Читать книгу Creative Capital - Spencer E. Ante - Страница 6

(1899–1920)

GEORGES FREDERIC DORIOT WAS born in the Peugeot house in Paris. The birth announcement sent out by Auguste and Camille could not have been more cute or clever. It pictured a cherubic baby boy enthroned in the open cab of the newest mechanical marvel to astound mankind: the horseless carriage. The car was a Peugeot, of course, a twoseater with a rear engine and penny farthing wheels. Attached to the front of the car was a sign saying “No. 1”. The bare-bottomed boy—one arm placed firmly on the steering column, the other raised in a buoyant wave—smiles while driving the car. The card read: “Mr. and Mrs. Doriot are happy to announce the birth of their son Georges.” A wind-whipped banner hitched to the back of the car proclaimed details of the joyous occasion: “Arrivée Paris, 24 September 1899 at 3:45 pm.”

Congratulatory letters began arriving. Marianne Peugeot, one of Armand’s three daughters, sent Camille a note with a playful picture of a baby enwrapped in a cabbage patch. “I am delighted that you finally have a good cabbage in your garden that has produced a little boy,” wrote Marianne. “I rejoice at seeing his eyes shrouded under the fat of his cheeks. Goodbye dear Madame. I send coos to you, as well as to your little baby.” Two of Marianne’s children also sent Camille congratulatory notes. “I hope your hens can manage now that there is a new mouth to eat their plentiful eggs,” wrote her ten-year-old daughter Germaine. “I’m so happy you have a little boy!” rejoiced Madeleine, Marianne’s twelve-year-old daughter. “Be careful when he starts eating donuts!”

In October, a Peugeot customer and friend of Auguste sent the new father a letter in which he pointed to his son’s promising future:

My dear Doriot,

I was enchanted to receive the little car #1, from the race of 1899, steered by the worthy representative of a very brave father and of Mrs. Doriot, who although I do not know very well, has made an impression that can be assured by his good nature, a life of happiness. When little George[s] is 20 years old, what will be the amazing speed, what will be the car that will victoriously win in the Tour de France? I hope that Mrs. Doriot and little George[s] are in the best health.

By all accounts, Georges lived a charmed life during his childhood. Indeed, the young Doriot was lucky to be born into such a comfortable and loving household. At the time of Georges’s birth, Auguste was thirty-five years old, the right-hand man of one of France’s most prosperous industrialists. A picture taken in July 1900, when Georges was almost a year old, shows signs of that good fortune: a smiling baby boy ensconced in a poufy white dress and large bonnet while perched on a small, ornate wooden high chair.

From his father, Georges inherited a sturdy Protestant work ethic, a fascination with technology and the future, and a confident yet humble personality that was at ease both with plutocrats and peasants. From his mother, Georges was bequeathed the gift of Gallic volubility, a sense of compassion, and a firm grasp of the importance of education.

Then, on August 15, 1902, Auguste made a decision that must have thrown the Doriot clan into a state of turmoil: he resigned from Peugeot. Walking away from the company where he had worked his whole professional life of twelve years, where he had made his name, must have been excruciatingly difficult. The specific reason for Auguste’s departure from Peugeot was not clear at first. This much we do know: according to his family, he went to work for another car company in Paris for a few years. However, he left the Peugeot Company—and Armand—on good terms. In fact, Armand wrote him a glowing letter of reference when he left the company: “For the many years I have known him as a collaborator, I’ve had the occasion to appreciate his intelligence and devotion to the work given to him. I consider him a man you can trust and an excellent mechanical engineer. He has exceptional technical aptitude and knows by heart the fabrication of automobiles and the explosion engine.”

Armand had ample reason to praise Auguste. When Doriot left Peugeot, the company had established a leading, if not the top, position in the budding French car industry. In 1902, the year Auguste left, Peugeot introduced another line of cars that transcended the company’s heritage of the horseless carriage. The innovations that were rolled out that year included electric ignition, steering wheels (which replaced the tiller), pressed steel frames, honeycomb radiators, and engines covered with bonnets, or hoods.

