Louis Renault

The fourth of six children born into the bourgeois Parisian family of Alfred and Berthe Renault, Louis Renault attended Lycée Condorcet. He was fascinated by engineering and mechanics from an early age and spent hours in the Serpollet steam car workshop or tinkering with old Panhard engines in the tool shed of the family's second home in Billancourt.

He built his first car in 1898, hiring a pair of workmen to modify a used 3⁄4 hp (560 W) De Dion-Bouton cycle which featured a revolutionary universally jointed driveshaft and a three-speed gearbox with reverse, with the third gear in direct drive (which he patented a year later). Renault called his car the Voiturette. On 24 December 1898, he won a bet with his friends that his invention with an innovative driveshaft could beat a car with a bicycle-like chain drive up the slope of Rue Lepic in Montmartre. As well as winning the bet, Renault received 13 definite orders for the vehicle.

Seeing the commercial potential, he teamed up with his two older brothers, Marcel and Fernand, who had business experience from working in their father's button and textiles firm. They formed the Renault Frères company on 25 February 1899. Initially, business and administration was handled entirely by the elder brothers, with Louis dedicating himself to design and manufacturing. Marcel was killed in the 1903 Paris-Madrid motor race, and in 1908, Louis Renault took overall control of the company after Fernand retired for health reasons. Fernand subsequently died in 1909.

Marriage

On 26 September 1918, Renault, then aged 40, married the 21-year-old Christiane Boullaire (1897–1979), sister of French painter Jacques Boullaire. They had a son, Jean-Louis (24 January 1920 – 1982). They kept homes at 90 Avenue Foch (formerly Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne) in Paris and a country estate near Saint-Pierre-du-Vauvray, Rouen, in the department of Eure, called the Chateau de la Batellerie à Herqueville or simply Chateau Herqueville. The Chateau fronted more than 3 km of the Seine, the entire grounds comprising 4,000 hectares. At Renault's request and expense, the small town hall of Herqueville was moved. Renault's personnel entered the residence via a tunnel.

Locations of Chateau Herqueville: 49°14′31.66″N 1°15′24.55″E

World War II, arrest and death

In 1938, Renault visited Adolf Hitler and, by 1939, he had become an important supplier for the French army. When Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940, Renault was in the U.S., having been sent by his government to ask for tanks. He returned to find the Franco-German armistice in place. Renault was faced with the choice of cooperating with the Germans and possibly forestalling them from moving his factory and equipment to Germany, which would lead to an accusation of collaboration with the enemy. He put his factories at the service of Vichy France, which meant that he was also viewed as assisting the Nazis. Over a period of four years, Renault manufactured 34,232 vehicles for the Germans. He argued that "by continuing operations he had saved thousands of workers from being transported to Germany", but, in 1942, Life described him as a "notorious Paris collaborationist".

During the occupation of France the company was under the control of the Germans, with people from Daimler-Benz in key positions. Renault himself became unpopular among members of the French resistance. The Renault factories on Île Seguin in Billancourt had become top priority targets for the bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and were ultimately severely damaged on 3 March 1942. Renault's health issues worsened, including his severely diminished renal function and, in late 1942, he suffered aphasia, and became unable to speak or write.

Three weeks after France was liberated in 1944, Renault surrendered "on condition that he would not be jailed until indicted". He was arrested outside Paris on 22 September 1944, on charges of industrial collaboration with Nazi Germany. At the time of his arrest, Renault "denied that his firm had received $120,000,000 from the Germans for war materials, said that he had kept his huge, much-bombed plant going at the request of Vichy to keep its materials and equipment out of Nazi hands and to save workers from deportation." He was incarcerated in Paris's Fresnes Prison, being already seriously ill at the time. The records for the exact period of his incarceration at Fresnes would later turn out to be missing. Renault was moved on 5 October to a psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne.

When Renault's health quickly declined on 9 October 1944 he was again moved to a private nursing home at the clinic Saint-Jean-de-Dieu in the Rue Oudinot, Paris at the request of his family and supporters, having gone into a coma. He died on 24 October 1944, four weeks after his incarceration, still awaiting trial and having claimed to have been mistreated in Fresnes Prison, with his 1918 French Legion of Honor, for exceptional contribution to the victory of the First World War, having been expunged by the Vichy régime.

No autopsy was performed and the exact cause of Renault's death remains unclear. An official report at the time gave the cause of death as uremia. Later, in 1956, his wife claimed that Renault died from beatings and torture at the hands of prison guards.

Louis Renault is buried at his country home Chateau Herqueville, in Herqueville dans l'Eure.