoint, has nothing to do with proving whether or not Renault collaborated, even though that may be the emotional motivation of his heirs.) After legal arguments lasting two and a half hours, the judge postpones an official decision until after the new year, and H\u00E9l\u00E8ne leaves to face the media storm waiting outside the court. &amp;quot;We want to obtain reparation so that the moral and material prejudice is recognized,&amp;quot; she told the Europe 1 radio network. &amp;quot;My grandfather did not collaborate with Nazi Germany.&amp;quot; On the appointed day, the judge declares the court &amp;quot;incompetent&amp;quot; to rule on the case \u2014 a narrow reading (or perhaps sidestepping) of the case based on an interpretation of a law from 1790. The heirs are appealing \u2014 their sights are set on taking the case to the Supreme Court and then France&amp;#039;s Constitutional Council. The stakes are high. The Renault Group, which is currently part of a multinational partnership that includes Nissan, Samsung, and AvtoVaz, is not directly a party to the suit. But the French state is. Since 1994, France has reduced its stake in Renault from 53 percent to 15 percent (as of 2010). With even that reduced holding, France remains the largest single shareholder in Renault. But none of those remaining shares, worth billions to France, are at stake. The family is seeking only &amp;quot;material and moral&amp;quot; compensation \u2014 a figure that is still expected to top $130 million. As H\u00E9l\u00E8ne says, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve opened a Pandora&amp;#039;s Box.&amp;quot; Who was the real Louis Renault? Opinions remain sharply divided. For much of his life, Renault&amp;#039;s grateful government regarded him as a national hero for his contributions during the First World War and to the French economy. To the Communist trade unions, which targeted his factories during the labor unrest of the 1930s \u2014 and later to de Gaulle himself \u2014 he was a convenient villain. A man of intense focus and few words, Renault, who was born in 1877 into a well-to-do Parisian family, had an overriding passion for engineering and was almost completely self-taught. He was a control freak avant la lettre; his work and his factory were his raisons d&amp;#039;\u00EAtre. He was only 21 when, in 1898, he revolutionized automobile design by inventing the direct-drive transmission. (Before that, early automobile engines transmitted power via chains, like bicycles.) Although he later filed many other patents, including one for the first turbo engine, the transmission patent became the basis of his immense fortune. Often referred to as &amp;quot;the Henry Ford of France,&amp;quot; Renault introduced a modified version of assembly-line production in his own factory after a visit to a Ford plant in 1911. Ford workers accepted the assembly line. French workers, who thought of themselves as artisans \u2014 many brought their own tools \u2014 fiercely resisted it. It was a foretaste of the employee dissent that eventually led to his downfall. As early as 1909, reliable Renault taxis were a familiar sight on Paris streets. But they entered legend as &amp;quot;the taxis of the Marne&amp;quot; in September 1914, when a thousand were commandeered to whisk 3,000 French soldiers to the front with such speed that they surprised the German forces and halted their advance. Renault went on to invent the FT-17 light armored tank, which was credited with turning the tide of the war in favor of the French. Its configuration, with the gun turret on top and the driver in front, has served as the model of all tanks for the past century. In March 1936 his company was the symbol of French industrial success at home and abroad, and he was elevated to the highest rank of the L\u00E9gion d&amp;#039;Honneur: la dignit\u00E9 de Grand-Croix, a designation awarded even more rarely than the congressional Medal of Honor in the U.S. Renault&amp;#039;s business grew at a rate similar to Ford&amp;#039;s. By 1934, 35 years after the company was founded, a maze of Renault factories sprawled over the Paris suburb of Boulogne Billancourt and the \u00CEle Seguin. The company liked to compare the size of the complex to the city of Chartres. But Renault clashed with the unionists. Although the company paid the highest salaries, and legislation put in place in 1936 by the short-lived Popular Front administration guaranteed a 40-hour workweek and paid vacations, there were increasingly frequent strikes, and Communist Party membership burgeoned, from 240 of Renault&amp;#039;s 30,000 workers in 1936 to 3,200 in 1938. Attacks on the &amp;quot;ogre, tyrant, war profiteer&amp;quot; grew increasingly violent. Renault ignored them. &amp;quot;Let the dogs bark,&amp;quot; he wrote to a supporter. When strikers occupied one factory in 1938, his nephew and chief negotiator, Fran\u00E7ois Lehideux, called a lockout and let only those who would sign an accord back in, effectively