Born September 22, 1855 in Pierrefond (Oise), Adolphe Clément went on to become one of France’s leading industrialists in a career with all the ingredients of a classic American success story: humble origins, menial jobs carried out with dignity and courage as a boy, and visionary, intuitive ideas which put him in a position to reap the rich rewards of a world in profound evolution through ventures in cycling, tyres and automobiles.
At the age of twenty-one, he opened a workshop in Bordeaux for repairing and, later, building bicycles. He soon transferred his growing business to Lyon and, eventually, to Paris, where he also opened a cycling school. In 1891 he made his first move to lay the foundations for development on a much larger scale, buying a vast plot of land at Levallois Perret – the future industrial hinterland of Paris – to host a velodrome (built in 1893). In parallel with this, he also agreed to a merger with the Anglo-French financial holding detaining control of the Humber and Gladiator bicycle factories to form an even larger consortium.
This era also saw the first motor cars to bear the name Clément. After a handful of tricycles powered by De Dion Bouton single cylinder engines built between 1895 and 1897, in 1897 the Clément-Gladiator company readied its first series of small cars with air-cooled Aster engines, which went into production simultaneously in France and England and were sold under the two different brand names. Despite the fact that during this period, Clément even found time to successfully capitalise his shares in Panhard Levassor, taking the position of sales director of the company and acquiring the distribution rights for Clément-Panhard (although he would sell his controlling share later), matters became complicated when in 1900, Clément decided to establish an independent automobile manufacturing concern of his own, hiring one of the best engineers of the era – Marius Barbarou – and building a huge factory on the site of the velodrome. The shareholders of the Anglo-French consortium saw this as a clear case of conflict with their own brands, and requested that he stop using his own name.
From this moment on, the ‘genuine’ Clément motor cars – the cars built under Adolphe’s own stewardship – had to stop bearing his name, and were sold under the brand name Bayard (but even this was indefinite, with the name switching first to Bayard-Clément and later to Clément-Bayard). However, not only did the consortium continue building cars under the Clément and Gladiator brands, it even went so far as to create two English spin-off brands – Clément-Talbot and the Clément Motor Company – from the original Clément marque.
The last years of Clément’s life were fraught with sadness. Devastated by the death of his first-born son in 1907 (a tragedy that would also befall Bugatti and Ferrari), he retired from the directorship of Clément-Bayard in 1914 and passed away in 1928, stricken by a heart attack while at the wheel of a motor car in the centre of Paris.