Biography|Frédéric Saint-Geours — Elected to the UIMM on Avenue de Wagram

People treat 20 December 2007 as the day he left cars.

He was still directeur général of Peugeot that Thursday.

The UIMM vote came first.

The Union des industries et métiers de la métallurgie has its seat at 56 avenue de Wagram, in the 17th arrondissement, a short walk north of the Étoile.

The council elected him on the second ballot against Jean-Jacques Leguay of the UIMM Alsace.

Jean-Paul Béchat and Yvon Jacob had already fallen on the first round.

He was succeeding Denis Gautier-Sauvagnac, who had resigned the presidency on 15 November after press reports of large cash withdrawals from the federation.

An inquiry for abus de confiance was open.

The facts of that case belong to the courts and to the later trial, not to this doorway.

What happened on this avenue that afternoon is narrower.

A Peugeot chief still in post was chosen to chair the metal employers after a public rupture at the top of the house.

Le Monde and AFP recorded the result the same day.

He was due to leave the Peugeot chair on 1 January 2008 and to stay at PSA as conseiller du président Christian Streiff.

He kept the UIMM presidency until November 2014.

The building is still the federation's headquarters.

It is a working employers' office, not a museum.

The photograph most often reused of him was taken eight months later, on 27 August 2008, at a MEDEF event: grey hair, glasses, a folder under the arm.

That is the face of the Wagram years, not of the 1986 arrival at the 75.

From this address he would later chair the Groupe des fédérations industrielles and, in December 2014, take the new conseil de surveillance of SNCF.

The December vote is the turn.

After twenty-one years inside PSA, the public job was no longer a car brand.

It was this federation on Wagram.

Photo: MEDEF, CC BY-SA 2.0, 27 August 2008, via Wikimedia Commons