Dealbroker at the heart of French life

Not many chairmen have had their effigies burned by protesters, and still fewer have been charged with being an accomplice to the alleged poisoning of several thousand people. But for Louis Schweitzer, one of Europe’s leading businessmen, it is simply part of having a long and varied career at the top of French business and politics.

Asked whether Belgian protesters set fire to a rendition of him after the former boss of Renault announced the closure of a car factory there, the dry-witted, bookish-looking 68-year-old says: “Yes, they did. But that’s a customary practice.” He pauses, before adding: “They even made a movie where I was – I don’t know if I was hanged or shot. It was shown in the cinema in my neighbourhood [in Paris].”

Even if one was to discount the furore over the factory in Vilvoorde, Mr Schweitzer has one of the most colourful backgrounds of any industrialist. Related to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, his father was a former head of the International Monetary Fund while his great-uncle, Albert Schweitzer, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Louis Schweitzer had a long career in the French civil service before being chosen by Laurent Fabius, the then prime minister, as his powerful chief of staff in the 1980s. He subsequently switched to carmaker Renault, which was owned entirely by the French government, from where he was dragged back into one of the periodic scandals that afflict senior French politicians and bureaucrats.

Nearly a decade after leaving his post, Mr Schweitzer was charged with being an accomplice to poisoning in a blood contamination scandal in which thousands of haemophiliacs were infected with HIV in the 1980s. “Let’s say it was not pleasant,” says Mr Schweitzer, who by the time he was charged in 1995, had become chief executive of Renault.

He felt the charge was unfair, coming so long after the case. France’s highest court agreed and acquitted him. But Mr Schweitzer adds: “There is a saying in France that the higher a monkey climbs, the more he shows his bottom.”

It is a customary aside from Mr Schweitzer. And few “monkeys” have climbed higher in France than Mr Schweitzer. He spent 13 years as chief executive of Renault before becoming chairman in 2005 for four years. He has been on the board at Philips, EDF, L’Oréal, BNP Paribas and Véolia. He is now the chairman at pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca, truckmaker Volvo and newspaper Le Monde.

Sitting in his office at AstraZeneca in London, he shows that aside from his obviously thoughtful and rational persona, he also has a great line in self-deprecation. “If you look at what a chairman is supposed to do, it’s not so much. It’s to be well-informed on the company, to make sure the governance functions properly and to give advice and counsel to the CEO. This does not take an enormous amount of time,” he says.

But with half an eye on BP, the UK oil company also chaired by a non-Brit, he adds: “Of course, if there is a problem then the chairman has to step in and play a much more active role. So it may become an 80-hour-per-week job at a certain point in time while at other times being quite, I wouldn’t say restful, but not taking too much time.”

His chairmanship of Le Monde illustrates the point perfectly. The French daily newspaper, a national symbol founded shortly after the second world war at the request of Charles de Gaulle, sought new owners this year after decades of making losses. “I have been chairman of Le Monde for two-and-a-half years now. For two years it was very little and for the past few months it was fairly active.”

In a tricky sales process, where Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, intervened in a heavy-handed manner, Mr Schweitzer says he needed to convince investors not to interfere with the editorial side of the newspaper and the journalists – who, through a complex ownership structure, had a controlling stake in Le Monde – to cede control to outside shareholders. Hence his description of his role as a “diplomat” and “deal-broker”.

He also had to deal with government intervention in the main business role of his career as head of Renault. The closure of the Vilvoorde plant caused some of his biggest headaches, not least when Lionel Jospin, a French socialist who said he would never allow the factory to shut if he were elected, became prime minister in the middle of the crisis and, thus, head of the carmaker’s main shareholder. The factory still closed.

Asked about whether that led to interesting meetings with Mr Jospin, Mr Schweitzer says laconically: “Just one,” before adding simply, “we found a course and solved the problem.”

The outcry was an uncharacteristic misstep in a distinguished career. Mr Schweitzer says he underestimated the depth of feeling among workers but that he still understood them. “Why should they like the guy who announces that the plant is going to be closed? They should hate him, and they do.”

Another unhappy outcome was the failed merger discussions with Volvo (although Renault later took a stake in the truckmaker).

Mr Schweitzer relates the story of a meeting between French and Swedish engineers. The French spoke the whole time and left thinking the Swedes agreed with them. Subsequently, Mr Schweitzer learnt what the Swedish reaction was: “This was awful; we couldn’t say a word and they spoke all the time.”

He drew a clear lesson from Volvo, which he soon had a chance to apply in discussions with Japan’s Nissan. “There are no love affairs between companies; they do not exist. But you do need trust and you do need to make living together acceptable.”

So he visited the Japanese prime minister and once Renault took its stake in the Japanese carmaker, it sent no more than 40 of its own workers to help out at Nissan, a company with close to 200,000 workers.

Mr Schweitzer’s efforts put Renault on the strategic path for which Carlos Ghosn, his more exuberant and media-friendly successor, often takes credit. Mr Schweitzer created the alliance with Nissan as well as Dacia, a Romanian maker of low-cost cars that provides much of the group’s sales in emerging markets.

Mr Schweitzer cut jobs, closed one of Renault’s main factories (in the Boulogne-Billancourt district of Paris) and helped steer the company through privatisation.

Throughout, he says he took with him something he learnt when he moved from being a civil servant to more of a political animal as chief of staff in the mid-1980s.

“When you’re a civil servant you believe that the difficult thing is to find what is the right decision. But you discover in politics that the problem is not finding out what is the right thing to do, it is to manage the execution. This is 95 per cent of the work, and if you manage a corporation the same is true.”

As the interview winds up, Mr Schweitzer attempts to sum up his career. While Vilvoorde was his toughest moment, his most personal failing, he says, was the thwarted Renault-Volvo merger because he foundered in the execution.

Still, he reflects: “My professional life has been very varied, and I have enjoyed it tremendously.”