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Bernard Citroën
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by John Reynolds |
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(This is the complete version of the obituary published in abbreviated form by the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, on 13th August 2002) |
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Bernard Citroën photographed by John Reynolds in Paris in July 2000 |
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Bernard
Citroën, who died in Paris on August 9th aged 85 was the second child
and eldest son of the French industrialist André Citroën, the founder
of Automobiles Citroën. During his boyhood years, as the heir-apparent
to the motor car magnate often called the Henry Ford of France, he
seemed destined to succeed to the throne of what was then Europe's
largest automobile manufacturing empire. But in 1935, when he was only
18, the bankrupcy and death of his father (closely followed by the
German invasion of France in 1940 ) caused his life to take a different
turn and ultimately he won recognition not as a captain of French
industry but as an officer in the Royal Air Force, piloting tactical
bombers during the Liberation of Europe. Later, he went on to achieve
distinction in the world of belles lettres, as a writer and poet and
member of the celebrated French literary society, the Academie du Var. His
father, André Citroën, an engineer-entrepreneur of Dutch-Jewish
origins, was the first industrialist in Europe to begin the
mass-production and mass-marketing of automobiles in the American
manner, founding his Double Chevron marque in 1919 at an assembly plant
located at the Quai de Javel on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, in
the huge munitions factory that he had built during WW1. Within ten
years, its output had overtaken that of all the older-established
French car makes such as Renault and Peugeot combined, to make
Automobiles Citroën the fourth biggest car concern in the world and the
largest outside the USA. In 1929 it turned out more than 100,000
vehicles, a total that was not seen again in Europe until the 1950s. This
remarkable success made André Citroën an immensely wealthy man, well
able to afford the lavish bon vivant life-style that made him the
target of gossip-columnists in England as well as France. His vast
profits enabled him to fund his love of gambling at racecourses and
casinos, to indulge to the full his weakness for advertising and
publicity and, above all, to lavish boundless generosity upon his three
children, Jacqueline, Bernard and Maxime, on whom he doted. Thus,
Bernard and his siblings enjoyed an eventful upbringing, even by the
hedonistic standards prevailing in Paris during the Roaring Twenties.
Throughout that era, images of the Citroën family at play were
published constantly by newspapers, magazines and newsreeels placing
them among the modern world's first media celebrities. |
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For
example, in July 1925 Bernard and his brother and sister accompanied
their father to the ceremony inaugurating the illuminations that André
Citroën had installed on the Eiffel Tower to celebrate the opening of
the international Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels, the
birthplace of the Art Deco movement. Thereafter, every night for the
next ten years, Bernard could observe his family name flashing in the
sky over Paris, spelled-out in huge letters 100 foot high by 250,000
electric light-bulbs fixed to the sides of the Eiffel Tower, forming a
gigantic advertisement visible sixty miles away. |
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Left: Bernard Citroën (at the wheel) with his brother and sister and Maurice Chevalier, in their C4 Cabriolet at Deauville, September 1930. | |
Above:
Bernard Citroën with his father, mother, sister and brother on holiday
with Charlie Chaplin at St Moritz, January 1932. L to R: Bernard
Citroën, Maxime Citroën, Charlie Chaplin, Mme Citroën, André Citroën,
Jacqueline Citroën Left: Bernard Citroën (aged 15) with his father, André Citroën and the French tennis champion, Henri Cochet |
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Bernard
Citroën was also present when, two years later, on 27th May 1927, his
father threw a huge party at the Quai de Javel factory to welcome
Charles Lindbergh who had landed in Paris three days previously, having
made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. In the course of these
ceremonies, he was called upon to present a gift of jewellery to the
American aviator. Regularly
throughout that period the Citroën family took their winter holidays at
Saint-Moritz in the company of Charlie Chaplin, while in summer they
they always rented the same seaside villa at Deauville where they
entertained their friends from Paris; typically the guest-list included
such celebrities as Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier.