firing more than 2,000 workers. The Communists vowed vengeance. But genius \u2014 from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs \u2014 plays by its own rules, often at its own peril. Renault failed the exams for the Ecole Centrale, but he was allowed to indulge his instinctive talent for engineering at his parents&amp;#039; weekend house in Boulogne Billancourt. With the financial backing of his two older brothers, Marcel and Fernand, who had run their father&amp;#039;s button and fabric business since his death in 1892, Louis expanded his backyard workshop into the first small Renault Fr\u00E8res factory, which incorporated in 1899. The company prospered, but Louis could be a shockingly tough negotiator with his own family. When Marcel died at the wheel during the Paris\u2013Madrid race of 1903 \u2014 a race that claimed the lives of five drivers and eight spectators and forced a halt to such promotional races until 1927 \u2014 Louis persuaded Marcel&amp;#039;s mistress to sign over her inheritance of Renault shares. Four years later, when Fernand, married with three children, was dying of cancer, Louis cut an equally tough deal. By 1908, Louis Renault was sole master at Billancourt. Thanks to his patents, riches came quickly. By 1906 he had acquired a famous paramour, opera star Jeanne Hatto, a yacht, and a thousand-acre country estate at Herqueville, in Normandy, that he had spotted while cruising up the Seine on his boat, the Chryseis. He built an Anglo-Norman chateau as their love nest, and their relationship continued for more than 10 years. (Renault liked to pull practical jokes, such as serving liqueurs in leaking glasses, on Hatto&amp;#039;s friends Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Faur\u00E9.) She turned down his marriage proposals because he insisted that she give up her career, but they remained friends to the end. At 40 he married a Parisian lawyer&amp;#039;s daughter, 23-year-old Christiane Boullaire, in 1918. The couple lived in splendor. In Paris they shared the sumptuous home Renault built at the end of the ultrafashionable Avenue Foch with their only son, Jean-Louis, born in 1920. (Renault also built a seven-floor apartment building next door as an investment.) The Herqueville estate reached its peak of opulence in the 1920s, when he added a guest annex that had a gold-flecked mosaic swimming pool, turned a former cottage into his billiard room, and filled greenhouses with his favorite white orchids. The couple didn&amp;#039;t stop there, adding a flotilla of his-and-hers yachts, a restored ancient fort on Chausey, one of the Channel Islands, and Escampobar, a luxurious 65-acre seaside property that Louis built on the Giens Peninsula on the Riviera, near Saint-Tropez. Christiane became a social fixture, but Louis scarcely bothered. After a long delay at one typically elegant luncheon in the mid-1930s at the restored fort, Christiane bade guests begin without their host. Midway through the meal Louis appeared, dressed in work clothes, tools in hand, accompanied by a mechanic. They disappeared underneath the table in quest of a short circuit in the service bell, as the luncheon continued. Fifteen minutes later, failing to find the problem, the two men emerged and left the room to continue the search elsewhere. The gilded lifestyle may have caused jealousy, but Renault&amp;#039;s image suffered more when Christiane fell madly in love with the far-right-wing writer and early collaborator Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, in 1935, and accompanied him to pro-Nazi rallies. The literary provocateur celebrated the affair in the novel Beloukia, a roman clef. Louis soon took a new mistress (young actress Andr\u00E9e Sevilanges), but he and Christiane carried on their affairs separately at the Avenue Foch house, so Renault and Drieu La Rochelle never met. Expansion was Louis Renault&amp;#039;s modus vivendi. By 1906 he had already subsumed both the Herqueville town hall and the national highway into his estate. He simply built replacements farther away. In the mid-&amp;#039;30s he added more land, and by 1939 his Herqueville estate comprised 4,200 acres (roughly five times the size of Central Park) on both sides of the Seine as well as two islands, Connelles and \u00CEle de Boeuf, which he turned into market gardens and a private golf course. When he looked out his bedroom window in the morning, everything he could see was his. During the Occupation, the industrialist was already planning for postwar production, one of the reasons he rebuilt his factory after the 1942\u201343 British bombing raids. There is now proof that Louis Renault was behind the development of the Renault 4CV, a four-door economy car that became the French competitor to the Volkswagen designed by Ferdinand Porsche, and that Renault secretly tested the prototypes during the Occupation. Released right after the Allied victory, it was the first French car to sell more than a million units, launching