Even though the Doriots had moved to Paris, they did not forget their roots. After all, the Doubs district was still home to most of the Doriot clan. Often, young Georges journeyed back to Valentigney for family vacations. These were carefree days filled with warm memories of the fading pastoral life. He spent most of his time with his cousins, mostly girls, because they had more free time. They were older and were all very sweet to him. Some of Auguste’s brothers moved away from the village but his sisters married and stayed there. Georges had a particular affection for his aunts, especially Tante Lucy and Tante Juliette. Tante Lucy’s husband was the local captain, a sort of leader of the working people, who was a portly yet industrious man.

“In the summer,” recalled Georges, “men requested permission to be able to start work at four or five o’ clock in the morning so that they could spend the afternoon taking care of their fields and gardens. Then, at night we would all sit quietly together, talk peacefully, and be grateful for what we had.”

One of the most pleasant memories of Georges’s life was the time he spent at the Fraternelle, a cooperative store owned by the Peugeot Company. Every morning, a member of the family would take one of their pushcarts and visit the Fraternelle to shop. “When you got within a few hundreds yards there was a wonderful smell of freshly baked bread, coffee, and many other things,” recalled Georges. “Everyone knew each other and everyone was very kind and helpful to each other. Whenever anyone was in need, there would be always some neighbor to come and help.” During these early years, in the fields and gardens and factories of France, Georges learned the values of mutual aid and cooperation, values that helped him unite people in constructive action as a professor, military leader, and venture capitalist.

Although Auguste worked for another car company for a short time, he was preoccupied by other dreams. In 1906, the true reason he left Peugeot became clear: he wanted to design and manufacture his own cars. In today’s world of “serial entrepreneurship,” where failure is considered honorable, practically a required rest stop on the path to success, the boldness of this decision is hard to appreciate. In Europe, during the first half of the twentieth century, business failure was looked upon as a personal and professional calamity that one could never recover from. “In those days bankruptcy was a catastrophic event,” says James F. Morgan, a former executive of American Research and Development who studied the history of European business. “In several European countries you were deprived of your right to vote and own property. It was a real black mark on your character and your family.”

To create his own automobile manufacturing company, Auguste would be taking an enormous risk. Failure would ruin his reputation, his finances, and his family. But Auguste took the chance anyway, betting on his impressive track record and knowledge of a burgeoning industry. This was not a solo ride, however. Auguste teamed up with a colleague, Ludovic Flandrin, who worked at Clement-Bayard, another successful French car manufacturer founded in 1903 and known for making especially fast automobiles. The two men bootstrapped the venture out of their own pockets and opened a factory in Neuilly-sur-Seine, an area in western Paris along the Seine River, just a few miles west of the Peugeot house. They started simply, producing single cylinder cars sold under the name Doriot, Flandrin.

By the early twentieth century, early-stage venture financing remained stuck in a relatively undeveloped state. Most entrepreneurs still got their start by raising money from friends and family, wealthy associates, or, if they were fortunate like Auguste, they were able to take money out of their own savings. Some large American banks occasionally took a chance on a new and unproven technology, but they only put their capital behind established figures with a proven track record. And they rarely, if ever, took a hands-on role and helped to nurture a company. In his later years, Georges Doriot realized how critical such nurturing was in determining the success of a new venture. “I don’t know anyone on Wall Street who ever built a company,” said Doriot. “They simply furnish money, and that’s the least important part of it.”

In 1878, for example, J. P. Morgan and members of the Vanderbilt family helped finance the creation of the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City. By that time, Thomas Edison was arguably the world’s most famous inventor, having sold the patent rights of his quadruplex telegraph to the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company for the princely sum of $30,000. Edison used the money to expand his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, considered the world’s first industrial research lab.

