Was He Murdered?

Few Frenchmen wept when they read in their newspapers one October morning in 1944 that Louis Renault had died in a Paris nursing home. He had been rich, powerful and famous, cantankerous, brilliant, often brutal, the little Napoleon of an automaking empire. But France's only eulogy for him was a grimace and an ugly word: "collaborator." Last week, in the cooler atmosphere of eleven years later, Louis Renault's widow sought a court decision to establish that Renault had not died of uremia, but had been "deliberately murdered after torture." The widow's story made big headlines, but it did not really startle Frenchmen; they sensed that it was probably true.

The Ogre. With $15,000 and a genius for things mechanical, Louis Renault and two brothers started building racing cars in 1899 in a shop in his mother's backyard. By 1908 the shop was a 50,000-sq.yd. factory in Billancourt, near Paris. Its 3,000 workers were soon building 5,000 Renault automobiles a year. And Louis Renault owned it all. Vulgar, loud, domineering, impatient, he was a terror to associates, a friend to practically none. To the French working man, Renault became "the ogre of Billancourt." He instituted piecework, maintained an internal intelligence and security system similar to that of Henry Ford (whom he knew and admired), ordered searches of workers' clothing in locker rooms, fired any worker caught with union propaganda.

By the '20s he had princely wealth, a vast palace near the Bois de Boulogne, a handsome wife and a son. He also had mistresses: the first, an opera singer, had refused to marry him ("As long as I'm only his mistress, I'm still free. His authority is incomplete"). He despised Automaker Andre Citroen, but enjoyed competing with him, was even a little regretful when Citroen went broke in 1934 trying to build a plant as modern as Renault's. "It was a dirty trick, showing him my place," Louis grinned.

"I have always lived without political passion," wrote Renault one day in 1936. "Whatever its government or opinion, I have always served my country with the same vigor ... to orient the country toward work." He visited Hitler in 1938, returned with a case of Fuehrerism. When the Wehrmacht swept across France, Renault was in the U.S. as a member of an Allied purchasing mission. He returned home to put his factories at the service of Vichy and the Nazis, in four years made 34,232 vehicles for the Nazis. When a friend chided him for making money in the process, Renault snapped: "Well, do you want me to lose?" And he liked to argue that by staying in operation he had saved thousands of workers from being transported to Germany.

The Vengeance. Paris had been liberated only two days when underground newspapers were shouting for Louis Renault's head, and three weeks later he surrendered on condition that he would not be jailed until indicted. He was taken to a prison infirmary, then transferred to a private nursing home. In four weeks he was dead.

General Charles de Gaulle's provisional government confiscated Louis Renault's empire. Renault's widow and son, who owned 95% of the stock, got nothing, but the other 5% of the stockholders were compensated. Government-operated, Renault is now France's largest nationalized company, employing 51,000 Frenchmen, making 200,000 automobiles and a profit of $11 million a year.

Last week in court, Christiane Renault made no claims on the confiscated empire. Instead, she wanted 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 postLiberation vengeance. Among her evidence was a report showing Renault's urea content to be normal a week before his death, and an X-ray showing a fractured vertebra. The court ordered his remains disinterred.

If Louis Renault was in fact murdered, his killers are safe from punishment under the general amnesty voted after the war for all Resistance crimes.

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