It has a surface area of approximately 11.5 hectares (28 acres), and is positioned opposite Meudon, a short distance downstream from the Île Saint-Germain.

[2] The island found itself renamed as the "Île Madame", and during the pre-revolutionary decades it was home to a commercial laundry, the "Buanderie de Sèvres".

Seguin became extremely rich, in part by using his island to construct a factory applying a new approach to tanning leather, on an industrial scale.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, while retaining its industrial businesses, the island also became a leisure destination, used for recreational boating, clay pigeon shooting and angling.

During the Second World War the factory, which was at this time being used to produce trucks for the Germans, was an easy target for bomber pilots using the River Seine to navigate, and suffered from several destructive allied bombings attacks.

Renault himself was accused of collaboration directly after the war, and in the frenzied atmosphere of retribution that characterized the post-liberation period he died in prison under suspicious circumstances, and without benefiting from the trial which had been intended for him.

His company was placed under the direction of a well-connected resistance hero, and then, on 15 January 1945 nationalised and renamed "Régie nationale des usines Renault (RNUR)" France had missed out on the economic recovery that had boosted prosperity in Britain and Germany during the 1930s, but she participated fully in the sustained post-war boom that got going in the 1950s.

The factory also continued to justify its reputation, established during the turbulence of the mid-1930s, as a bastion of trades union militancy, notably being closed down by a 33-day strike during the "Événements"("Events") of May 1968.

Rising wages, union militancy (especially in the big car plants of the Paris region) and high employment taxes encouraged the French auto-industry to become a pioneer of automated vehicle assembly and the Billancourt factory, designed for an era of labor-intensive production processes, was hard to adapt to the new techniques.

The local community group, Le Collectif "Vue sur l'Île Seguin"[7] argues the undeveloped parts of the island should remain as 'green' and vegetated as possible, given the high density of the surrounding suburbs.