For the most part, though, banks refused to finance innovation. Instead, more often than not they ended up reinforcing existing power structures. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the evolution of the House of Morgan, which in the late nineteenth century took over the title of the world’s most powerful bank from the House of Rothschild. Like the Rothschilds, Morgan made his bones by lending large sums of money to governments.

The ultraconservative strategy of J. P. Morgan started during the Panic of 1873, when European investors lost $600 million in railroad stock investments. Petrified by all of the railroad bankruptcies, Morgan decided to limit his future dealings to only the most established and safest companies. He despised risk, wanting only sure things. “The kind of Bonds which I want to be connected with are those which can be recommended without a shadow of a doubt, and without the least subsequent anxiety, as to payment of interest, as it matures.”

The conservatism of modern banking deepened during the recession of 1893. And it was J. P. Morgan who led that transformation. Overwhelmed by massive debt and overbuilding, more than a third of the nation’s railways fell into bankruptcy. The collapse of the railroads triggered a depression that wiped out fifteen thousand commercial firms, leading to class warfare and a bloody round of strikes. Over six hundred banks failed and capital dried up when people started hoarding their precious dollars. English investors implored J. P. Morgan to save their shirts and bring order to the chaotic industry.

Morgan’s solution was to consolidate the industry under his control. Virtually every bankrupt railroad east of the Mississippi—including the Erie, Chesapeake and Ohio, Reading, New York Central, Southern Railway, and many others—passed through such a reorganization, or morganization, as it was dubbed. One-sixth of the nation’s trackage was morganized, allowing J. P. Morgan to ascend to a plateau higher than any other businessman had ever known. The amount of power accrued by Morgan is hard to overestimate. After all, railroads were the primary blue chips of the stock market, then accounting for 60 percent of all issues on the New York Stock Exchange. Utilities and industrial companies were considered too speculative an investment for insurance companies or savings banks.

As a further protection of his interests, Morgan transferred a majority of the voting stock of the railroads into “voting trusts.” Of course, trusts were merely a camouflage for an unprecedented concentration of power, usually equating to Morgan and a few of his cronies running a railroad for a five-year period.

Bankers across the United States embraced Morgan’s consolidation of the railroad industry as the business model of choice. In the first great wave of American mergers, consolidation was propelled by the shift from a domesticoriented economy toward international expansion. The number of mergers jumped from sixty-nine in 1897, to more than twelve hundred by 1899. By 1901, a new class of corporate giants dominated a long list of industries, including sugar, lead, whiskey, plate glass, and coal.

But the most impressive (or impressively frightening) act of consolidation was the formation of U.S. Steel, led by J. P. Morgan. Fearing a repeat of the railroad debacle, with overcapacity and price wars, Morgan proposed a steel trust that would control more than half of the business. Pulling an allnighter in his library, Morgan convinced some of the industry’s leading players, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, to agree to the deal. The new corporation was capitalized at a staggering $1.4 billion—the first billion-dollar corporation in history. Morgan’s lesson was clear: competition was a destructive, inefficient force that could be cured through large-scale combinations. Venture financing had no place in this increasingly anticompetitive picture.

On August 11, 1906, in their new home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Auguste and Camille’s second child, Madeleine Georgette Doriot, was born. A photograph taken in 1908 shows an adorable girl standing on a lawn chair in front of a hedgerow, posed beside her smiling nine-year-old brother Georges, who has his arm wrapped around her waist. Georges and Madeleine, nicknamed Zette by her family, formed a close bond. By age nine, when that photo was taken, Georges had grown up to be a healthy boy, skinny yet tough. “I remember my youth, so to speak, as being very close to my family,” recalled Georges. “I loved my sister and had complete devotion and admiration for Father and Mother.”

