Biography|Vincent Rambaud — The Day He Took Peugeot at 75 Grande Armee

People treat the Peugeot brand as something always run from Sochaux or from a glass campus in the western suburbs.

On 8 March 2010 PSA announced that Vincent Rambaud would become directeur général of the Peugeot marque, effective 2 April 2010.

He would report to Jean-Marc Gales, then director of the group's brands.

The announcement came from the group's registered office at 75 avenue de la Grande-Armée, in the 16th arrondissement, a nine-storey block the firm had occupied since the mid-1960s.

Rambaud was 51.

He had just left the Latin America job he had held since 2009, after the Mercosur unit created in 2007.

The same day PSA split Peugeot's sales map into four zones: France, northern Europe, southern Europe, and international.

He sat in that building through a brutal European slump.

On 2 April 2012, two years almost to the day after he took the brand, PSA signed a promise to sell the same headquarters for 245.5 million euros and lease it back for nine years.

He left the group in September 2012.

The company statement said he was going for personal reasons and wished to change the direction of his working life.

Maxime Picat replaced him on 1 October 2012.

The building outlasted both men as a Peugeot address until 2017, when the remaining staff moved to Rueil-Malmaison.

Gecina later rebuilt the block as the office complex now called l1ve.

A visitor on the avenue still faces the same plot between Étoile and Porte Maillot.

The façade is no longer the 2010 Peugeot front.

The decision that put Rambaud over the lion was taken and published from this address, not from a provincial plant.

Photo: Gecina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The file shows the plot after the later rebuild; the 2010 offices stood on the same numbered avenue front.