In January 1935 André Citroën, already suffering from the cancer that would kill him a few months later, offered Michelin options to acquire a large block of voting shares in the business as additional security for the monies owed for tyres.
[4] The immediate priority was the Citroën Traction Avant for which massive investment in production capacity had been necessary and which had been launched in April 1934 before all the gremlins in the design had been addressed in order to generate desperately needed revenue.
France under the Popular Front government was undergoing a surge in nationalist extremism and industrial unrest at this time,[4] but during the ensuing decades the suspicions involving Pierre Michelin never progressed beyond the status of rumor.
[6] On 29 December 1937, while driving his Citroën Traction near Montargis on the main road to the south, Pierre Michelin was involved in a fatal collision.
A sad parallel came in 1950 when Boulanger himself died at Broût-Vernet, Allier, also in a car crash in a Citroën Traction Avant, on Sunday, 12 November 1950, while on the main road between Clermont-Ferrand (the home of Michelin) and Paris.