Biography|Maxime Picat — Named to Run Peugeot from 75 Grande Armee

People remember the Peugeot recovery of the mid-2010s as a Carlos Tavares story told from the top of the group.

The brand chair changed first, and it changed on paper issued from this building.

On 3 September 2012 PSA announced that Maxime Picat would become directeur de la marque Peugeot from 1 October, replacing Vincent Rambaud, who was leaving for personal reasons.

Picat was thirty-eight.

He had been managing director of Dongfeng Peugeot Citroën Automobiles in Wuhan since January 2011, after running that joint venture as deputy from August 2008 and the Wuhan works from November 2007.

Between 2008 and 2011, the company said, DPCA sales more than doubled.

He came home to a brand whose French and European volumes were falling hard in the slump after 2008.

The headquarters at 75 avenue de la Grande-Armée was still the public address of Automobiles Peugeot and of Peugeot S.A.

The nine-storey block by Louis, Luc and Thierry Sainsaulieu, finished in 1966, held the brand direction.

Peugeot later left the avenue.

The group consolidated at Rueil-Malmaison after 2017.

The building a visitor faces now is the reused L1ve offices, not a lion on the lintel.

The appointment itself is not in dispute.

The Stellantis archive still carries the 3 September 2012 communiqué in French and English, and contemporary notices in L'Usine nouvelle, Challenges and Le Figaro repeat the same effective date.

He held the chair until 31 August 2016, when Jean-Philippe Imparato took the brand and Picat moved to Europe and the Managing Board.

The 208, 2008, 308 and 3008 years sat under that nameplate.

The pin is this plot on the avenue, the last Paris headquarters from which the lion was actually run.

Photo: Gecina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The image shows the reused L1ve offices on the same plot after Peugeot left.