technology and culture Book Reviews 345 Marius Berliet. By Louis Muron. Lyons: LUGD, 1995. Pp. 201; illustra tions. (No price given.) Marius Berliet lived from 1866 to 1949, almost exactly the same years as Henry Ford. Berliet was a major personage in the French automobile industry and at some points almost as famous there as Ford was in America. Ajournalist, Louis Muron has aimed this un documented biography at a general, but well-read, audience. He hits the high spots of Berliet’s career, but his book lacks the depth needed to make it a major contribution to French auto history. Berliet issued from a family in Lyons operating a small textile fac tory; it employed some thirty people in the 1890s. A skillful me chanic, Berliet was seduced by early automobiles, like so many ofhis generation. He made an internal-combustion engine in 1894, a car in 1897. Two years later, he began manufacturing automobiles, fi nanced by his family and friends. Expansion was slow until 1905, when Albert Pitkin of the American Locomotive Company (whom the author, like other French writers, insists on calling Monsieur Pitkins) came to France on his “yacht” and for one hundred thou sand dollars bought a license to make the rugged Berliet cars in America. Although the author does not say so, perhaps as many as six thousand of these Alco cars were made in the United States before production ended in 1913. The American license money enabled Berliet to expand and thereafter become a leading automaker in Europe. (In 1913 Berliet made an estimated three thousand vehi cles, and ranked behind Renault, Peugeot, Benz, Darracq, Opel, Fiat, and Wolseley.) Berliet had become France’s largest truck maker—two hundred to three hundred annually—by the time ofWorld War I and special ized in trucks during the conflict. The company produced some twenty-five thousand, second only to Fiat’s forty-six thousand war time production. Berliet’s trucks, along with production of artillery shells, small tanks, and other military equipment, made the firm one of the key components in France’s amazing industrial performance during the war. Marius Berliet used his profits to build a huge new factory atVenissieux , southeast of Lyons, but he experienced serious production and financial difficulties in the 1920s. He wisely decided to adopt diesel engines for his trucks in the late 1920s, obtaining licenses from Aero and then Ricardo in 1935. His revival in trucks was held back by French government efforts to help the financially ailing rail ways by limiting long-distance common-carrier trucking. In his Poli tics of Transport in Twentieth-Century France (Kingston, Ont.: McGillQueen ’s University Press, 1984), Joseph Jones treats this episode more thoroughly than does Muron. In the 1930s Berliet offered several prototype military vehicles to the army, without success. When World War II began in 1939 the 346 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE company could not expand production of shells rapidly enough to suit the authorities, who requisitioned it. When France fell, the government managers decamped. Marius Berliet and his son Paul resumed control of the enterprise but had to follow a fine line between keeping it operating and providing employment for thou sands ofworkers and producing as little as possible for Nazi military use. Although they produced less for the Germans than did Renault, Citroën, Peugeot, or French Ford, at the Liberation Marius and his four sons were arrested by extreme left-wing officials of the De Gaulle government and the factories seized. Louis Muron suggests that the motive here was less to punish collaboration with the Nazis, which he believes was not proved, than to institute a regime of worker management in a large industrial enterprise. In a few years worker management degenerated into Communist Party manage ment, and the government returned the Berliet company to the fam ily in 1949. A few months before this denouement Marius Berliet died. Muron is good on the narrow and closed personality of Marius Berliet, but he would have better used his pages for fuller discussions of the auto industry and the Berliet company’s operations rather than inserting textbook accounts of French politics. He presents nothing on factory...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Oct 1, 2001
Robert B Silver 
Open Access