From the planet’s largest assembly of Bugattis to a bare-breasted can-can girl lounging atop priceless race cars, the French National Car Museum has it all
Trigger me, cancel me, or ban me, I don’t care. I expected little from France’s National Car Museum in Mulhouse. After all, what have the Gauls given the automobile? Besides Bugatti, the occasional Alpine, and Renault’s hyper-turbocharged RS10 of Formula One’s early turbo years, not bloody much, as far as I could see.
So, I wasn’t looking forward to the visit. Indeed, I did it just to placate my ever-curious spouse, Driving.ca’s own Nadine Filion. The one good thing is that we were “limited” to two hours, so I thought, in the name of relationship harmony — “happy wife, happy life” is more than just a cute aphorism, after all — I’d go ahead and smile and look interested for 120 minutes.
The museum’s origins are mired in controversy
It wouldn’t be French if there wasn’t un peu de drame. In this particular case, actually, a whole bunch of drama. You see, these cars were never intended for a public museum. They were actually part of a secretive — indeed, very secretive — private collection. A private collection that was, at best, ill-gotten; at worst, corrupt right from the get-go.
The story goes like this: brothers Schlumpf — Fritz and Hans, but mostly Fritz — were successful wool merchants, their company, SAIL (Société Anonyme pour l’Industrie Lainière), dominating the yarn business in eastern France and employing as many as 3,000 in and around Mulhouse, France. Yarn being a big thing back in the day, they were scandalously rich, and their company, so everyone thought, the very model of fiscal health.
As it turns out, not so much. The French yarn business took a dive in the mid-’70s and, amidst a strike in 1977, it became clear the two brothers had mired the company in so much debt that insolvency was the only recourse.
As it turns out, the brothers Schlumpf — again, mostly Fritz — had a problem. Actually, an addiction. As in, they couldn’t stop buying classic cars. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. And not cheap, cheerful little Citroens — though Mulhouse does have one of those, too, the last one ever made, in fact — but fancy, decidedly expensive stuff.
Indeed, proving that mainlining smack isn’t the only road to ruin, Fritz bought 30 Bugattis — 30! — in one sitting, one of them a Royale, once the most expensive car in the world. And it was all — if you’ve been following along on the undercurrent of larcenous behaviour — paid for by siphoning off company funds.
According to reports, no one knew about all these ill-gotten cars — which is kinda hard to believe, considering there were more than 500 of them, and they pretty much fill up an entire building — and they were only discovered when the strikers, getting no relief from the owners, took over the factory grounds.
All hell broke loose. The workers protested, the authorities issued a warrant for the Schlumpfs’ arrests, and the duo quickly fled to Switzerland, supposedly to never again see even one of the cars they worked so hard to purloin.
It took almost five years to work all the shenanigans out — the collection was first designated a historic monument, then the building they were in was liquidated, and, eventually, local Alsace authorities took over the whole shebang. But in 1982, what I am absolutely sure is the most auspicious auto museum in the world opened its doors, all based on — depending on your view on corporate fraud and/or creative bookkeeping — the greatest theft of automobiles ever recorded.
The first car ever was not a Benz
The French — at least their national car museum — are adamant: the first car powered by piston and fossil fuels was not German, it was French. The museum even has a 1884 Delamare-Deboutteville to prove it and, if you know your automotive history, you’ll realize that date, 1884, means France’s ungainly four-wheeler is two years older than the Benz tricycle most herald as the oldest ICE-powered automobile.
Not so fast, say the Germans, protesting that the Delamare-Deboutteville is not real. For one thing, the museum car is a reproduction. A faithful reproduction built from legitimate patent drawings dated February 12, 1884, sure, but a reproduction nonetheless. And everyone agrees no original Delamare-Debouttevilles remain extant, the Benz fans noting — with a little more than their usual hauteur — that Karl Benz’s actual 1886 car does indeed exist, the company, Teutonic to the core, managing to keep the real first-ever Patent-Motorwagen intact and original.
Aha, counter the French, but there are records of the French car travelling in Normandy shortly after the patent was filed. It wasn’t a production car, counter the German fans, which Benz’s trike most certainly was — legend has it some 25 were sold in all — so it doesn’t count.
What I am trying to say, here, is that the historical bickering between Germany and France — the so-called larivalité franco-allemande — runs deep, and it’s no surprise that, coming on the heels of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 (which, I am told, united Germany, much to the displeasure of France, which wanted to be Europe’s most powerful army) that the French are still contesting the origins of the first automobile to this day.
