Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Having cowed the city and bought the grudging approval of the university, Morris decided to involve himself in politics on a national scale. However, his political interventions were, like those of Henry Ford, clumsy, ill-informed and inappropriately rightwing. As a result he was, like Ford, rarely taken seriously, even by conservative politicians. In 1930–1 Morris bankrolled the New Party then being set up by former Labour minister Sir Oswald Mosley, who later described the tycoon as ‘our chief backer’. After the New Party had metamorphosed into the British Union of Fascists in 1932, and Mosley had adopted Mussolini as his model, Morris ostensibly ended his financial support for his activities, and he later strenuously denied any involvement in the fascist movement. However, Martin Adeney has uncovered evidence suggesting that Morris surreptitiously channelled money to Mosley’s fascists throughout the 1930s. Given Morris’s adamantly rightwing views and his staunch belief that he was always right, this should perhaps not come as a surprise.

  William Morris’s Italian equivalent, Giovanni Agnelli, was cut from very different cloth. While as politically conservative as Morris, and similarly keen to exploit the burgeoning interwar market for small, economical family cars, Agnelli’s social and political acumen, and in particular his uncanny ability to rub along with the government of the day, ensured that while Morris Motors is long gone, the firm that he founded is as prominent as ever, happily taking its place among the world’s top-ten car makers.

  The Agnellis were Piedmontese gentry who, by 1899, were living in a sumptuous Turin villa. In that year 33-year-old Giovanni Agnelli, an intense former cavalry officer with a pronounced weakness for women, joined the new car-making partnership soon to be known as Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino, or FIAT, as its managing director. By 1906 Agnelli had persuaded most of Fiat’s original partners, laid-back Torinese aristocrats, to sell him their shares. Three years later he found himself on trial for fraud, accused of falsifying the company’s accounts and misrepresenting its share price. But, exhibiting the good luck with which he was always associated (and that seems to have been crucial for any budding car maker at that time), he was mysteriously acquitted and swiftly returned to his role at Fiat.

  Agnelli soon showed that he was not just a talented auto executive but also a consummate politician. He established close ties with the Italian Liberal premier Giovanni Giolitti, and in return received lucrative government contracts for military vehicles and aircraft engines during the First World War, with the title of Cavaliere al Merito del Lavoro thrown in for good measure. The canny car maker then ensured that he covered all his political bases by simultaneously allying both with Giolitti’s left-of-centre Liberals and with the up and coming firebrand Benito Mussolini, then a radical socialist. By 1917 Agnelli was one of Mussolini’s biggest benefactors.

  Like Morris Motors, Fiat – and Agnelli – did very well out of the First World War. By 1918 Fiat was the third biggest company in Italy, its profits not only helping swell the massive salaries of Agnelli and his fellow directors but also enabling the company to build a new car factory at Lingotto, outside Turin. When Giacomo Mattè-Trucco’s revolutionary Lingotto plant was finally opened in 1923 it was not just the largest car factory in the world, but also the first true example of purpose-built automobile architecture. Made, like Kahn’s Ford factories, primarily of reinforced concrete, and looking like a huge ocean liner, it was planned vertically: raw materials entered at ground level, cars were assembled on the building’s five floors, and the finished vehicles emerged on the rooftop, where they could be put through their paces on a test track. The modernist architectural guru Le Corbusier called Lingotto ‘one of the most impressive sights in industry’ and ‘a guideline for town planning’.1

  Revolutionary unrest after the First World War prompted Agnelli to choose between his increasingly disparate political allies. When in 1920 his friend Giolitti declined his request to use troops to quell a communistled sit-down strike in the Fiat factories, Agnelli turned to Mussolini for help. By the time of Mussolini’s stage-managed March on Rome and his subsequent seizure of power in October 1922, the two men were closely linked. (Agnelli’s daughter later unconvincingly argued that her father had never been serious about supporting Mussolini’s fascism: ‘Putting on those black Fascist uniforms was a great joke to him,’ she maintained, asserting that Giovanni’s fashion sense prevented him from embracing Mussolini’s dictatorship, ‘just think of the bad taste of those people who designed the Fascist uniforms.’) Mussolini helpfully disbanded the commission investigating Fiat’s ‘excess’ wartime profits, Fiat continued to win significant government contracts, and in 1923 Agnelli himself was made a government senator. Where William Morris chose to criticize government from outside, Agnelli preferred the cosier environment inside the regime.

  Secure in his political backing, Giovanni Agnelli’s Fiat created a series of outstandingly novel and influential cars in the mid-1930s. The revolutionary 1500 of 1936 was swiftly followed by the endearing 500, dubbed the Topolino after Disney’s Mickey Mouse, and the larger 1100, the Millecento. These three models were, along with Volkswagen’s contemporary Beetle, the direct antecedents of the modern small car. Dante Giacosa, a Piedmontese engineer who had joined Fiat in 1928 and had become engineering manager by 1937, gave the 500 hydraulic brakes and independent front suspension, while Rudolfo Schaffer styled the car in a manner that suggested a far larger vehicle. The resulting Topolino was far better built, and performed far more impressively, than cheap and cheerful predecessors such as the Model T and the Austin Seven. Giacosa’s Millecento of 1937, which slotted in between the 1500 and the tiny 500, was not only simple, frugal and strong but enjoyed better roadholding and performance than most contemporary sports cars.

  Austin, Morris and Fiat were not the only European success stories to make millions out of the mass manufacture of small, popular cars in the interwar era. Renault and Citroën of France had, by 1939, become major players in the same market, as we shall see. But not every successful European car manufacturer was based in the West. Indeed, one Eastern European firm had become a household name across the continent by 1939.

  The founder of the Škoda firm, Emil Škoda, had himself never made cars. By the time of his death in 1900 he had made the Škoda works at Pilsen (Plze), near Prague, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. Only in 1919 did the Škoda plant turn to cars, producing Hispano-Suizas under licence, using their own Czech-built engines. It was the engineers Václav Laurin (1865–1930) and Václav Klement (1868–1938) who turned the successful arms producer into a leading car maker. Laurin was retiring, modest and hard-working; Klement was ebullient and ambitious – and together they made an ideal partnership. Their first car, the Type A Voiturette, appeared in 1905 and sold respectably; Laurin and Klement also did very well out of the First World War, making military vehicles and ambulances for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1926 they had made enough money to be able to absorb Škoda – sensibly retaining the wellknown Škoda brand rather than substituting their own – and proceeded to carve out a niche market in small, handsome family cars. The Škoda 633 of 1931 and the 420 Tudor of 1933 were particularly successful, being just what Central Europe needed at a time of economic uncertainty.1

  By 1938 Škoda was making cabriolets, coupés and a streamlined twodoor saloon, the Rapid, that looked a lot like Porsche’s new KdF-Wagen. (Skoda’s aerodynamic, rear-engined 935 also owed a lot to Porsche and Ledwinka’s designs.) And early in 1939 Škoda unveiled its best and biggest car yet: the impressive four-door Superb saloon. Sadly, the Superb was to be the last great car Škoda was to make for almost sixty years. In 1939 the invading German army occupied the Škoda works; in fact, the acquisition of Škoda had been one of the principal reasons why Hitler was so keen to overturn the Munich agreement of 1938 and absorb all of Czechoslovakia. Over the next six years, the Škoda plant became notorious not as the producer of cheerful, sturdy family cars but as one of the Nazi regime’s most efficient producers of milita
ry vehicles and equipment.

  Škoda’s equivalents in France were the Paris-based companies of Renault and Citroën. However, while both car makers focused on the popular end of the market, there the similarity ended. The nature of both concerns derived from the personalities of their founders, bitter rivals whose temperaments were at opposite ends of the spectrum.

