Few Frenchmen wept when they read in their newspapers one October morning in 1944 that Louis Renault had died in a Paris nursing home. He had been rich, powerful and famous, cantankerous, brilliant, often brutal, the little Napoleon of an automaking empire. But France's only eulogy for him was a grimace and an ugly word: "collaborator." Last week, in the cooler atmosphere of eleven years later, Louis Renault's widow sought a court decision to establish that Renault had not died of uremia, but had been "deliberately murdered after torture." The widow's story made...
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