Michelin under the Occupation: keep the presses running or close the doors
In the summer of 1940, dies and the leadership of the largest company in Clermont-Ferrand passes to his son-in-law , assisted by . The armistice commission then sets the production quotas: the bulk of the firm's tyres will go to the occupier.
The factory employs around 10,000 people. Halting production in order to refuse to supply the occupier would mean shutting down the workshops and throwing thousands of families out of work. At the same time, Resistance networks are forming among the workers, the engineers, and even within the Michelin family itself, and they are demanding the sabotage of the installations.
Management must choose between keeping the industrial machine running, closing through refusal, and the deliberate destruction demanded by the underground.
Faced with the tyre quotas imposed by the armistice commission and the Resistance's calls for sabotage, which course should Michelin's management follow?
Michelin's management, under , chose to continue the legal production of tyres (most of which went to Germany via the armistice commission) while systematically refusing to sabotage its own workshops as the Resistance demanded, in order to preserve the industrial machine and the jobs. The resistance was the work of individual initiatives by workers, engineers, and family members (, arrested in July 1943 and dead in deportation), not a company decision. In the absence of internal sabotage, it was the British who bombed the Cataroux factory on 16 March 1944 to cut off the German supply.
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