There are no fewer than 120 Bugattis in its cavernous halls
There’s the last, and maybe the prettiest, Bugatti ever made by Jean Bugatti, Ettore Bugatti’s elder and most accomplished son; and the last, and totally ill-conceived, 1952 Type 101 — basically a pre-war Type 57 with a Chevy four-door-like body grafted on — by younger and not nearly so talented son, Roland. There is even the very last car to carry the Bugatti name before Romano Artioli revived the brand in 1991, a one-off 1955 Type 251 Grand Prix racer powered by an equally rare double-overhead-camshaft straight-eight designed by no less than Gioacchino Colombo. Yes, that Colombo, the engineer whose V12 put Enzo Ferrari on the map.
There are no fewer than two incomprehensibly expensive Royales, out of the seven total Ettore Bugatti commissioned (and the six that have survived). There are so many Type 35 variants — the car that made Ettore Bugatti a household name, thanks to the model’s 2,000-plus racing victories — that there’s an entire room dedicated to just the French Racing Blue-liveried race cars.
There are big Bugattis — the aforementioned Royales — and there are small Bugattis — all manner of battery-powered miniature 35Cs so the kids of the fabulously well-to-do could get with the program. Essentially, if there’s an important Bugatti, the French National Car Museum in Mulhouse probably has one. Maybe two!
It houses a (somewhat) fitting tribute to Helle Nice
As we were leaving the museum, the final exhibit was a series of water-colours, nary an actual car in sight. Some of the paintings were, shall we say, a trifle libidinous, featuring an often scantily clad — occasionally completely un-clad — demoiselle in various contortions on stage and sometimes driving blue Bugattis rather rapidly. Perhaps more disconcerting — for any easily-offended Americans visiting le musée — there were no placards explaining how bare breasts merited inclusion at such an august gathering of automobiles.
That’s a travesty, because they were all a tribute to Helle Nice, the Bugatti Queen, who, as I explained in one of my favourite Motor Mouth columns, was the premier female grand prix racer of the pre-war period. By nights, she was a can-can dancer who had seemingly no compunction to doffing drawers on stage. But by days, she drove a 35C ferociously enough to give legends like Tazio Nuvolari and René Dreyfuss more than a little trouble.
She was reportedly fabulously wealthy (baring breasts obviously more lucrative in ’20s France than it is now); was the local face of Lucky Strike cigarettes and, in America, Esso gasoline (yes, her fame crossed oceans); and, as reported by her biographer, Bugatti Queen author Miranda Seymour, she liked bedding auto racers almost as much as she like beating them.
This last — and isn’t this the oldest of stories — got her in some trouble. It seems that the only racer she wouldn’t drop trou for was one Louis Chiron, and, to exact revenge, on the cusp of the first post-war Monte Carlo Rally, he denounced her as a collaborator. No matter that the accusation was patently untrue, or that Chiron had no proof. In those times — much as in our own — just the accusation was enough.
Nice, once the Bugatti Queen, was ruined, and eventually died penniless in a one-room walk-up in suburban Nice. Chiron, meanwhile, because he won numerous Grand Prixs driving blue, was given the tribute of having Bugatti name a car — yes, he’s that Chiron — after him. The French National Car Museum in Mulhouse is undoubtedly the finest car museum I have ever visited, but that there isn’t more to Nice’s story does auto racing — and the museum — a disservice.
More than just French cars and can-can dancers
The Mulhouse museum, as one would expect, is chock-a-block with historic French cars. There are famous Peugeots, Citroens, and Renaults out the whing-whang. There are less-than-famous French automobiles: Panhard & Levassor, Hurtu, and the incredible almost-as-gigantic-as-a-Bugatti-Royale Voisin Type C1.
There are also plenty of Gallic oddities, such as the De Dion-Bouton Type 2 ¾ (possibly the worst possible combination of car and motorcycle technology I have ever seen); a 1907 Lorraine-Dietrich Type E Ladder Carrier (what passed for a French fire truck at the turn of the last century); and a 1905 Peugeot Phaetonnet, which for all the world looks like a baby carriage — it was literally called the “Baby” in England, where it proved more popular than in France — with a single-cylinder engine grafted onto its rear storage area.
But its hallowed halls also house no fewer than 11 Ferraris (including a lovely 500 TRC, an equally beautiful 250 MM, and four achingly gorgeous Formula Two race cars from the early ’50s); eight Maseratis (including a 1957 250 F run by no less than “The Maestro” himself, Juan-Manuel Fangio); and enough Mercedes-Benzes and Maybachs (some 40 examples, including a bunch of truly imposing 540K Cabriolets and an oh-my-God W125 Grand Prix racers) to convince you France and Germany were actually best buds.
Lotus is well-represented with four cars (three of which are former Formula One racers); there’s something called a Pegaso Z 102B, a Spanish GTO look-a-like powered by a 218-horsepower 3.2L V8; and so very many Rolls-Royces that they almost dominate the museum’s most prestigious hall.
I may have gone to the Mulhouse museum looking to see France’s contribution to automotive history, but I came away mesmerized by the greatest collection of automobiles I have ever seen.
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