In 1908, Doriot and Flandrin brought in the brothers Alexandre and Jules Rene Parant as their new partners. The triumvirate of families was set. The company was officially renamed D.F.P., standing for Doriot, Flandrin, and Parant. For their icon, they chose a greyhound dog galloping in full stride. For their slogan, they selected two simple yet strong words: fidele and vite, which translates to Trust and Speed. By highlighting those words, D.F.P. declared its strategy: D.F.P. cars would be fast and reliable.

The partners moved the factory farther west to a growing industrial town called Courbevoie, on the other side of the Seine River. And they began selling bigger cars, including two cars with 2.4 and 2.8 liter four-cylinder engines from Chapuis-Dornier. On March 20, 1908, D.F.P. held a public offering of stock in their new company. This was likely a significant milestone for such a young company. In those days, most new companies took five to seven years before raising money from the public. With an IPO after just three years of operation, its reputation, finances, and growth prospects must have been solid if not superb.

By 1911, D.F.P. began to manufacture cars with even bigger six-cylinder engines. But 1912 was when everything came together for this young group of entrepreneurs. That year, the company started making their own engines. More importantly, D.F.P. secured a major distribution and marketing deal when Walter Owen Bentley, known as W. O., and his brother, H. M., acquired the rights to sell D.F.P. motor cars in the British Commonwealth. An apprentice railway engineer who would become one of the most well-known racers of his day, W. O. founded Bentley & Bentley with his brother to market the French cars. The Bentley brothers imported the chassis of the cars and farmed them out to coachbuilders in London to gussy up their finish.

The Bentley brothers’ timing was propitious. In 1912, D.F.P. introduced what turned out to be its most popular seller, the D.F.P. 10/12 model. Quickly after that came the 12/15 model. Its pressure lubrication, three-bearing crankshaft and four-speed gearbox produced a car that could zoom up to 55 miles per hour. The Bentley brothers entered this car into competitions, and by the end of 1913 a customized version was timed at nearly ninety miles per hour. But the Bentley brothers were not satisfied.

In 1913, working with their French mechanic, they designed a new engine that contained aluminum alloy pistons, a tuned camshaft, twin-spark ignition, and an efficient V-shaped radiator. In 1914, D.F.P. launched a car with the new engine called the 12/40 “Speed” model, built exclusively for Bentley & Bentley. This car marked a major advance in auto technology, allowing the car to top out at sixty-five miles per hour.

The 12/40 D.F.P. Speed model brought D.F.P. and the Bentley brothers commercial and competitive success. In 1913 and 1914, the Bentley brothers captured twelve of the Class B Speed Records at Brooklands, the first ovalstyle race track, which was built to race cars in 1907. W. O. described these achievements “as representing the very highest point that motor car efficiency had ever reached.”

While Auguste learned the ropes of entrepreneurship at D.F.P., Georges was getting his own education. He benefited from the modern French education system, which had just been developed in the late nineteenth century by Jules Ferry, a lawyer-turned-politician who held the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the early 1880s. During his term, Ferry passed two laws that revolutionized French primary education, making it free, nonclerical, and obligatory for all children under the age of fifteen. The laws sparked an outcry, though, as they wrested the right to teach from the unauthorized religious orders.

In September of 1905, when Georges was six, he entered one of the newly formed elementary schools in Neuilly-sur-Seine. There, for the next five years, Georges learned how to read and write French and received a broad introduction to a number of core subjects including mathematics, natural science, and geography, as well as civics courses that taught children about La République, its function, its organization, and its famous motto, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” Since the clergy was separated from French education, Georges attended church to receive religious instruction.

In 1910, when Georges was eleven, he left his home country for the first time to study English for a year at Lynton College in England. At such a young age, the experience must have been a formative one, expanding his horizons immeasurably. In France, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to study English since Minister Ferry had outlawed the instruction of non-French languages in public schools. Auguste not only had the money to send his son abroad, he also felt comfortable in England. Since launching D.F.P., he traveled many times to the United Kingdom to sell his cars. When Georges returned, he spoke accent-free English. Moreover, his interest in the opposite sex —and his sense of humor—apparently had awakened. “When he came back from England he said to his mother he would never marry an English woman because they wouldn’t sew and instead would use safety pins,” says Eveline Poillot, Georges’s niece, who was very close to Camille.

