Andre Citroen: The Henry Ford of France

A graduate of the cole Polytechnique, France's most prestigious engineering college, Citroen (1878-1935), from a well-to-do Jewish family, was a hugely successful entrepreneur. His background enabled him to recognize the value of double-helical gears produced in Poland, sleeve-valve engines made in Belgium and mass-production methods developed in the U.S., a country with which he felt a special affinity. Large-scale industrial production, notes the author, ""was the engineering challenge that really interested"" Citroen. Always an innovator, he began direct-mail marketing, billboards and skywriting ads in France, so that by the early 1930s, Citroen was the fourth-largest automobile manufacturer in the world, after America's big three. A cultivated sophisticate fond of good living and gambling, Citroen overextended himself during the Depression, demonstrates Reynolds in his well-documented, instructive biography, lost control of his firm and died soon afterward. This biography is not just for car lovers but has much to say about the effects of industrial growth in the West and, even more interesting, about the role that subtle anti-Semitism may have played in the demise of Automobiles Citroen. Reynolds is a British freelance writer. (Jan.)