In the sterile boardrooms of Boulogne-Billancourt, Renault’s executives prepare to sacrifice three thousand more livelihoods at the altar of “efficiency.” They call it Arrow — a name as sleek and bloodless as the ideology it serves. Beneath that euphemism lies the familiar calculus, Renault is a company bleeding billions, seeking redemption not through imagination or solidarity, but through subtraction — the quiet erasure of its own workers.
Human resources. Finance. Marketing. The soft organs of the modern corporation — soon to be excised under the promise of “simplification.” There will be no wailing in the corridors, no reckoning in the boardroom. The layoffs will be “voluntary,” a word drained of its meaning when survival itself becomes coercion. By year’s end, thousands of families may find themselves cast out, collateral damage in a corporate war waged against cost and uncertainty.
Renault’s spokesperson speaks the language of the age: “optimisation,” “execution,” “competitive environment.” It is the lexicon of technocrats who no longer see the human face in their spreadsheets. The same company that once gave France its postwar mobility now turns inward, its ambitions strangled by debt, tariffs, and the relentless pressure of global competition — from Chinese upstarts, from the American fortress, from its own hubris.
Renault: A Symbol of Decay
The new CEO, François Provost, inherits not a carmaker but a symbol of industrial decay — a firm crippled by the write-down of its partner Nissan, its profits gutted by the electric revolution it cannot afford to lose.
The numbers are staggering: an 11.2-billion-euro loss in the first half of the year, only a fraction of which can be blamed on the cold arithmetic of accounting. The rest belongs to a world where machines displace men, and markets have become more merciless than monarchs.
Renault’s crisis is not merely financial. It is spiritual. It mirrors the broader malaise of an economy that prizes growth over grace, speed over stability, and margins over meaning. The company will recover, perhaps — it may even return to profit — but something far more vital will have been lost: the belief that industry exists to serve people, not the other way around.