After the summer of 1911, Georges entered secondary school in Courbevoie, the town along the Seine where his family had recently moved. It was at that school that Auguste delivered his infamous “And why not first?” retort to a young Georges.

Pressed by his father, Georges learned the value of studying and hard work. He began school at half past eight in the morning, came home for lunch for an hour, and then went back to school until five o’clock. The evening was then filled with a great deal of homework. “I remember vividly sitting in at night in our living room, father and mother, my sister Zette and I,” recalled Georges. “Father reading and working, mother knitting or repairing clothes, and my sister and I working on our homework. We usually had at least two hours of homework every night.”

In 1912, with D.F.P. doing well, Auguste built a new house for his family in Courbevoie. It was a solid brick and stone two-story, four-bedroom home surrounded by a walled garden on 7 Rue Franklin. Auguste and Camille’s master bedroom was on the first floor, along with the kitchen, dining room, and living room, where Georges and the family spent their evenings. Upstairs, Georges and Zette had their bedrooms, along with a small kitchen and bedroom for the housekeeper. Attached to Georges’s bedroom was a small side room. Georges converted this chamber into his own personal sanctuary, where he played with his chemistry set and pretended to be a mad scientist. No one was allowed to enter this room. So adamant was he about this rule that one day he rigged the door so that if his mother tried to enter it would set off a small explosion.

When Georges had no schoolwork to do, Auguste would let him visit the D.F.P. factory. There, strolling the aisles of the factory, observing the men in their overalls welding steel and handling complex machines such as lathes, mills, boring fixtures, and drill jigs, Georges instinctively absorbed his father’s obsession with machinery—and his appetite for taking risks.

Over time, Georges became a decent mechanic himself and a fairly good draftsman. He also developed a taste for reading American magazines that dealt with machine tools and factory problems. Georges liked two magazines in particular, American Machinist and Machinery. These new trade magazines were like a headlight illuminating the automotive revolution brewing in the United States. In 1910, when demand for automobiles exploded, cars could not be produced quickly enough for the massive American market. New production methods had to be invented. Until that time, automobile manufacturing had been pioneered by Europeans, mainly the French, German, and English carmakers. But now the United States was poised to take over the automobile market, led by an engineer named Henry Ford who, in 1903 at the age of forty, incorporated the Ford Motor Company. A few years later, in 1908, Ford rolled out the Model T, the best known motor vehicle in history. It was a “car for the great multitude,” durable enough to withstand the rough American roads, economical to operate, and easy to maintain and repair.

When the car proved a hit, Ford and his associates turned to the problem of producing a vehicle in large volume at a low unit cost. The solution was found in the moving assembly line. In 1913, after more experimentation, Ford unveiled to the world the first complete assembly line mass production of motor vehicles. The system hinged on several basic elements: the conveyor belt, standardized parts, synchronization, and the limitation of each worker to a single repetitive task. In the spring of 1913, it took almost thirteen hours to build a “T.” By the end of the year, when a complete assembly line was in place, it took only ninety minutes to produce a car. The price of the Model T dropped from $950 in 1909, to $360 in 1916, to $290 in 1926. By that time, Ford Motor was producing half of all the motor vehicles in the world. Europe may have pioneered the development of the automobile, but mass production was a U.S. innovation.

When Georges cracked open the pages of American Machinist and Machinery this whole new industry of machinery and mass production was unveiled before his eyes. After all, automobile manufacturing was like the early twentieth century’s version of Silicon Valley. It was an industry transforming the world, and creating vast riches for the select few who mastered the new techniques of mass production. Flipping through the pages of American Machinist, Georges read about the latest technologies and production methods: “Machining the Ford Cylinders,” “Interesting Milling and Grinding Operations,” and “A Thousand Carburetors a Day,” were just a few of the stories that captured his imagination. Undoubtedly, flipping through the pages of these magazines gave Georges an appreciation for the dynamic nature of technology and the emerging power of America.

In the summer of 1914, the peace and prosperity that France had enjoyed for the last twenty years was shattered by the outbreak of World War I. Europe was engulfed by violence once again. The war radically altered the fates of millions of people in Europe and around the world. This was as true for the Doriot clan as for any other family that suffered through the profound tragedies of the Great War. In fact, many of Georges’s cousins were drafted as part of France’s countrywide mobilization.

The Doriot family chose to stay in Paris despite Germany’s declaration of war on France in August of 1914. But this war would require Auguste to make an extreme sacrifice. He had risked his family’s finances and reputation on D.F.P., and had worked tirelessly for ten years to get it off the ground. Now, just as D.F.P. had established itself as an up-and-coming car manufacturer, Auguste had to turn over the keys of the factory to the government. The factory was turned into a shell-making plant. Although these had to have been very trying days for Auguste, no one could question his patriotism. He had served in the Army and was just as repulsed as any Frenchman by the idea of German hegemony. So Auguste devoted himself and his business to the cause. “At the time, people worked 24 hours a day, and I think my dear father worked 24 hours a day as well,” recalled Georges.

Georges was lucky. In 1914, he was only fifteen and not old enough to be drafted. Instead, he continued his studies at a lycée in Paris (not at the University of Paris, as many previous accounts of Doriot’s life have noted). In the French education system, a lycée is roughly equivalent to a U.S. high school. Students attend a lycée for three years from the ages of fifteen to seventeen, receiving a baccalaureate degree upon graduation. This degree allows students to enter a university, such as one of the grand Écoles. While high school students in the United States can choose most of their own courses, French lycée students follow a more regimented curriculum with a large number of required core courses and fewer electives. The baccalaureate is divided into three streams of study, called séries. The série scientifique is concerned with natural sciences, physics, or mathematics; the série économique et sociale with economics and social sciences; and the série litéraire focuses on French and foreign languages and philosophy. In the lycée, Georges’s appreciation for science and technology continued to grow. And so, Georges naturally sought a degree from the sciences, studying many hours of math, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Attending school during a war with Germany—a war that threatened to overrun Georges’s home city—must have been terrifying to say the least. To help him relax, Georges got his driver’s license about a week after he turned fifteen, the youngest age one could receive a license at the time. The license, which was referred to as a “patrol,” permitted Georges to drive a car of up to 220 horsepower, a privilege that Georges enjoyed on a regular basis.

While Georges drove around the city, he encountered many unusual sights. In the first weeks of September in 1914, Paris was hunkered down for battle. Thousands of French and Moroccan troops, called the “Armies of Paris,” entered the city and were placed under command of the military governor of Paris, Joseph Gallieni. Bridges were mined, the Eiffel Tower was prepared for demolition, and reconnaissance patrols scoured the city.

As the war dragged on for six more years, the French Army suffered profoundly. In the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the French military alone suffered 351,000 losses. If one of Georges’s cousins saw action in Verdun, they entered a netherworld resembling Dante’s inferno, a hell on earth consisting of almost continuous and thunderous noise, of chemical warfare and flamethrowers choking and burning men and horses, of the appalling stench of rotting flesh.

Beginning in early 1917 and continuing sporadically through 1918, France’s civilian population was convulsed by massive strikes and raging bouts of inflation. By the time July came around, a “veritable prices explosion” took hold as prices for a group of basic food products more than doubled since the beginning of the year. Like an army of termites, inflation ate away at the savings of Auguste Doriot and every other French family.

Then came the strikes. In January 1917, strikes broke out in several munitions factories, including Panhard-Levassor. In total, one hundred thousand workers from seventy-one industries in the Paris region took to the streets, but minimum wage scales and cost-of-living allowances ended the stoppages. Then, in May 1918, a major wave of strikes slammed the Paris region. Although it is not known if D.F.P. was hit by a strike, “most factories in Courbevoie, Suresnes, Puteaux and Levallois were working with 30% to 60% of their full complement.”

