Overview
- His family announced Friday that he died Thursday at the age of 83.
- He served as Laurent Fabius’s chief of staff at Matignon before spending 20 years at Renault, including 1992–2005 as CEO.
- His tenure featured a failed 1993 Volvo tie-up, the 1996 privatization, 3,000 layoffs at Vilvorde in 1997, and expansion in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
- After stepping down, he remained Renault’s honorary chairman, joined boards at Volvo, BNP, L’Oréal, and Veolia, led the LFDA, briefly headed the FNSP in 2021, and since 2022 was vice president of the IHU Méditerranée Infection.
- A Sciences Po and ENA graduate from a prominent family linked to Albert Schweitzer and Jean‑Paul Sartre, he was praised in 2022 by former SNCF chief Guillaume Pepy as “a one‑of‑a‑kind monument of France’s economic heritage.”