Biography|Frédéric Saint-Geours — Born in This Commune, Not Beside a Factory Gate

People treat a later Peugeot chief as someone who must have grown up next to a plant gate at Sochaux.

Frédéric Saint-Geours was born on 20 April 1950 in Clamart, a Hauts-de-Seine commune about nine kilometres southwest of Notre-Dame.

The civil record belongs to this town.

The family house is not a public site, so the pin sits on the Hôtel de Ville on Place Maurice Gunsbourg.

The town hall is the old Château de Barral, bought by the commune in 1842 and later joined to a medieval colombier and a seventeenth-century town house.

It is the civic building a visitor can stand in front of without knocking on a private door.

His father, Jean Saint-Geours, was a high civil servant and financier: directeur général of Crédit lyonnais, later president of the Commission des opérations de Bourse, and an énarque of the 1949 class.

Two brothers, Jean-Philippe and Yves, followed the same state path.

The household was a finance-and-administration house in the inner western suburbs, not a Franche-Comté factory street.

That origin is the first fact that later résumés flatten.

He would study at lycée Carnot and lycée Louis-le-Grand, take a licence in economics, finish Sciences Po, and leave the École nationale d'administration in 1975 with the promotion Léon Blum.

He would then spend a decade in the Finance Ministry and in ministerial cabinets before PSA hired him in 1986.

None of that starts at Sochaux.

It starts with a birth registered in this commune on 20 April 1950, a date repeated by the Nouvel Observateur profile of 20 December 2007 and by the Wikidata record that follows the same civil entry.

The plaque a visitor wants is not on a vanished nursery.

It is this town hall, still in municipal use, still facing the square where Clamart keeps its flags.

Photo: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Portrait: MEDEF, CC BY-SA 2.0, 27 August 2008, via Wikimedia Commons