Headquarters, factories, stores, these places are the starting points of some of the greatest French industrial and commercial sagas. In this summer series, L’Express opens the doors to emblematic sites, in the four corners of France.
They are still there. Planted across the long gardens that green the Trapèze district, in the south of the city of Boulogne-Billancourt, in Hauts-de-Seine. Neat and tidy in their old-fashioned clothes, at a respectable distance from the brand new eco-district that surrounds them. Nestled in the bend of a private road, they face each other. Two roosters, survivors of a Belle Epoque auto show, watch them from the top of their cast iron structure. On the right, the little hut where it all began. On the left, the brick building where it all expanded. Two sides of the same industrial saga: that of the car manufacturer Renault. Two vestiges of a once sprawling production site, now gone.
Because before welcoming company headquarters left, right and centre, Billancourt was Renault. And Renault was Billancourt. It was in this town that Louis Renault liked to tinker. To the fabric and button trade that had enriched his parents, he preferred the exhilarating novelty offered by the automobile at the end of the 19th century. He made his own the shed of the family country house that served as a shed, a copy of which is now accessible to visitors authorised by Renault.
Self-taught, the young man developed his first small car, on which he installed a direct-drive gearbox. The system was a small revolution. And it proved its worth: in 1898, Louis Renault drove up Rue Lepic on the Butte Montmartre without stalling. Paris was ecstatic. Orders poured in. The Renault Frères company was born. In Billancourt, the young company bought undeveloped blocks of land to set up its workshops. They had to be connected to each other: no matter, it privatized the streets, to the great displeasure of local residents. Louis Renault was inspired by the assembly line of Henry Ford, whose factories he had visited in 1911, and imposed a stopwatch system to which the workers, who then worked twelve hours six days a week, responded with strikes.
When Renault produces… bricks
But the First World War took everything away. The company began to produce some of the famous Marne taxis and FT tanks. The war was a springboard: in four years, it quadrupled its workforce and tripled its surface area. More than 20,000 people worked there on around forty hectares. At the end of the conflict, the vast factory then acquired its control tower: building X, the same one that still stands in Boulogne-Billancourt. At the time, each of the workshops was named after a letter of the alphabet. The management headquarters was no exception to the rule. Its façade, which had not changed in a century, had to be grandiose. It had to impress the foreign delegations who would be invited to discover the new cars there.
The building gets its ochre color from the bricks that the company produces itself. “To do this, Renault uses the residue from blast furnaces mixed with clay,” says Philippe Cornet, a former Renault executive and author of an article on the company’s headquarters. Louis Renault, who trusts banks no more than he trusts suppliers, internalizes the production of what he needs to ensure his business: wood, tires, engine oils, etc. So why not bricks? Inside Building X, a monumental double marble staircase lit by a vast glass roof leads to the management offices, located upstairs. But to access the left wing reserved for him, Louis Renault prefers his personal elevator, while a footbridge allows him to reach the projects and studies building from his office. And Renault is full of projects.
To make them a reality, the manufacturer took over Seguin Island this time. Raised several meters to avoid flooding, the site was home to an industrial cathedral that defied belief from the 1930s onwards: over six floors, stamping, sheet metal work, painting and assembly were carried out. “The factory had 48 elevators for cars and 8 kilometers of conveyors. Elevator engineers were permanently present to intervene in the event of the slightest breakdown,” says Daniel Théry, who worked on Seguin Island many decades later and, with ex-Renault employees, perpetuates the memory of the place in Boulogne-Billancourt.
In addition to cars, railcars were assembled there. But the period that opened was dark. Europe was set ablaze by the Second World War. Billancourt, which produced trucks for Nazi Germany, was partly destroyed by Allied bombings. Shortly after the Liberation, Louis Renault, accused of having collaborated, died in prison. The company was nationalized: it became the Régie nationale des usines Renault, whose building X still bears the name. Under the direction of Pierre Lefaucheux, it opened up to the working classes with the famous 4 CV, the first French car to have passed the milestone of one million units produced.
Back to the sources
In the 1950s, the factory was at the height of its history. Located on a hundred hectares between Billancourt, Seguin Island and Meudon, it had more than 40,000 employees, including thousands of immigrant workers. Billancourt rises Renault, lives Renault, sleeps Renault. The lung of workers’ struggles, the site has always been affected by strikes. But the one in 1968 was unprecedented in its scale. It lasted more than a month, and paved the way for the Grenelle agreements. These provided for a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a forty-hour week, the free exercise of union rights in companies… But two decades later, it was disillusionment for the Boulogne workers.
Despite the success of vehicles produced locally – such as the R5 – and record production rates reached in the 1970s, the fate of Renault Billancourt was sealed in 1989. In March 1992, the last Supercinq left Île Seguin. Gone were the flows of thousands of employees following the rhythm of the Paris metro. Gone were the ballet of river shuttles full of freshly assembled cars. Gone was Renault Billancourt. In fact, the link between the group and the city was weakening. Management kept its headquarters there in a vast, fully glazed building with a bird’s eye view of the banks of the Seine. But, under Carlos Ghosn, Renault’s future was no longer in Hauts-de-Seine. Or even really in France. It was happening in Japan, where the leader became a manga hero after turning Nissan around; in Morocco and Eastern Europe, where Renault massively relocated its production.
In 2018, the arrest of Carlos Ghosn plunged the group into an unprecedented crisis. To get out of debt, the sale of Building X was considered for a while, then abandoned. Refurbished and renamed after Pierre Lefaucheux’s successor, Pierre Dreyfus, the place has since regained the role it occupied until 1975. Jean-Dominique Senard and Luca de Meo, Renault’s chairman and CEO, share the upper floor, a series of offices and chic lounges. On the ground floor, a large room hosts summit meetings. In 2026, a new headquarters should see the light of day, as an extension of Building X. In the meantime, François Roger, Renault’s HR Director, who is also in charge of real estate, hopes to repatriate some historic productions to the garden that separates Building X from Louis Renault’s cabin. Almost like a return to the roots.
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