Les héritiers de Renault demandent réparation à l’Etat 1/2
Les sept petits-enfants de l’industriel Louis Renault, accusé de collaboration, demandent à la justice de réviser la nationalisation-sanction, l’une des décisions les plus symboliques de l’après-guerre. Ils ont déposé une assignation devant le tribunal de grande Instance (TGI) de Paris afin de contester l’ordonnance de confiscation du 16 janvier 1945, qui transforme Renault en une Régie nationale, sans que l’industriel, décédé entre-temps, n’ait été jugé. Ils veulent voir “réparer le préjudice ayant résulté de la dépossession de l’ensemble des biens, droits et participations” de Louis Renault, selon la plainte.
Les héritiers de Renault demandent réparation à l’Etat 2/2
Renault founder’s granddaughter leads legal fight to clear name
The granddaughter of Louis Renault, founder of France’s largest car maker, is leading a legal fight to clear his name and counter accusations he was a Nazi collaborator.
The granddaughter of Louis Renault, founder of France’s largest car maker, is leading a legal fight to clear his name and counter accusations he was a Nazi collaborator.
‘I want the truth to finally be told about my grandfather: that he was totally unjustly accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany and that he was a scapegoat’
By Henry Samuel, Paris 9:42PM BST 13 May 2011
The fight threatens to reignite a painful debate in France over the extent to which the company co-operated with the Wehrmacht.
Hélène Renault-Dingli, 49, is one of eight grandchildren suing the French state over what they say was the illegal confiscation of the company in November 1944 after claims that it had backed Germany’s Second World War effort.
“I want the truth to finally be told about my grandfather: that he was totally unjustly accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany and that he was a scapegoat,” she told the Daily Telegraph.
Louis Renault, an inventor and racing driver who founded the car company with his two brothers in 1898, died in custody awaiting trial two months after the liberation of France in 1944.
Hailed as a hero in the First World War for building French army tanks, he was accused of collaborating with Hitler, imprisoned and developed aphasia, a psychological disorder that prevented him from speaking.
Officially, the cause of death was urine in the blood, but according to eyewitness and family accounts, the 67-year-old had been beaten and perhaps tortured.
At his death, he owned 96.8 per cent of the group. A month later, Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime leader, signed a decree confiscating his stake in Renault on behalf of the state.
Today Renault’s market capitalisation is 11.6 billion euros (£10.1 billion).
Mrs Renault-Dingli and her fellow grandchildren claim De Gaulle breached the French constitution on several counts, above all because the State “confiscated the property of a dead man” without compensating the family.
“No other company was subjected to such treatment, not even among those whose leaders were convicted in the courts of collaboration,” said Thierry Lévy, the lawyer representing the grandchildren.
This week he opened a case on their behalf with a Paris court to seek “material and moral” compensation.
He wants an expert to determine how much the family would have earned from Mr Renault’s stake since 1945.
The legal challenge was made possible thanks to a procedure introduced last year allowing individuals to challenge the constitutionality of French legislation.
Mrs Renault-Dingli said financial compensation, if accorded, would doubtless be “very substantial” given the “huge damage caused to the family”, but she insisted her main aim was to restore her grandfather’s reputation.
The family scored a first legal victory last year when a war memorial was ordered to remove a photograph of Mr Renault alongside Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering at the Berlin Motor Show in 1939.
The grandchildren admit that Renault made about 30,000 lorries for the German army and repaired German tanks during the war, but that it had no choice. When Mr Renault returned from the US to ask for tanks on behalf of France, the Germans had already requisitioned his factory.
He promised to make vehicles for the Wehrmacht in exchange for keeping workers in France, and was heard to remark: “Give them the butter or they’ll take the cows”.
She said that Renault was a high-profile scapegoat needed by De Gaulle’s post-war administration to placate the Communists and demonstrate its political direction and resolve.
Annie Lacroix-Riz, the emeritus professor of history at Paris University, claims that the group funded the extreme Right in France before the war and clearly collaborated.
French carmakers were “entirely mobilised in the service of the German war economy,” she said.
Mrs Renault-Dingli said archives in her possession suggested otherwise.
“Louis Renault was the archetypal boss figure that many in France still love to hate,” she said. “But he never collaborated”.
