Belvallette Frères, often spelled "Belvalette Frères", was a French company that manufactured carriages and other vehicles.
The Belvallette family company was founded by Jacques Belvallette (1785–1855) [1] in 1804 in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the property at 139 rue Royale. In addition to carriage building, it also offered repairs, including for stagecoaches. At that time, the founder's two sons, Jacques and Norbert, who would later operate as Belvallette Frères, were not yet born.
After completing their training in England, they took over the company in 1840 and established it in Paris in 1850. In addition to a shop on the Champs-Élysées at number 24, they also had a workshop on rue Bayard. In 1856 they moved to a larger property on Avenue de l'Impératrice and finally to rue Duret, number 21. [2] One of the brothers ran the factory in Boulogne, the other ran the factory in Paris. [3]
The Belvallette brothers exhibited their products at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, where they received a gold medal. [4] They had previously presented it in London and received several awards. They also invented several innovations that made the vehicles lighter and more practical, including a friction nail attached directly to the car body and a folding door handle. [5]
Other inventions belonged more to the category of curiosities, such as the Cynophore by Alfred Norbert Jacques Belvallette, a three-wheeled vehicle powered by dogs running inside the wheels.
The company fell victim to the Great Depression of 1929 and was closed by Jean Belvallette in 1933. [2]
A number of Belvallette vehicles have been preserved or at least documented.
A Break from around 1880 by Belvallette Frères is displayed in the Musée des Equipages in the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. [6]
Belvallette Frères supplied, among other things, the bodywork for one of Panhard & Levassor's first automobiles. The vehicle, built in 1891, was equipped with a two-cylinder engine from Daimler; it may have been driven by Hippolyte Panhard herself. [7] They also built bodies for automobiles from a number of other brands, such as Charron, Delage, Delahaye, De Dion-Bouton, Gobron-Brillié, Hispano-Suiza, Hotchkiss, Lorraine-Dietrich, Minerva, Peugeot, Renault, Rolls-Royce, Voisin, and more. [8]
The Bibliothèque nationale de France has an album with 110 images of Belvallette Frères vehicles from the Georges Sirot collection, mostly albumen prints. The carriages are usually presented here without horses.
Boulogne-Billancourt is a wealthy and prestigious commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France, located 8.2 km (5 mi) from the centre of Paris. It is a subprefecture of the Hauts-de-Seine department and thus the seat of the larger arrondissement of Boulogne-Billancourt. It is also part of the Métropole du Grand Paris. Boulogne-Billancourt includes one island in the Seine: Île Seguin.
Hector Guimard was a French architect and designer, and a prominent figure of the Art Nouveau style. He achieved early fame with his design for the Castel Beranger, the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris, which was selected in an 1899 competition as one of the best new building facades in the city. He is best known for the glass and iron edicules or canopies, with ornamental Art Nouveau curves, which he designed to cover the entrances of the first stations of the Paris Metro.
Louis Renault was a French industrialist, one of the founders of Renault, and a pioneer of the automobile industry.
The Crédit Commercial de France is a commercial bank in France, founded in 1894 as the Banque Suisse et Française and renamed to CCF in 1917. By the end of the 1920s, it had grown to be the sixth-largest bank in France. Its brand was eclipsed between 2005 and 2022 under HSBC ownership, but is set to be revived by the bank's new owner Cerberus Capital Management.
A coachbuilder or body-maker is a person or company who manufactures bodies for passenger-carrying vehicles. Coachwork is the body of an automobile, bus, horse-drawn carriage, or railway carriage. The word "coach" was derived from the Hungarian town of Kocs. A vehicle body constructed by a coachbuilder may be called a "coachbuilt body" or "custom body".
The Avenue Foch is an avenue in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, named after World War I Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1929. It was previously known as the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. It is one of the most prestigious streets in Paris, as well as one of the most expensive addresses in the world, home to many grand city palaces, including ones belonging to the Onassis and Rothschild families. The Rothschilds once owned numbers 19–21.
Michel Le Quien was a French historian and theologian.
Moynat is a Parisian trunkmaker, founded in Paris in 1849 by Octavie and François Coulembier. They collaborated with specialist Pauline Moynat in travel goods to open the company's first store at Avenue de l'Opera, France. The house participated in various World's Fairs.
Paris–Rouen, Le Petit Journal Horseless Carriages Contest, was a pioneering city-to-city motoring competition in 1894 which is sometimes described as the world's first competitive motor race.
Henri Malo – 17 March 1948 in Chantilly. was a French writer.
Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert was a French architect.
Gustave Louis Jaulmes was an eclectic French artist who followed the neoclassical trend in the Art Deco movement. He created monumental frescoes, paintings, posters, illustrations, cartoons for tapestries and carpets and decorations for objects such as enamels, sets of plates and furniture.
Louis Bernard Bonnier was a French architect known for his work as an urban planner for the city of Paris. He was instrumental in loosening the restrictions on the appearance of buildings in Paris, which resulted in the blossoming of Art Nouveau buildings. He designed many significant buildings himself, including private villas, public housing and railway buildings. In all his work he was true to the rationalist principles of Art Nouveau.
Émile Joseph Molinié was a 20th-century French architect.
The Maison pompéienne, sometimes called the Palais pompéien was the hôtel particulier of Prince Jérôme Napoléon in Paris in the style of the Villa of Diomedes in Pompeii. It was located at 16-18 Avenue Montaigne from 1860 to 1891.
Denis Albert Bardou was a French manufacturer of precision optical instruments.
Jules-Isidore Lafrance was a French sculptor.
Jacques-Constantin Périer was a self-taught French engineer and businessman who, with his brother, founded the Compagnie des eaux de Paris doing a period of great stock market speculation under Louis XVI. He is known for having introduced James Watt's steam engine to France in 1779 and for having built the first double-acting engine in 1789, only six years after Watt thanks to the intercession of Agustín de Betancourt during a visit to Watt's Albion Mills.