the company&amp;#039;s economic renaissance. Renault didn&amp;#039;t live to enjoy that success. In 1944, during a frenzy of &amp;quot;purification&amp;quot; right after the Liberation, the founder of Renault was accused of collaboration. Friends urged him to leave the country, but Renault, furious about the allegations, was determined to prove his innocence. Convinced of the fairness of French justice, and having been given assurances that he would be interrogated and released, he presented himself voluntarily to Judge Marcel Martin at the Palais de Justice; when he returned five days later, on September 23, 1944, he was incarcerated in Fresnes prison. His already fragile health deteriorated rapidly \u2014 the family has always suspected beatings \u2014 and he was transferred first to a hospital, then to a Paris clinic, where he died a month later, on October 24. Louis Renault was never tried, never judged, and never sentenced. But he has gone down in French history as guilty, because General de Gaulle treated him as if he were when he signed the ordinance nationalizing the Renault factories on January 16, 1945, without compensating the heirs for the 96.8 percent of the business that Renault controlled. It was a move without parallel in French history, before or since. &amp;quot;I want the truth to be told,&amp;quot; H\u00E9l\u00E8ne Renault-Dingli says when we meet in the apartment she shared with her historian husband, Laurent Dingli, west of Paris, near the Parc de Saint Cloud. (The couple recently moved to Brittany.) Her eyes flash with indignation as she insists, &amp;quot;Louis Renault was not a collaborator. We are working to remove the accusations against him so he will regain his place in history as the great patriot he was.&amp;quot; But in the minds of the French left, Louis Renault is still guilty. Because neither Britain nor the U.S. recognized the French state&amp;#039;s claim on the company&amp;#039;s overseas accounts or agencies, Renault&amp;#039;s widow Christiane and son Jean-Louis (H\u00E9l\u00E8ne&amp;#039;s father) were able to negotiate to recover a considerable fortune derived from Renault&amp;#039;s vast real estate holdings and the earnings he accumulated prior to nationalization from more than a thousand patents in his own name. (All future income from those patents, however, was included in the nationalization.) The Renault heirs are well off, thanks to Louis&amp;#039;s acquisitions of real estate. The grandchildren still own a remnant of the Herqueville farm; recently H\u00E9l\u00E8ne&amp;#039;s half brother Louis bought back one of the family&amp;#039;s houses. H\u00E9l\u00E8ne&amp;#039;s father and her mother Anne-Marie divorced six months after her birth, at which point she moved with her mother and older sister close to Paris. All her memories of Herqueville, her first home, derive from later childhood visits. &amp;quot;My father never spoke of his father to any of his eight children,&amp;quot; H\u00E9l\u00E8ne recalls. &amp;quot;It was too painful for him.&amp;quot; But growing up as a Renault without all the trappings was not a problem for her. &amp;quot;There are dozens of Renaults in Paris. It&amp;#039;s quite a common surname,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;When the professor spoke of Renault and the enterprise, some made the connection. I didn&amp;#039;t push myself forward. But I wasn&amp;#039;t ashamed of it either. Au contraire.&amp;quot; Although H\u00E9l\u00E8ne was convinced of her grandfather&amp;#039;s innocence, she never had the facts to prove it until 1994, when she met Laurent Dingli, her future husband, a historian who specialized in the 17th century. He soon transferred his focus to Louis Renault. &amp;quot;When I told the story, he wanted to find out more, to find out if it was just my view, the granddaughter&amp;#039;s idea,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We wanted to find the truth.&amp;quot; Revisiting Chausey and Herqueville with Laurent brought intense personal reverberations. &amp;quot;Because of the relationship between my parents, I didn&amp;#039;t see much of my father. It was easier for me to find out the story of my grandfather,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;The new owners of Herqueville and Chausey tried to preserve the spirit of my grandfather in the ch\u00E2teaux. Many things haven&amp;#039;t changed. His study, which featured his specially designed oak workbench/tool cabinet, is intact in his Herqueville sitting room. And so is the record player with the automatic record changer he designed \u2014 revolutionary at the time. These details helped me understand who Louis Renault was as a man. He spent his time inventing, innovating, improving daily life,&amp;quot; she says. Dingli ended up with a 678-page biography, five years in the making, which was published in 2000. &amp;quot;As I was now married to his granddaughter, I had to be very precise about my sources,&amp;quot; he says. His account offers