The Peugeot Family: How 200 Years of an “Old Money” Dynasty Died in A Boardroom

In 1819, in a workshop turned by the current of the Gland River in eastern France, a man named Fritz Peugeot worked out how to make a better saw by hardening the steel cold before pressing it flat, and the family that pressed that steel became, over the next two centuries, the most disciplined industrial dynasty in France, until two feuding cousins quietly handed the whole thing away.

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The Peugeots were Lutheran ironmasters from a small Protestant enclave called Montbéliard, an imperial territory tied by inheritance to the German Duchy of Württemberg, where the duke turned Lutheran in the sixteenth century and his subjects turned with him.

The name turns up in the parish registers of a village called Vandoncourt as far back as the fifteenth century, where for generations the Peugeots served as labourers and village mayors, an office the family held almost without a break until the Second World War.

In 1805, two of Jean-Pierre Peugeot’s sons rebuilt the family grain mill at Sous-Cratet on the Gland River to work steel instead of grain, and in 1810 they incorporated the firm as Peugeot Frères Aînés and brought in a son-in-law from the Japy clan to seal the partnership with capital and blood at once.

In 1819, Fritz Peugeot locked down his cold-rolling method and won the national industrial society’s gold medal, and Peugeot saws swept across Europe and beyond.

With saw money behind them, Jules and Émile Peugeot bought out the other partners in 1851 and pushed the firm into flexible steel bones for crinoline hoop skirts, umbrella ribs, sheep clippers, files, rasps, shovels, pickaxes, and coffee grinders, one factory turning out a hundred and fifty thousand of them a year by 1850.

The lion arrived in 1847, when Jules and Émile hired a Montbéliard engraver to give their goods a mark that would say three things: teeth hard as a lion’s jaw, a spine that bent without breaking, a stride quick as a cutting blade.

Decades before French law required any of it, the family gave its workers a ten-hour day, a mutual-aid fund for sickness begun in 1853, subsidized housing, vocational training, pensions for widows dating back to 1811, and a hospital at Valentigney where a worker’s whole family was treated free.

In 1889, Armand Peugeot, the engineer grandson, showed a steam tricycle at the Paris World’s Fair, got his hands on one of Gottlieb Daimler’s gasoline engines the same year, and left the family firm in 1896 to build his own automobile company at Audincourt, later called the first factory in the world built by and for the car.

Armand built France’s biggest carmaker, ten thousand vehicles a year by 1913, and died in 1915 without a son, and the company he had risked everything to create passed to the sons of Eugène, the very cousin who had refused to build it.

In 1912 the family chose a flat plain at Sochaux for a new factory laid out the way Henry Ford’s American plants were laid out, and it grew into the largest employer in all of eastern France.

The 201, launched in 1929, was the first Peugeot built for the mass market, and it gave the brand its signature three-digit name with a zero in the middle that every Peugeot since has carried, a small permanent scar from a trademark dispute nobody remembers.

In 1976 the family absorbed Citroën from Michelin with a government subsidy, forming the holding company PSA, and two years later bought Chrysler’s tangled European operations for a symbolic one dollar and rebranded the cars as Talbot.

The patriarch Pierre Peugeot died of a secret cancer in December of 2002 without a written succession plan, opening a decade-long cold war between cousins Thierry and Robert that the French press turned into a soap opera.

In 2012 the family absorbed the worst loss in the company’s history, closed the Aulnay plant with eight thousand jobs, and quietly offered General Motors outright control of the firm, only to be politely turned down.

The July 2014 letter that expelled the sitting family chairman ended two hundred years of Peugeot family control, and today the family holds a seven and seven-tenths percent stake in Stellantis and a boardroom seat, a real position worth billions but a minority holding in a giant they no longer run.

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