  Whatever his achievements, Louis Renault could never be said to have been an endearing character. Indeed, Renault was as far removed from his cinematic namesake – the ineffably charming, incorrigibly roguish chief of police in Michael Curtiz’s legendary 1943 film Casablanca – as could possibly be imagined. One colleague described him as ‘always in bad humour, irritable, tense and … aggressive because of his natural shyness’. Outside the cockpit of his beloved racing cars, Renault felt vulnerable and awkward, and he did not relish working with others or delegating, even to senior managers. Like William Morris and Henry Ford, he was impatient and fidgety, and rarely kept still. But he was also tough, wiry and able to do anything his workforce did – which he often proved on the shop floor. He was a mechanic who had made good, and he always behaved as if he still was that mechanic. Like Morris, he was highly suspicious of finance and rarely borrowed from banks unless it was absolutely necessary. When in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, Renault ran out of spare cash, it took a government act (popularly known as la loi Renault) to force him to accept state aid.

  Renault’s home life, like Morris’s, was remarkably austere. Highly reclusive by nature, he and his young family (he married his wife Christiane when he was forty and she was twenty-one) bought a remote country estate and chateau at Herqueville in Normandy – but not before he had paid to have the local inhabitants removed and their homes demolished, and had down driven the price of the property by claiming that the government intended to make a compulsory purchase of the land. He even took advantage of his brother Fernand’s failing health to buy him out of the family firm at an extraordinarily low price, leaving his widow and three children almost destitute when Fernand finally died in 1908.

  Yet Louis Renault – again, like Herbert Morris – was undoubtedly a gifted engineer. Renault’s early cars had live axles, rather than being chain-driven, as most of the early autos (taking their cue from the bicycle) had been. His transmission system soon became the industry standard, at least until Cadillac introduced synchromesh in 1928. At the same time, he was fully aware of the importance of marketing. By 1909 he was selling cars not just across Europe but also in America, Japan and Russia. In Britain, King Edward VII, the architect of the historic 1904 Anglo-French rapprochement popularly known as the Entente Cordiale, swiftly cemented the new alliance by buying a Renault.

  But, talented mechanic though he was, Renault’s business methods always left something to be desired. In order to obtain room to expand his factory at Billancourt, for example, he offered the neighbours derisory prices for their land and homes. If they refused, he would noisily test his cars outside their doors until they capitulated. In this way he was able to extend his works across the River Seine, ultimately colonizing the whole of the mid-river Île Seguin.

  Renault prospered from the First World War. Along with Panhard, he championed the use of the car for military purposes, a passionate advocacy that appeared to be vindicated when Renault taxis played a central, and highly publicized, role in the Miracle of the Marne, when the Anglo-French armies halted the seemingly irresistible advance of the German army in September 1914. Paris’s military chief, General Gallieni, requisitioned all the taxis in Paris (having promised their drivers the meter fare plus 27 per cent) – amounting to some six hundred-odd Renaults. Louis Renault found himself an accidental hero and capitalized on his new-found celebrity. Soon his firm was making aircraft engines and shells, and by 1918 the Billancourt factory was churning out large numbers of the successful FT-17 light tank, which he himself had helped design.

  Renault’s uncompromisingly conservative views made him a leading standard-bearer for the right in the 1930s. The traditionalist magnate was particularly vocal in his denunciations of Léon Blum’s left-wing Popular Front coalition of 1936; he sacked 2,500 workers on the suspicion that they were Popular Front communists and, during the short lifetime of the Popular Front, Renault’s resolutely anti-union stance led to numerous strikes and stoppages at Billancourt.

  Yet not all of the motor moguls of the 1920s and 30s were antisocial dictators or autistic engineers. Louis Renault’s great rival, André Citroën, was an ebullient bon vivant who actually did not like driving – a sharp contrast to those automotive rivals who had graduated from racing cars to running boardrooms. And he was good company. An inveterate gambler – the London Daily Sketch reported on 24 September 1924 that Citroën had won £162,000 (around £3 million in today’s money) in a few hours at a Deauville casino – who also liked being seen with beautiful women, Citroën’s numerous friendships extended to many of the leading celebrities of the day, such as Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker. Citroën’s senior staff at the company’s Quai de Javel plant displayed great loyalty and affection for their colourful chief, creating an esprit de corps very different from the sombre mood at Renault’s Billancourt complex. Citroën often visited the shop floor to talk to his staff and, unlike Renault, was happy to delegate major decisions to his senior managers.

