For his actions in the war he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour and received the Croix de Guerre and five citations.

[citation needed] Gradis became president of Nieuport, the Compagnie générale transsaharienne and the Brasseries du Maroc.

[3] Her father, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, was the first oil refiner in France first at Nantes and then at Saint-Loubès, with Pétrole Jupiter.

[4] The retired General Jean Baptiste Eugène Estienne, who had designed and built tanks during the war, was made president of the company.

[5] The purpose of the company was to "study, establish and exploit land and air communications between the various territories of the African continent, particularly between Algeria and Niger.

[8] Gaston Gradis headed a second exploratory expedition that left Colomb-Béchar at midnight on 25 January 1924 with three large six-wheel Renault cars with double tires.

[9] A rival Citroën expedition had left a day before, and the press made great play of the competition, which Gradis thought obscured the important goal of establishing a trans-Saharan route.

[15] They then returned to Europe by boat, while the Estienne brothers raced back from Savé to Colomb Bechar in six days, setting a new record for long-distance speed in Africa.

The French security forces struggled to provide adequate protection to the Saharan tourists, whose numbers grew when the service was made weekly.

[17] Gaston Gradis was one of only three business leaders who were exempted from this law on the basis of exceptional services to the French state, the other two being Raymond Berr and Pierre Lyon.