Michelin Work, Material. Living the Ideal in the Factory
Testimony from the Honorary President of the well-known tire company. His Catholic faith enters into the concreteness of reality: Christianity “is a way, not an ideology”

by Emiliano Ronzoni

He arrived discreetly and unannounced. And he departed discreetly and suddenly, after two days filled with questions and curiosity. It was the first time at the Meeting for François Michelin, gran patron of one of the most important industrial groups in the world, and he showed himself to be an outspoken Christian and Catholic.
This is the third generation of a dynasty that has filled a large part of the world with research, innovation, work, and tires. Today, Michelin means about 130,000 people, a commercial presence in more than 170 countries, 80 production centers, a deposited capital of € 15,645 million, corresponding to a good 19% of the world market in its sector.
His session was entitled, “The Ideal in the Factory.” Monsieur Michelin spoke simply, slowly, and at the same time precisely. He spoke simply because “I want to understand myself what I am saying,” and precisely because his words opened up to Being: “Monsieur comes from mon seigneur. My lord… it means that one recognizes in the other a greater presence.” He does not offer theories; his thought unfolds as a reflection on an experience, an encounter, a dialogue. “One morning I set out to go into the factory at Clermont-Ferrand. The factory was closed. There was a strike. I saw a union leader and asked him, ‘According to you, does a boss work?’ ‘No.’ I tried again, ‘Now, why would I not be a worker?’ ‘Because you do not fit into the canons of the statute of workers; for example, you do not take orders.’ ‘But I constantly take orders. If the customers do not buy my products, it means something is not working, and so they give me orders; if you strike, it means that something is not working, and so you are giving me an order; if I build a drawing bench and it does not give me the quality of work I wanted, the material is giving me an order. The material itself gives orders.’” Thus the figure of this 77-year-old patron begins to be defined. Tall and thin, he is a third-generation Michelin, about to turn things over to the fourth. For François Michelin, reality exists; this alone is enough. You have to enter it by obeying, and perhaps stripping away the dusty layers that tend to hide it.

Against dualisms
He hates dualisms. Descartes is guilty of too much analysis. Marxism is the ruin of the century–it is a closed system; it mistakes effects for causes; above all it denies transcendence, shutting off and opposing man to man, job to job, competency to competency. To those who offer him the pair “being and having,” he points out that in order to experience one’s being, a person has to have; indeed, even more, in order to be able to say “being” and “having,” at the least one has to “have his own being, isn’t that so?” He does not say it openly, but if someone asks him, “How can one reconcile being a boss and being a Catholic?,” his instinctive reaction betrays annoyance. He takes the question and returns it to the sender, “I would ask, instead, does a human experience of business exist?” There is reality, there is the concreteness that is a harsh taskmaster, and everything is contained in that; there is no need for anything else. What about Christianity? “Christianity explains things as they are;” it is not an addition to reality, and it is always a surprise to discover that what experience teaches has a correspondence, time after time unexpected, with Christian teaching. “Christianity is a way, not an ideology.” Thus Michelin and his whole dynasty did not need to surround themselves with Christians in order to build their factory: “What the factory needs, and what we have to look for in people, is the lucidity of their reasoning. Among those who say they are Christians, some reason badly, with preconceived ideas, and others reason well and are sensitive to concreteness.”

Adherence to reality
Concreteness, obedience, and adherence to reality for what it is…. There is no doubt that François Michelin is a strange man–strange in the sense that nothing seems to work to explain him. At least not thoroughly. Not the brief, essential biography with which he presents himself: General Director of the Michelin tire company from 1955 until two years ago; a wife, Bernadette; six children, two of whom are consecrated to God, and two are married; eight grandchildren. Not his readings, which we can intuit are numerous and cultivated.
In a world market made up of the multiplication of Chinese boxes, alliances, boards of directors, and legal and financial headquarters, Michelin is a limited partnership, which means that it answers directly, jointly and severally, to the shareholders. This too is strange. Where does this man come from, who fights with drawn sword against all the dualisms and stereotypes that want to take the humanity out of reality, against the ideological and abstract exhaustion that opposes itself to a living concreteness?
“ Monsieur Michelin, can work bring happiness?” “Try asking the unemployed that question. And listen to their answer.” “Monsieur Michelin, once upon a time, buying something was an important act that summoned up significant resources, not only financial. Now, with so many products available, it has all become so commonplace…” “Commonplace means that something is for everybody: that’s magnificent!” He went on, “Something being commonplace is more in our heads than in reality. Go into a hardware supermarket and you will see how carefully shoppers choose commonplace objects like nails.” Thus, under his blows, every act of man appears as an act of the spirit; every job, every relationship is the locus where freedom becomes concrete. And friendship makes the factory a work shared by workers and management.

The traces of God
A few years ago, after a wait of fifteen years, he granted a long interview to two authoritative French journalists. The interview became a book, E perché no? [published in English as And Why Not? Morality and Business]. The two asked him if, in his opinion, beauty and perfection were one and the same. Yes, a good product is necessarily also beautiful–as long as you don’t turn it into an idol. “Man is a capacity made to be filled. The more one learns, the more one hungers and thirsts for something else. It is unexplainable, but this is how it is. God, however, cannot be comprehended with the intelligence. On the other hand, the intelligence can discover traces of God, proofs of His existence. When we want to explain God, we do not explain anything at all; the day we think we have understood God, we have not understood anything. God, the self-sufficient being, says about Himself: I am the Good that emanates itself. I am He who is. The intelligence runs away in the face of God’s words, and yet it never stops seeking, until the moment when it realizes that all there is left for it to do is kneel down and say: that’s the way it is.”
Where does this man come from, who repeats that the specificity of Christianity is saying that a positive exists? Where and how has he been able to understand things that others–we–acquire and keep alive with difficulty and over time only thanks to providential companionships? Is the work that has reached and continues to reach millions of people, the product transformed in obedience to the material, the constant and absolute search, customer satisfaction–is this the road that Being has chosen in order to emanate itself, in François Michelin and his dynasty? We would like to talk about this and other things some more with this man, François Michelin.