  Citroën and the austere, cold Renault were never close. Renault was callous, calculating, lugubrious and autocratic; Citroën was warm, generous, humane, and always visibly enthusiastic about his cars and his workforce. Citroën was also Jewish, and after 1933 was increasingly worried by the growth of anti-Semitism not just in Germany but in France, too. (During the Second World War, over one hundred members of the Citroën family were to perish in Hitler’s gas chambers, the majority of them deported from France by the Vichy authorities.) As we have seen, Louis Renault never shrank from expressing anti-Semitic opinions. Although he did, in February 1932, deign to invite Citroën to his new, vastly expanded works at Billancourt, it was largely to gloat over Citroën’s discomfort at Renault’s massive new trans-Seine complex; typically, the two auto barons lunched frugally in Renault’s office rather than at one of the flagship Parisian restaurants that were André Citroën’s habitual haunts.

  The Citroën family had originated in Holland. André’s grandfather had sold lemons, and had used his trade as the basis for his somewhat curious change of name (citroen means ‘lemon’ in Dutch.1) André’s father committed suicide when his son was only six years old, yet André still managed to enrol at the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris in 1898. From then on, his fortune seemed assured. After operating a successful munitions business during the First World War, in 1919 he founded a new auto company which immediately acquired a reputation for brave, if not eccentric, innovation. He built Europe’s first car assembly line in 1919, on which he built Europe’s earliest mass-produced car, the Type A Tourer, the first low-priced car in the world to incorporate an electric starter and electric lighting. Citroën’s simple, utilitarian 5CV of 1922, nicknamed ‘Le Petit Citron’ after the yellow paintwork often used for its bodywork, became the French farmer’s car of choice – and the first French car to be widely bought by women. (Citroën’s wife, a close friend of Coco Chanel, was a pioneer of women’s driving and a founder of the Automobile Club Féminin de Paris.) A francophone rival to the Model T and Austin Seven, the highly successful 5CV was the ancestor of the legendary postwar 2CV.

  The restless Citroën was always looking for new challenges and, in particular, for ways to adapt the accepted form of the automobile. In 1920, working with the engineer Adolphe Kégresse and advised by British tank pioneer General Sir Ernest Swinton, he developed the world’s first halftrack car, popularly known as the Citroën-Kégresse caterpillar.2 These rugged vehicles conquered both the Alps and the desert, crossing three thousand miles of the Sahara in just one week. (In 1923 Citroën even persuaded England’s Queen Mary to ride in one during the British army’s manoeuvres
in Aldershot.) Meanwhile, Citroën’s B2 taxi had become a common sight on the streets of French cities, undermining Renault’s earlier domination of this lucrative market. By the late 1920s Citroën’s factory was producing a car every ten minutes, a rate unheard of outside of Detroit.

  Perhaps Citroën’s greatest achievement, however, was his astonishing Traction Avant of 1934. This car was undoubtedly the most innovative product Citroën had yet developed. Designed by Flaminio Bertoni and André Lefèbvre, the dashing former racing car driver, who had joined Citroën from Renault in 1933,1 it brought luxury car engineering to a mass-produced family runabout. The world’s first frontwheel-drive, steel monocoque production car, it was constructed using a unitary, or ‘monocoque’, body rather than, as had long been the custom, a coach-built body lowered on to a chassis, making the car enviably light, fast and low. The Traction Avant’s graceful lines made it an instant design classic, and the star of countless French films of the 1930s and 40s. And its distinctive, double-chevron logo, which now spanned the radiator grille, ensured that no one was in any doubt that this was a Citroën car (not that the Traction Avant looked like anything else on the road, anyway). Its intrinsic lightness also made it frugal with petrol, while the lowslung arrangement of the car eliminated the need for running boards to step into or out of the vehicle. These features made the Traction Avant ideal for use as a limousine or taxicab, and it was enormously popular with drivers and passengers alike.