a balanced picture of a complex character in tumultuous times \u2014 and counters the accusations of collaboration using new information Dingli found in the Renault Company&amp;#039;s own archives. Other historians have taken a positive view too. H\u00E9l\u00E8ne says, &amp;quot;We know the Renault factory did not work actively for the Germans but under three Daimler-Benz executives. If you take de Gaulle&amp;#039;s definition of collaboration \u2014 to work with zeal and without constraint \u2014 my grandfather wasn&amp;#039;t guilty. The Renault managing director, Ren\u00E9 de Peyrecave (who was arrested at the same time as Louis Renault), was freed quite quickly. Then, in 1949, when the collaboration case was dismissed, all the responsible French directors were exonerated.&amp;quot; But, she adds, &amp;quot;to justify the nationalization, somebody had to be guilty. So Louis Renault was accused of rushing to cooperate, offering his factories before the Germans asked. &amp;quot;But Louis Renault was not even in Paris in June 1940, when France surrendered to the Germans. He was in the U.S. on a special mission for the French government, meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt to get American tanks so the French could fight the war against the Germans. By the time he returned, his factories were under German commissaires. Louis Renault was a scapegoat.&amp;quot; In 1949, after four years of investigation by a judge, the collaboration case against Louis Renault was dismissed for lack of evidence. But despite two legal attempts by Renault&amp;#039;s widow and son, in 1954 and 1961, Louis himself was never exonerated. The current litigation &amp;quot;is a unique case,&amp;quot; Thierry L\u00E9vy says when we speak at his office, opposite the Rodin Museum. &amp;quot;There have been many nationalizations, but not one without compensation. It was an isolated act,&amp;quot; he insists. &amp;quot;No other company was subjected to such treatment, not even those whose leaders were convicted in the courts of collaboration.&amp;quot; No one denies that Renault worked with the Germans during the occupation \u2014 so did Michelin, which owned Citro\u00EBn during the war; so did Peugeot and many other industrialists. At the time, their only choice was to cooperate, even unwillingly, or see their plants dismantled and shipped to Germany and their workers deported to run them. Several members of the Michelin family had died fighting for the Free French, for the Resistance, or after being deported to concentration camps. In 1943 Peugeot linked up with the British SOE Resistance network and began internal sabotage. Neither firm was nationalized. In a closer parallel, the truckmaker Marius Berliet and his two sons were arrested in September 1944 and their company confiscated the same month. Released because of his age \u2014 he was 79 \u2014 Berliet organized their defense, and the company was returned to them in 1949. &amp;quot;De Gaulle&amp;#039;s provisional government knew they were committing a serious irregularity,&amp;quot; L\u00E9vy explains. &amp;quot;You have to understand the climate of the times. They did it because Gaullist power was fragile. He needed the support of other parties. He needed the Communists, and the Communists made the nationalization of Renault one of their essential demands. This irregular act had a political explanation.&amp;quot; There were other reasons that made Louis Renault such a tantalizing target. &amp;quot;He was a very hard boss. Even the family realizes this,&amp;quot; L\u00E9vy says. &amp;quot;Authoritarian&amp;quot; would be a mild description of his management style. Ferocious temper tantrums provoked by the slightest incident were frequent, with workers fired on the spot \u2014 then discreetly hired back. &amp;quot;He wasn&amp;#039;t a god, but he wasn&amp;#039;t a monster,&amp;quot; H\u00E9l\u00E8ne insists. &amp;quot;In France a self-made man is like a red flag.&amp;quot; The recent judicial setback has not shaken her determination. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not astonishing. We are attacking the state, after all,&amp;quot; she says. And, one might add, also attacking the de Gaulle legend. &amp;quot;In the 1970s someone presented a film script to my father,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;But there needed to be a contrast between the good and the bad, and no one was ready to admit de Gaulle could be bad.&amp;quot; Are the French more open-minded today? Possibly, and in the Internet age public opinion can no longer be easily quashed within national borders. &amp;quot;Nothing will stop us,&amp;quot; H\u00E9l\u00E8ne promises. &amp;quot;We refuse to have Louis Renault remembered as a collaborator for eternity. It&amp;#039;s our duty, and our generation has to do it. We&amp;#039;re young, we&amp;#039;re numerous, and we have the energy. We&amp;#039;re not giving up.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a857/louis-renault-estate/>