To amuse his children, André Citroën presented them with an
electrically-powered half-scale model of the latest Citroën model
which, with the permission of the Deauville police, they were allowed
to drive about the town on the public roads. Every season, they would
enter their little car in the annual Concours d'Elegance held by the
Deauville automobile club. But,
sadly, the good times did not endure. In 1934, with typical
over-optimism André Citroën decided to reconstruct his factory in order
to launch a revolutionary new car, the Traction Avant, the world's
first mass-produced front-wheel-drive saloon. Alas, he had misjudged
the economic situation for by then the Depression had arrived in
France. The result was that his firm ran headlong into a severe
financial crisis, made worse by the plunging sales of his existing
range. A creditor's moratorium was established, but when this was
broken by an impatient minor creditor, Automobiles Citroën was adjudged
insolvent and taken-over by its largest creditor, the Michelin tyre
company, to which André Citroën had already pledged his personal
shareholding. Having lost his firm, his
fortune and even the rights to his name, the following year he died of
cancer in a Paris clinic. Bernard
Maxime Citroën was born in Paris on 4th June 1917. Educated at the
Lycée Saint-Louis on the Left Bank, in 1936 he followed in his father's
footsteps by entering the Ecole Polytechnique, the technical academy of
the French military and civil services, passing out in 1939. In May
1940, at the height of the drole de guerre or phoney war he was
called-up for compulsory military service and began training as a pilot
at the Armée de l'Air flying school located at Versailles. When the
invading German army arrived in Paris the following month, however, his
unit was hastily transferred to Royan and then on to Toulouse. In
August 1940, following the fall of France and the signing of an
armistice with Germany, the country was divided into two separate
zones, occupied and unoccupied, the northern part falling under German
military control while the southern part was administered by a
collaborationist French government led by Maréchal Pétain, based at
Vichy. As
a result, in common with the majority of French servicemen, the young
Lieutenant Citroën was immediately demobilised. The following January,
he enrolled in the Ecole Superieure du Pétrole, a faculty of the
University of Strasbourg based at Clermont-Ferrand, and after gaining
his diploma he began his career as an engineer in the petro-chemical
industry, by joining the French state-owned Aquitaine Petrol Company,
engaged in exploring for oil and gas in the south west region of France. Almost
from the very outset of the Occupation, the German military authorities
and the civilian Vichy regime both began to introduce a systematic
campaign of intimidation and persecution upon the country's extensive
Jewish population, intended to eliminate Jews from all positions of
power and influence in French national life. Indeed, in the Occupied
Zone of France, these anti-semitic measures, imposed by martial law and
enforced by the Gestapo, were even harsher than those existing in
Germany. Although
the Citroën family were no longer active practicing members of the
Jewish faith, they, too, were subjected to this persecution and before
long many of their closest friends and relations began to disappear,
rounded up by the Gestapo and despatched on the journey that led
inevitably to the concentration camps of the Third Reich. The most
notable of these victims among the Citroën family was Bernard Citroën's
first cousin Louis-Hugues Citroën (André Citroën's nephew). A leader of
the Resistance in the Marseilles region, he was captured at Nîmes in
November 1943 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was executed
in the gas chambers the following March. Observing
the realities of Hitler's New European Order at first hand, in December
1942, now aged 25, Bernard Citroën decided to attempt his escape from
France, by making his way to England and joining the many other former
French servicemen rallying under the command of General de Gaulle.
After crossing the Pyrenees on foot during the height of winter he
reached the British Consulate in Barcelona the following April, and on
enlisting in the Free French Air Force he was smuggled along the
clandestine route that led across Spain and Portugal. After many
adventures including a spell in prison, twenty weeks later he reached
Lisbon and was flown to Bristol on board a Dakota aircraft, arriving in
London early in June 1943. Here at an address in Duke Street he met his
maternal uncle, Jacques Bingen, who had already fled from France in
1940, to become a leading member of the exiled French Committee for
National Liberation. |
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Nine
months later, after passing through elementary flying school at
Wolverhampton and an advanced pilots course at RAF Cranwell he gained
his wings as a Flying Officer in the RAF. In
April 1944 he was posted to an Operational Training Unit at Finmere,
before joining No 342 Squadron ( staffed entirely by French air crews
and known as the Lorraine Squadron ) a unit equipped with twin-engined
Douglas A-20 Boston tactical bombers, based at Hartford Bridge near
Camberley. As
part of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force, throughout July and
August 1944 Bernard Citroën's squadron was assigned to support the
ground forces engaged in the liberation of France, following the Allied
landings in Normandy which had commenced on D-Day, the 6th June. |
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Bernard Citroën in the cockpit of the Douglas A20 bomber which he piloted during the liberation of Europe in 1944 and 1945, while serving in the No 342 (Lorraine) Squadron, RAF | |
Almost
a month after the recapture of Paris on the 25th of August 1944,
Bernard Citroën reached the capital himself, arriving at le Bourget
aerodrome on the 20th September after piloting a party of French
officers from London in an Oxford liaison aircraft. Immediately upon
landing on French soil once again, he made straight for a rendez-vous
with his family who had spent the occupation lying low at their
apartment in the centre of Paris, rarely leaving the premises by day,
in order to avoid the attentions of the Nazis. Nights were never passed
at home, however, as it was always very early in the morning that the
police would come to arrest those who were to be deported. On being
reunited with his mother for the first time in almost three years he
was appalled to learn that his uncle Jacques Bingen ( whom he had last
seen in London less than eighteen months previously ) had been captured
by the Gestapo near Clermont-Ferrand only four months beforehand,
during the early part of May 1944. Following the execution of the
Resistance leader Jean Moulin at the hands of the notorious SS chief
Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in July 1943, Jacques Bingen had
been parachuted into France to replace him, tasked with the mission of
directing and coordinating sabotage activities behind German lines, to
prevent Wehrmacht reinforcements and supplies reaching Normandy.
