Andre Citroen: The Man and the Motor Cars - Hardcover

This illustrated biography reviews Citroen's life and work and catalogues the cars he produced, in order to restore his reputation as one of the most progressive and imaginative characters in the history of the motor car.
The book recalls his privileged childhood as the son of a prosperous Jewish immigrant in Paris during the late nineteenth century and describes his education at the elite Ecole Polytechnique. It records the start of his meteoric career, which began with the manufacture of helical gears (the inspiration for the famous Citroen double-chevron badge), and continued with the production of munitions during the First World War. It goes on to chronicle his prodigious accomplishments as a motor-magnate in the 1920s when he was responsible for the first mass-produced and mass-marketed vehicles in Europe, a feat of industrial creativity that earned him his reputation as the Henry Ford of France. His story comes to a sad end in the Great Depression of the mid-1930s when, just after the launch of his most famous model, the revolutionary Traction Avant, his company went bankrupt and he died.
This first published account of Andre Citroen's life and work to be available in English gives a fascinating insight into his complex character, and goes some way towards explaining his extraordinary success and failure. It shows how his mastery of salesmanship and publicity, combined with his love of risk-taking, made him an international celebrity whose adventurous business policies and extravagant way of life consistently created headline news. The book also provides a series of vivid snapshots of the momentous times in which he lived, from the belle epoque and the First World War through the roaring twenties to the wasted years of the 1930s, when his ideals of social and economic progress through international cooperation were destroyed, as he himself was, by the Depression and the rise of fascism.