By 1917, it was also time for Georges Doriot to play his part in the Great War. Georges enlisted in the French Army, signing up for the three-year service requirement. A photograph taken that year shows Georges outfitted in his new military uniform. Instead of the laughable blue and red uniforms that offered no camouflage protection, Georges wore the new beige ensemble, similar to the uniforms worn by the better-equipped German soldiers. Rifle slung over his shoulder, black leather boots laced up to his knees, hands stuffed in his pockets, and pants hitched up high over his thin waist, Georges stands in front of a barracks, a young untested soldier, prideful but looking a bit unnerved, fear peaking through the slits in his eyes. Lord knows, he had ample reason to be terrified. The war exacted a horrible toll on his family. All of Georges’s first cousins on both sides of his family who had entered the war had been killed.

But Georges was lucky once again. Now that he was old enough to serve, the war was finally winding down. Georges joined the R.A.L.T., a motorized heavy artillery regiment. His regiment maintained 145 millimeter longrange guns, one of the most powerful guns in the French Army. Instead of horses, the regiment towed its guns with tractors. Soon after joining the 81st R.A.L.T., Georges was asked to replace the engineering officer in charge of artillery. His superiors believed that his experience in the motor vehicle industry made him a logical candidate for the job.

It was the first major test of the young man’s leadership ability and Georges, still a teenager, was intimidated. Most of the soldiers who worked under him were experienced repairmen from the top companies in Paris. They resented the young man’s promotion and tested him by asking for detailed repair orders. By conceding to their superiority, however, Georges won over the men and ended up forming a good relationship with them. “We understood and respected each other, and I can say that it was a useful time, and, in many ways, a happy time,” recalled Georges. “I made some friends there that I kept in contact with for many years.”

On November 9, 1918, as it became clear that Germany could not withstand the Allied counteroffensive, the Germans entered into armistice negotiations in a railroad carriage at Compiègne in France. The conflict persisted for another seven months, until it was finally declared over on June 28, 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

By the time the war ended in November 1918, Europe’s liberal civilization was destroyed. But among the Allied Powers, it was France that suffered more than any other nation. The heaviest battles of World War I were fought on French soil, and the French deployed the greatest number of Allied troops and suffered the heaviest casualties. More than 1.3 million French soldiers were killed in the war, or two out of every nine men who marched away, while more than 3.2 million were wounded.

Although none of the great French offensives allowed France to wrest control of Germany, French soldiers prevented German victory on the most important land front of the war, the Western Front. The courageous performance of the French Army during World War I led Winston Churchill to famously refer to them as “that sorely tried, glorious Army upon whose sacrifices the liberties of Europe had through three fearful campaigns mainly depended.”

After the war ended, Georges returned to the lycée. One of Auguste’s friends had suggested that since Georges was interested in machinery and production, he should give serious thought to sending his son to America. France was no place for a bright young man, agreed Auguste. The country had lost millions of its best men. Its gross domestic product had shrunk by nearly 40 percent, and by January 1919, the national debt exploded more than five-fold. France, to put it mildly, was devastated by the war.

Auguste’s pessimism was grounded in personal experience. The war was a major setback for his company. Reconverting the D.F.P. factory back to making cars would have been hard enough. But that year Auguste suffered another blow: he learned that his most important partner, the Bentley brothers, decided to end their deal with D.F.P. so they could create their own car company.

Auguste knew what he had to do: he had to send Georges to the United States. In 1920, after receiving his baccalaureate science degree from the Paris lycée, Georges prepared to come to America. Father and son agreed upon a plan: Georges would study machines and manufacturing in America, and then, after a short while, would return to France to get a job. Now, it was Georges’s turn to take a big risk.