André-Gustave Citroën (1878 – 1935) was a French industrialist whose innovative and bold engineering and business ideas were singularly responsible for bringing Europe into the technological and consumer age. He is particularly renowned for introducing mass manufacturing to the European automobile industry through the car named for him. Ironically, Citroën is Dutch for “lemon,” perhaps not the best name for an automobile manufacturer.
Seeking to make the automobile more affordable, Citroën designed his Type A car (1919), adapted from Henry Ford’s Model T, to be within the financial reach of a wide range of consumers. Citroën’s vehicles were also celebrated for designs and features that focused on durability, practicality, and comfort rather than style, and his innovations included front wheel drive and adjustable front seats.
Perhaps equally important, although marketing and public relations were concepts that would not be developed for many decades, Citroën brilliantly utilized these novel techniques, including:
- Employing professional artists and designers as an integral part of his factory and management staff and photographing his vehicles in authentic outdoor venues.
- Advertising a name brand rather than a specific product (again, the first to do so) and arranging to have his name displayed with 250,000 light bulbs on the Eiffel tower during the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. (The gigantic ad could be seen at a distance of 60 miles.)
- Introducing, in a masterstroke of genius, toy models of the car, which not only proved enormously popular but also drew children – and, of course, their parents – into toy stores throughout France and overseas, where the adult car buyers were exposed repeatedly to the Citroën name and products. These models were followed by toy garages, service depots, and fire stations, all bearing the Citroën name.
- Becoming the first to offer prospective purchasers test drives, thereby securing the trust of consumers and their confidence in his product, and pioneering warranties and “after-sale” service.
- Becoming the first to use direct-mail marketing; the first in Europe to advertise using skywriting; and, in an act of civic responsibility, deploying over 150,000 traffic signs through France – each (not at all coincidentally) marked with the Citroën brand.
- Using vertical acquisition techniques and economic integration, he opened his own auto insurance company and offered low premiums to Citroën owners; created the first finance company in France specifically for automobile purchases; and developed over 1,000 of his own car dealerships.
- Designing a car (the 5HP Clover Leaf) and an advertising campaign aimed at women.
- Persuading, in what became an enormous publicity coupe, England’s Queen Mary to ride in one of his vehicles during British army maneuvers (1923) and establishing a Citroën Hospitality Center that was the talk of the 1933 Berlin Motor Show. (Hitler, who had just taken power, ordered that this “national embarrassment” perpetrated by a Jew was never to happen again).
- Establishing medical and dental facilities, a gymnasium, and childcare and kindergarten on the worksite, and providing for annual leave, paid maternity leave, for new mothers, and company retreats. He was renowned for his general interest in improving the working conditions of industrial workers.
Perhaps most famously, Citroën staged exciting stunts and tests of his automobiles to publicize their high quality, including:
- Being the first to send a car over a cliff and to photograph the damaged, but intact, vehicle, which had survived the impact.
- Lowering a 20,000-pound weight atop a vehicle to demonstrate its incredible resilience.
- Undertaking a sequence of stunts involving expeditions over arduous terrain, that included:
- A group of Citroën-built caterpillar tractors completing the first ever crossing of the Sahara Desert by motorized vehicles, covering 2,000 miles in 20 days (December 1922).
- Citroën-built tractors crossing Africa, beginning in Algeria and ending through Cape Town, Mozambique, and Madagascar in a nine-month trek covering over 15,000 miles (1924). During the journey, vast numbers of photographs were taken of mostly unfamiliar regions in Central Africa.
- A group of Citroën vehicles traveling over 8,000 miles from Beirut across the Asian continent, following Marco Polo’s route along the Silk Road and crossing the challenging Himalayan mountains to Beijing (1931).
Thanks to his ideas and efforts, Citroën’s company to become one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, but he always maintained an open mind and remained receptive to new suggestions. For example, in this January 28, 1919 correspondence on his personal letterhead, Citroën writes to one Albert Houlgard, in French:
Being currently very absorbed by the transformation of my factory, I will be very obliged to you to communicate to me by letter the exposition of your project in order to see if it is of interest to me.
The son of well-to-do Jewish parents – diamond dealer Levie Citroen from Amsterdam and Masza Amelia Kleinman from Warsaw – Citroën became an orphan at age six after his mother died and his father committed suicide in response to a dramatic failure of a business venture involving a diamond mine in South Africa. Upon witnessing the construction of the Eiffel Tower, he decided to become an engineer and went on to graduate from the renowned École Polytechnique (1900), France’s most prominent engineering college. He joined the French Army as an engineer officer.
During a visit to his late mother’s Jewish family in Poland, Citroën observed a carpenter working on gears with a fish-bone structure that were stronger, less noisy, and more efficient than the standard set of gears then in use in cotton mills. This led him to invent double herringbone helical gears and to open a small shop to produce them (1904); after a mere six years he boasted annual sales of over a million francs and opened a new factory in Paris.
Citroën’s success drew broad public notice, including attention from the Mors brothers, owners of an important automobile company, who hired him as a consultant (1909). Employing assembly-line techniques introduced by Henry Ford, whom he visited several times in the United States, he increased Mors’s sales tenfold in only five years and led the company to become one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world and one of the great drivers of the French economy (1913).
In 1915, while serving as an officer of the French Army during World War I, Citroën noted the unrelenting shortage of mortar grenades and, drawing on his knowledge of mass production, initiated an ammunition facility that ultimately employed 35,000 men and manufactured about 55,000 shells a day. His further contributions to the French war effort included locating a stable supply of coal to run French factories and organizing civilian food distributions using ration cards. His organizational abilities and designing acumen were credited with playing a major role in the allied victory.
Citroën went on to parlay his skills and international renown as France’s leading production expert into becoming one of the dominant figures in French industry after the war, beginning with his appointment as one of the directors of the Société Française Doble, which built French steam cars, and later founding his own Citroën automobile company (1919). Much as Henry Ford, he believed automobiles should be affordable to the general public and that efficient mass production and standardization were necessary to facilitate price reductions that would achieve that goal. Accordingly, he undertook to follow Ford’s technique in producing only complete vehicles with the bodies attached to a single chassis type. Although retooling existing presses proved incredibly costly, he quickly boosted production to 35,000 vehicles annually.
But as the world experienced its first global economic recession, banks were reluctant to lend money needed for product development and most people could not afford to spend money on luxuries like cars, even at the reduced prices made possible by Citroën’s efficiencies.
His enthusiasm for “the next great idea in automobiles” led him to bleed money, as he made significant investments in purchasing patents and designing new models, and he came under unremitting pressure from banks and lenders to deliver his “Petite Voiture” (PV) automobile, forcing him to launch the project before the vehicle had been completed and tested. Moreover, increased competition, personal depression, and significant gambling debts ultimately forced him to turn his business over to creditors, including particularly the Michelin tire company.
While the PV ultimately proved to be a great success, Citroën did not live to see it. Despairing at the loss of his business and the death of his daughter, he died of stomach cancer on July 3, 1935. Although he had never participated in Jewish affairs in any meaningful way, his funeral was conducted by the chief rabbi of Paris.