Renault descendants demand payout for state confiscation
Grandchildren of Louis Renault begin legal battle to clear his name and counter allegations that he collaborated with Nazis
Angelique Chrisafis
December 16, 2011
Berlin pitch … Louis Renault (centre) presents a car built by his group to, from left, Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering and the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, in 1937. Photo: AFP
PARIS: It was one of the most shameful and shady chapters of French history: the collaboration of industrialists and business owners with the Nazis during the German occupation.
A historical can of worms was reopened in a Paris court on Wednesday when the grandchildren of the inventor and car maker Louis Renault began a legal battle claiming his famous company was unfairly confiscated by the state as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the occupiers.
Mr Renault, who founded the car maker in 1898 with his brothers, died in prison while awaiting trial for collaboration in 1944, two months after the liberation of France. In January 1945 Charles de Gaulle and the provisional government signed a decree confiscating the company and nationalising it, accusing Mr Renault of working for the Germans and providing their armies with vehicles and services to help the Nazi war effort.
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Entrepreneur … Renault drives a miniature car in 1899. Photo: AFP
Mr Renault’s seven grandchildren have now seized on a new law introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy to argue that the confiscation did not abide by the French constitution. Their lawyers argue that no other company was subjected to the same treatment as Renault and that it was unfairly nationalised as punishment without Louis Renault ever going to trial. They are demanding financial compensation from the state.
The case has sparked outrage from the Communist Party, communist trade unions, deportee groups and some historians, who accuse the family of trying to rewrite history. The Communist Party said it vehemently opposed ”any attempt to rehabilitate Louis Renault”.
One of the grandchildren bringing the case, Helene Renault-Dingli, said the battle was about how unfair and unconstitutional the state had been in confiscating the company. ”This is not a re-reading of history,” she told TV channel TF1, and said she welcomed a new debate among historians about what really happened in Mr Renault’s factories during the Second World War.
Nemesis … Charles de Gaulle’s government seized the company.
There is no doubt among historians that Renault provided motors, vehicles and technology for the Nazi occupiers during the war. The question is whether the company did this willingly or whether, as the family suggests, it had no choice.
The celebrated war historian, Henry Rousso, told Le Figaro: ”Renault worked for the German war economy. With what degree of enthusiasm or constraint? That remains largely to be studied.”
Some historians point out that other big French industrial groups, Peugeot and Citroen, who also worked for the Germans, chose to support the resistance and Allies from 1942 to 1943.
Guardian News & Media
Lien vers The Guardian et the Sydney Morning Herald
Nazi collaborator or scapegoat ? Debate on Louis Renault still rages
Dec 31, 2011
Louis Renault is arguably the most important French industrialist of the modern age. One of the pioneers of the motor car, he was France’s answer to Henry Ford, bringing mass production to Europe and, with it, the joys of motoring to the masses. More than 100 years after its formation, Renault remains a popular and trusted badge. But while his company remains dear to the French, the man himself has been cast as a villain, due to an arrest for collaboration with the Nazis that is hotly contested to this day.
Renault designed his first car in 1898 and soon gained a reputation for engineering genius, with inventions such as drum brakes and hydraulic suspension. With financial support from his brothers, he set up a factory in Boulogne-Billancourt and, by the time of the First World War, it was one of the largest car manufacturers in France, with Renaults standing out with their distinctive “coal scuttle” noses. During the war, Renault designed the first modern tank and was awarded for his contribution to victory with the Legion of Honour. He was the patriot of the production line.
Over the next few decades, the company excelled and expanded but Renault, a hard-nosed businessman with right-wing views, did not make many friends. He formed a bitter and intense rivalry with Andre Citroen, whom he referred to as “the little Jew”. He was also brutal in suppression of the labour unrest and strikes that followed the Wall Street crash. Becoming increasingly paranoid about the threat of communism and his own safety, he became a recluse at his castle near the coast of Brittany.
When war broke out again, Renault was doing his patriotic duty in the USA, negotiating for use of American tanks. When he returned, his homeland had been occupied by the Nazis and was under the control of the Vichy government, itself under the thrall of the Third Reich. He had a choice: either build German trucks or see his factories and workforce subsumed into Daimler-Benz and production moved to Germany. He chose survival and, over the course of the war, built more than 30,000 vehicles for the Wehrmacht. This collaboration was deeply resented by members of the French resistance, who saw Renault as a traitor and therefore a target. The hero of the First World War was painted as a villain of the second, and the British RAF made two bombing raids on Renault factories.
