"Mr Lottman's account of the company's behaviour during the second world war is appropriately judicious; occupation provided no easy options. The company decided to keep its factories open; the alternative might well have been forced labour for its employees. The Michelin factories did enough for the German war effort to warrant a Royal Air Force bombing raid. Against that, several Michelins had distinguished resistance records."
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Book review: Michelin's very own guide
By Michael Skapinker, FT.com site
Published: Mar 03, 2004
THE MICHELIN MEN
Driving an empire
By Herbert Lottman
IB Tauris, $27.95, £19.95
In 1985, Financial Times journalists went to Clermont-Ferrand in central France to interview François Michelin, head of the eponymous tyre manufacturer.
It was the first interview Mr Michelin had given to any newspaper in six years. There was no question of the journalists entering the factories. The interview took place in a hotel - after the next-door room had been checked for eavesdroppers.
When the FT returned last year to talk to the new boss, Edouard Michelin, François's son, the interview was at Michelin's headquarters. These days, the company even allows journalists to peek into the factories.
There is a limit, however, to Michelin's new openness. When Herbert Lottman, author of The Michelin Men, asked when Edouard was born, the company declined to say. An "always helpful outside source" provided the answer (August 13 1963), along with the intelligence that Mr Michelin's family called him Dou-Dou.
So this is not an authorised history. Michelin refused to help in any way, which has not made the book any less readable.
Marcel Dassault, the French aerospace pioneer, called Michelin's tyre business "a provincial speciality". A book about tyre-making would be a provincial speciality too, except that Mr Lottman, a New Yorker who has been a journalist in France for 30 years, has a wide sweep, and there is more to Michelin than tyres: there are its famous guides, its celebrated restaurant ratings, and Bibendum, the Michelin Man, one of the world's best-known corporate mascots.
And because Michelin has been there throughout the automobile's history, its story is the 20th century's too.
Michelin traces its roots to 1830 and a company that manufactured rubber balls. It was renamed Michelin in 1889, when André and Edouard Michelin (the current chief executive's great-grandfather) were invited to run it after their father married into the founding family.
Edouard took care of the manufacturing in Clermont-Ferrand. André, living in Paris, became the company's hugely skilled publicist. By now, Michelin's business was tyres: bicycle tyres and horse-drawn vehicle tyres. André Michelin said in 1895 that he did not see much of a future for automobile tyres.
He was wrong, but the company caught up, surpassing Britain's Dunlop and Germany's Continental to become Europe's greatest tyre manufacturer. From the start of the automobile age, Michelin campaigned for more and better motoring. The guides, started in 1900 and, initially free, were part of that. If people were going to travel by car, they needed to know what was worth looking at and where to eat: two stars meant "worth a detour", three stars "worth a journey".
Michelin was a paternalistic employer, providing staff with housing, schools and medical care. Its leaders were eager followers of the newest management trends, meeting Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of "scientific management". The company had an employee suggestion scheme as long ago as the 1920s.
Against this, Michelin was fiercely anti-union and took a harsh line against anyone who tried to organise one. Leaving Michelin, or being fired, had serious consequences. Departing employees, even those who were dismissed, had to agree not to work for any company in the same field, whether in France or abroad.
The Michelins had an early understanding of the importance of air power in war. During the first world war, their factories produced crude bombers. Mr Lottman's account of the company's behaviour during the second world war is appropriately judicious; occupation provided no easy options. The company decided to keep its factories open; the alternative might well have been forced labour for its employees. The Michelin factories did enough for the German war effort to warrant a Royal Air Force bombing raid. Against that, several Michelins had distinguished resistance records.
The company's postwar success was based on its pioneering of the radial tyre. Its continued name recognition owes much to its restaurant stars. Mr Lottman knows a lot about Michelin's stars and he treats us to the full five courses.
There is a long section on the positive effects on restaurant standards as well as on the negative consequences: high prices, uniformity of culinary style and often intolerable pressure on restaurateurs who covet three stars or, having won them, are desperate to keep them.
There is less on how much the restaurant ratings and the guides contribute to Michelin's central business of selling tyres. However energetic Mr Lottman was in tracking down people who would talk, some of Michelin remains hidden.
Readers of this newspaper might have liked more on the company's ownership structure, which gives the family and their intimates extensive control but unlimited liability too. There is also little in the way of final summing up or discussion of the future and the publishers have provided a deplorably inadequate index.
Enough carping. This is an absorbing, novelistic read: a story not only of a French company but also of French pride, the country's often mysterious industrial success and, finally, of France itself. Well worth a detour.
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