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Paul-Marie Pons (Born 24 June 1904 Longwy: died 24 October 1966 Paris) was a French naval engineer who became a senior civil servant. He is remembered for the Pons Plan which restructured the French auto-industry in the second half of the 1940s. Pons was educated at the prestigious École Polytechnique at Palaiseau on the southern fringes of Paris. After this he pursued a successful career in engineering and management. In 1927 he married Michèlle Duchez: the marriage was childless. After the Second World War Pons was appointed to the Ministry of Industrial Production under the direction of the minister, Robert Lacoste. Robert Lacoste had himself been a senior civil servant before the war and had been a member of the French Resistance during the war, after which he re-emerged as a Socialist Deputy and a leading national politician. ==The Pons Plan== The Pons Plan was conceived in the broader context of the modernisation and reconstruction Plan of the influential economist Jean Monnet who was a firm believer in the benefits of government economic planning. The Pons Plan was for a government devised and directed rationalisation of the French vehicle industry. The plan identified in France twenty-two manufacturers of passenger cars and twenty-eight manufacturers of trucks. This was too many. The plan, applied in a way that some thought authoritarian and arbitrary, defined complementary roles for seven of the larger manufacturers: Berliet, Citroën, Ford SAF, Panhard, Peugeot, Renault and Simca. Citroën and Renault were both considered powerful and large enough to operate autonomously, but Peugeot were required to link up with Hotchkiss, Latil and Saurer for the production of commercial vehicles. In the Lyon region Berliet were required to form an association with Isobloc and Rochet-Schneider. There were two further groupings of the smaller formerly independently vehicle manufacturers, being the U.F.A (Union Française Automobile) and the G.F.A (Générale Française de l'Automobile), being headed up respectively by Panhard and Simca, and destined to produce just two models between them. As far as the French passenger car market was concerned, production was divided into three principal sectors according to car size. Citroën, with their existing Traction model, would occupy the upper end of the volume car market. Renault and Peugeot would produce mid-sized cars, leaving the small car market for Panhard and Simca who would produce two and four door versions of the A.F.G. (Aluminium Français Grégoire), a radical front-wheel drive aluminium based car designed by the influential automobile pioneer Jean-Albert Grégoire. In the event matters did not work out quite as intended by The Plan. Louis Renault, accused of collaboration, had lost control of his company and died under suspicious circumstances in October 1944, and his business came under the control of a well-connected Resistance veteran called Pierre Lefaucheux who ignored the Pons Plan and went ahead with a small car that had all ready been well advanced during the war, and which emerged in 1948 as the Renault 4CV. That left Peugeot with the middle-sized cars, while Simca, located far from Paris in the west of the country and owned by a foreign company, was also able to escape the model planning of the civil servant. That left Panhard to produce the A.F.G. (Aluminium Français Grégoire) which in due course turned up rebranded as the Panhard Dyna X. Citroën used the duration of the plan to further develop the Citroën 2CV that had been started in the 1930s. It was launched in 1948. Although the larger auto-makers did not entirely follow its strictures, by the time Paul-Marie Pons left his job in November 1946, the vehicle market had been carved up in a way that clearly retained features of the Pons Plan:〔Marc-Antoine Colin, ''Hotchkiss 1935-1955. L'âge classique'', éditions E.T.A.I.,1998, p.104. ISBN 2-7268-8214-5〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paul-Marie Pons」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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