Biography|Maxime Picat — The July Dawn He Drove into the Mulhouse Plant

People remember his first PSA year as a clean line on a corporate timeline: joined the group in 1998, manufacturing, Mulhouse.

The morning itself is dated.

On 15 July 1998, according to the account he later gave Le Monde, he drove toward the plant in the Alsace countryside before dawn and found the access roads already packed at half past four.

The site is not inside Mulhouse proper.

Peugeot opened the works in 1962 on land at Sausheim and Rixheim, at Île Napoléon, and the first assembled car, a 304, left the line on 5 April 1971.

The official name still says Mulhouse.

He was twenty-four, a new Mines graduate, and he had asked for the factory rather than a design office.

PSA's own later notices confirm only the year and the plant.

The July dawn comes from that 20 January 2015 Le Monde interview.

Three years later the group moved him onto the industrialisation of the Citroën C4, then in 2004 to the assembly shops at Sochaux.

The first clock-in remains this forest-edge works beside the A35.

The plant is still there.

A visitor sees a working Stellantis site from the motorway, not a museum.

The 1998 novice is the same man the group would send to Wuhan in November 2007 and call back to run the Peugeot brand in 2012.

The career does not start in a Paris boardroom.

It starts on this access road, at an hour when the shift change already fills the tarmac.

Photo: ODLG, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons