Paul-Marie Pons

Paul-Marie Pons (Born 24 June 1904 Longwy: died 24 October 1966 Paris) was a French naval engineer who became a senior civil servant. He is remembered for the Pons Plan which restructured the French auto-industry in the second half of the 1940s.

Pons was educated at the prestigious École Polytechnique at Palaiseau on the southern fringes of Paris. After this he pursued a successful career in engineering and management.

In 1927 he married Michèlle Duchez: the marriage was childless.

After the Second World War Pons was appointed to the Ministry of Industrial Production under the direction of the minister, Robert Lacoste. Robert Lacoste had himself been a senior civil servant before the war and had been a member of the French Resistance during the war, after which he re-emerged as a Socialist Deputy and a leading national politician.

The Pons Plan was conceived in the broader context of the modernisation and reconstruction Plan of the influential economist Jean Monnet who was a firm believer in the benefits of government economic planning. The Pons Plan was for a government devised and directed rationalisation of the French vehicle industry. The plan identified in France twenty-two manufacturers of passenger cars and twenty-eight manufacturers of trucks. This was too many. The plan, applied in a way that some thought authoritarian and arbitrary, defined complementary roles for seven of the larger manufacturers: Berliet, Citroën, Ford SAF, Panhard, Peugeot, Renault and Simca.

Citroën and Renault were both considered powerful and large enough to operate autonomously, but Peugeot were required to link up with Hotchkiss, Latil and Saurer for the production of commercial vehicles. In the Lyon region Berliet were required to form an association with Isobloc and Rochet-Schneider. There were two further groupings of the smaller formerly independently vehicle manufacturers, being the U.F.A (Union Française Automobile) and the G.F.A (Générale Française de l'Automobile), being headed up respectively by Panhard and Simca, and destined to produce just two models between them.

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