ABSTRACT
The emergence and the development of variety are essential for a true understanding of the history of organisations and of industrial strategies. The State authorities were aware of the difficult situation in the automobile industry, and they did not hide their pessimism. As the president of Andre Citroen pointed out in 1945, 'Just by allowing free enterprise to develop, the French automobile industry had shown before the Second World War that it was fully capable of reaching a remarkable degree of concentration, without having to wait for a nanny State to show it the way. He wanted to produce 100 models per day of one single model, whereas before the War, the entire French output of a number of models barely reached this level. An inexpensive price can only result from the mass production of one model. The Comite d'Organisation de l'Automobile's main industrial project became the establishment of the 'one model policy'.