Unfortunately, he had also fallen into enemy hands. To avoid betraying
his comrades under torture, he had chosen to take his own life by
swallowing a cyanide capsule. After
spending the remainder of the war with No 342 Squadron, based initially
in Normandy and then later in Holland, Bernard Citroën was demobilised
from the RAF in October 1945, having reached the rank of Squadron
Leader. Between June 1944 and May 1945 he had flown more than seventy
five missions over France and Germany, service for which he was awarded
the Croix de Guerre with five bars and, ultimately, the distinction of
Commander of the Légion d'Honneur, military class. In
January 1946, he found himself once more in Spain, having been sent to
Madrid by the French government, to head an allied mission formed to
locate and recover German assets. Finding the Spanish way of life
agreeable, and having joined the Roman Catholic faith, when this work
ended two years later he decided to stay on the Spanish capital,
employed by a small agency involved in the importation of various makes
of French automobiles. In due course, he opened an import agency
representing, amongst other French industrial and engineering firms,
the gear wheel manufacturing company that his father had opened in
1902, the Société Engrenages Citroën. His stay in Madrid lasted until
1958, when he returned to Paris and rejoined the French petrol-chemical
industry, taking-up employment with Hydrocarbures des Pyrenées, a
subsidiary of the Elf-Aquitaine / Total oil conglomerate, engaged in
mineralogical exploration and development work overseas. Over the next
twenty-five years, until his retirement in 1982, his activities as an
oil company executive regularly took him abroad, to Argentina, Iran,
India and, ultimately, Mexico. During
his retirement Bernard Citroën was able to concentrate on the subjects
that had always been his principle interests in life, literature and
tennis; for his achievements as a poet he had earlier been elected, in
1979, a member of the distinguished French literary society, the
Academie du Var. In
the latter years of his life, however, he became increasingly involved
in an attempt to unravel the opaque and complex financial and political
affairs surrounding his father's demise. As a result of his extensive
researches, he formed the view that the unfortunate affair had been no
commercial accident, but that the Citroën family had actually been the
victims of a devious plot to swindle them out of the rightful ownership
of their company. In his autobiography published in 1996, entitled le Conjuration de Javel ( the Javel Conspiracy ) he set out the arguments supporting his controversial case. But to his great disappointment the book failed to make an impact in France, least of all among the many millions of motorists who continue to buy Citroën cars today, unaware of the tragic story of the founder of the Double Chevron firm. Automobiles Citroën is currently managed by its third owners, Peugeot SA, having been sold by the Michelin family in 1975. |
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Bernard Citroën with Citroën Traction Avant in 1997. Photographer unknown | |
In
his autobiography Bernard Citroën also described how in the summer of
1934 he had been driven with his father from Paris to Deauville in a
prototype example of the V8 engined 22CV version of the Traction Avant,
exhibited at the 1934 Paris Salon but never commercialised. At the
wheel was Dennis Kendal, the Anglo-American engineer who represented
the suppliers of the body presses and tooling that André Citroën had
ordered from the USA to construct the Traction Avant, the Budd
Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia. Some ten years later, while
stationed at RAF Cranwell, Citroën met Kendal again. By this time
Kendal had become the Member of Parliament for the nearby Lincolnshire
town of Grantham where he was also Managing Director of a factory that
manufactured Hispano-Suiza cannons for the RAF's Spitfire and Hurricane
fighter aircraft. Bernard
Citroën married, in 1952, Piroska Szabo, a Hungarian by birth, who died
in 1996. He is survived by his three sons, Henri-Jacques, Philippe and
Bernard-Louis. |
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© 2002 John Reynolds John Reynolds is the author of many books about Citroën including the widely acclaimed "From A to X - 75 years of Citroën in the UK" which is due to be republished in expanded form soon. Julian Marsh and Citroënët would like to extend sincere condolences to the Citroën family on the occasion of their loss. |