Biography|Vincent Rambaud — The Foundry He Ran on Avenue de Bohlen

People treat a future Peugeot chief as someone who always worked inside the lion's own plants.

Rambaud's first industrial command was a foundry in the Lyon suburbs.

He arrived at Florence et Peillon in 1991 and took the direction générale in 1992.

He held that post through 2001.

The firm cast light-metal parts for the car industry.

On 1 May 1993 the company moved its siège and main works from rue des Frères Lumière in Chassieu to 68 avenue de Böhlen in Vaulx-en-Velin.

That is the address a visitor can still type.

The building sits in an industrial strip east of Lyon, not in a branded automotive campus.

Rambaud ran the place for eight years after the move and nine years in total as directeur général.

The Jéco speaker note he later supplied for a 2014 Lyon conference is the cleanest first-person résumé of those dates.

French company filings confirm the 1993 transfer and the light-alloy foundry code.

The site is no longer a working Florence et Peillon plant.

The legal entity later entered collective proceedings, and the 68 avenue de Böhlen establishment was closed in 2010.

What stands on the avenue now is ordinary industrial and commercial fabric along the same numbered plot.

The decade matters because it is the only long stretch in which he ran a factory rather than a ministry desk or a brand.

From Vaulx-en-Velin he walked into PSA in 2001 and was given Panhard the following year.

Without the foundry years the later appointments look like a pure civil-service conversion.

They were not.

He had already managed a supplier that sold metal into the same industry he would later direct from Paris.

The pin is the Vaulx-en-Velin address the company itself declared, not the vanished Chassieu yard and not a generic Lyon skyline.

Photo: Benoît Prieur, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows Avenue de Böhlen at Vaulx-en-Velin, the street of the foundry plot.