Today marks 140 years since the birth of Pierre Jules Boulanger. This man, often simply called PJB by his colleagues, is the father of the Citroën 2CV.
Boulanger was born on March 10, 1885, in northern France. During his military service, he became friends with Marcel Michelin, a member of the family behind the famous tire manufacturer. In 1908, Boulanger left for the United States, where he worked on a ranch, as a streetcar driver and later as an architect. When the First World War broke out, he returned to France to defend his country.
After the war, Boulanger got a job at Michelin, where he quickly rose through the ranks: in 1922, he joined the management team. When Citroën went bankrupt in 1934, Michelin took over as its main creditor. Pierre Boulanger and Pierre Michelin were sent to Paris to run the car factory. Pierre Michelin as president, Pierre Boulanger as director.
Under Pierre Michelin’s leadership, the teething problems of the Traction Avant were quickly resolved, while Pierre Boulanger became responsible, among other things, for developing new cars. He personally involved himself in the smallest details. He was rarely in the office: he preferred to visit the design department or the test track, always dressed in his plain gray overcoat with a cigarette perpetually in his mouth. He recorded every detail in his little black notebook and tested the prototypes himself... Nothing happened without his approval.
At the end of 1935, Pierre Boulanger was stuck in a traffic jam when he realized that he was the only one there with a car. The French countryside was still barely motorized. Not surprisingly, since cars were far too expensive and, moreover, hardly suited to conditions outside the city. Surely there was a huge market for a small, affordable rural car? And so the idea was born for the car that went on sale in 1948 as the Citroën 2CV.
Neither Pierre Michelin nor Pierre Boulanger would live to see the success of the 2CV. On December 30, 1937, Pierre Michelin died from injuries sustained in a car accident the previous day. From then on, Pierre Boulanger would lead Citroën on his own. In a grim parallel, he too would die in an accident 13 years later, when his car skidded on an icy road on November 12, 1950, and crashed into a tree.
