Biography|Maxime Picat — Born in This Alsace Commune, Not at a Plant Gate

People treat a later Peugeot chief as someone who must have grown up next to a plant gate at Sochaux or Mulhouse.

Maxime Picat was born on 26 March 1974 in Schiltigheim, a Bas-Rhin commune on the north edge of Strasbourg.

The civil record belongs to this town.

The family house is not a public site, so the pin sits on the old Hôtel de Ville in the historic core.

That 1880 town hall, designed by Gustave Adolphe Beyer in red stone, still faces the old streets even after the commune opened a modern hall on Route de Bischwiller in 1969.

It is the civic building a visitor can stand in front of without knocking on a private door.

The date is not a later press invention.

Peugeot S.A.'s 2016 registration document lists him as a French national born 26 March 1974, and the French Wikipedia and Wikidata entries follow the same civil day.

Later résumés flatten the start into a line about Mines and a factory.

The start is an Alsatian birth registered here, in a brewing suburb of Strasbourg.

He would sit a classe préparatoire at the Jesuit lycée Sainte-Geneviève in Versailles, take a civil-engineering diploma from the École des mines de Paris in 1998, and walk into the PSA plant at Mulhouse the same summer.

None of that begins on a Franche-Comté assembly line.

It begins with a birth in this commune on 26 March 1974.

The plaque a visitor wants is not on a vanished nursery.

It is this old town hall, still standing in municipal view, still the building Schiltigheim used to keep its flags before the 1969 hall took the daily desks.

Photo: Zéphyrios, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons