Lucien Rosengart

Lucien Rosengart (11 January 1881 in Paris, France – 27 July 1976) was a French engineer.

His early life was shaped by carriages and the advance of the automobile age. He first started working as a mechanic at the age of 12, and by age 24 he had a machine shop in Belleville and several patents to his credit. By 1914 his products included railway parts, bicycle parts, and a rocket that allowed artillery shells to be exploded while airborne. This attracted the attention of the French Government and they set him up with two factories, one in Paris and one in Saint-Brieuc - at this point he began working with Andre Citroën's company, which provided the shells. By the end of the first world war, he'd become a skilled businessman and helped both Peugeot and Citroën stave off bankruptcy. Involvement with these companies led Rosengart to think of building his own car. He was already making bicycles.

In 1927, he saw the opportunity to produce a very small car for a segment of the market in France that was not at that time being covered by any of the major players. He bought the old Bellanger factory at Neuilly.

The early Rosengart cars were licensed copies of the British Austin 7. This model, the LR2, was dressed up in various ways using various styling techniques and remained in production for quite some time - surviving as the vastly facelifted LR4 and Vivor long after the British car had been consigned to history.

In the early 1930s Rosengart teamed up with the German manufacturer Adler, offering license built copies of the Adler Trumpf and Trumpf Junior, small front-drive cars that bolstered its range. It also added a conventional rear-driven car along the lines of a stretched and widened Austin. The development of front-wheel drive models led to the elegant Supertraction model in 1937 - which competed with larger cars like the Peugeot 402 and the Berliet Dauphine for the first time in Rosengart's short history.

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