In September 1944, he was arrested on a charge of collaboration and sent to prison. He stressed that his actions had saved 40,000 workers from being forcibly relocated to Germany and that he had prevented production of tanks or armaments. As he explained it to a friend, he was “giving the Germans butter so they wouldn’t take the cows”. Tragically, he was never given the opportunity to plead his innocence at trial, as he died a mere four weeks after being incarcerated.
After the war, Renault was nationalised without a single franc of compensation for his wife or son. The company went from strength to strength, largely due to the success of the 4CV, a model Renault had developed in secret during the war. He had been made a scapegoat and the French government had forcibly acquired an industrial powerhouse that was making US$11 million (Dh40.4m) in profit each year by the mid-1950s. But the fight to clear his name goes on.
In 1956, his widow, Christiane, claimed that Renault had been murdered in prison and presented both an eyewitness account of a nun claiming to have seen the frail 67-year-old being beaten and an X-ray showing a broken neck (the official cause of death was recorded as a urine infection).
Furthermore, historians found evidence that Renault had deliberately sabotaged many of the vehicles produced for the Germans, causing many engines to seize on the Eastern front. Reliability problems had been one of the causes of the failure of the Germans to push through the Russian lines; perhaps Renault was a hero after all.
Despite fresh evidence, the French government refused to reopen the case and, in 1999, Renault’s grandchildren were not invited to the company’s centenary event. But this is a scandal that has not yet run its course, as earlier this year a court case began seeking compensation for the Renault family.
Justice is rarely meted out fairly during wartime, and Renault may have been a victim of circumstance and a high-profile scapegoat to expunge France’s guilt at having coalesced with the Nazis.
Not just another motor magnate then, but there is more often than not a tale about the man behind the marque.
Renault family reopens old war wounds to bury Nazi slur
Renault is once again facing unwanted scrutiny over its wartime record after the founder’s grandchildren began legal proceedings against the French State to restore his reputation, which they claim was tarnished by allegations that he collaborated with the Nazis.
Louis Renault’s heirs are suing the Government over what they say was the illegal nationalisation of the company in November 1944 after claims that it had backed Germany during the Second World War.
They are demanding compensation denied at the time because of Mr Renault’s alleged collaboration with Hitler’s regime, potentially reigniting an awkward debate over the extent of the company’s cooperation with the Wehrmacht.
Mr Renault, a racing driver and inventor who founded the car company with his two brothers in 1899, died in custody awaiting trial two months after the liberation of France in 1944. He was accused of collaborating with Hitler, imprisoned and beaten by guards, and developed aphasia, a psychological disorder that prevented him from speaking. A month after his death, Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime leader, signed a decree confiscating his 96.8 per cent stake in Renault on behalf of the State. But Mr Renault’s eight grandchildren say that de Gaulle had not right to seize his holding without compensating his family.
“The decree of confiscation… is contrary to the fundamental principles of the right of property”, Maître Lévy, the lawyer representing Mr Renault’s grandchildren, said.
“No other company was the object of such a treatment, not even those where the managers were found guilty of collaboration”, he said.
The proceedings have been made possible by a procedure introduced last year that entitles individuals to challenge the constitutionality of French legislation.
Maître Lévy told the Times that he was seeking a court order designating an expert to evaluate what M. Renault’s stake “would have brought the family since 1945”.
Although Renault’s market capitalisation is 11.6 billion euros (£10.1 billion), the founder’s grandchildren said that their main aim was not the money but to restore his reputation.
Last year, they took action against a war memorial that had displayed a photograph showing Mr Renault alongside Hitler at the Berlin Motor Show in 1939. The organisers were fined £2,000 and ordered to remove the photograph by Limoges Appeal Court.
Mr Renault’s family admit that the business made about 30,000 lorries for the German army and spare parts for Wehrmacht tanks during the war. But they said that he had no choice after Hitler occupied France and requisitioned its factories.
Hélène Renault-Dingli, the founder’s granddaughter, said : “Renault did not make weapons and was not more zealous (in its support for Germany) than Peugeot or Citroën”.
However, Annie Lacroix-Riz, the emeritus professor of history at Paris University, claims that the group financed the extreme Right in France before the war and collaborated with Hitler.
The French car industry was “fully mobilised in the service of the German war economy”, she said.
Renault is not the only French group embroiled in a row over its war record. SNCF, the state railway network, was recently forced to issue an apology for its role in the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Adam Sage
(See) Ignominious death of a French industrial genius.
