Ratier

Ratier was originally a joinery firm. By the outbreak of the first world war, the company was specializing in propeller blades for the aircraft of the French Air Force. Afterwards it produced for the French mail service Aéropostale all the way through its heyday of the 1930s when the service broke many flight records. The factory was originally in Malakoff and then transferred to Montrouge. Much of its workload consisted of the contract work it received from Citroën to produce the Citroenette, a child's pedal-car. Paulin Ratier fabricated a prototype propeller-car which never made it into production.

The company produced a rally-car which went on to win many races, such as the Bol d'or race, during a time when it was raced by cars and motorcycles. The factory at Figeac produced bicycles during World War II. It also produced aircraft parts for the German War machine and in January 1944 the Maquis, along with other French resistance groups, launched a secret attack on the factory and caused considerable damage.^[1]

After World War II, France needed motorcycles for police and army forces. The BMW patents and BMW Wehrmacht motorcycles and sidecar combinations were considered legitimate war spoils. The French army started a semiprivate business known as CMR (Centre de Montage et de Réparation) to refurb existing German motorcycles seized partly in France, partly in the French occupied zone of Germany, build a stock of spares and reverse-engineer missing parts.^[2] On this basis, chief engineer Jacques Dormoy started improving the product, sharing many common features with the BMW brand. The 750cc L7 had side valves (L stands for Lateral, meaning side valves), but the later 600cc C6S (C stands for Culbuté meaning rocker operated Over Head Valves). At some point CMR was in financial troubles and was relaunched as CEMEC (Centre d'Etudes de Moteurs à Combustion et Explosion) and its operations were devolved to the non-propeller branch of Ratier called RAM (Ratier Aviation et Marine) headquartered in Montrouge and production was restarted under the Ratier brand .

General Charles de Gaulle equipped his presidential escort with Ratier motorcycles. While the L7 was considered an obsolete design, prompting French Gendarmerie to buy German made post war BMW's instead, the C6S was on par with the BMW R60 performance-wise, the only difference being the use of a flector (rubber coupling) instead of a universal joint between gearbox and rear wheel transmission shaft. While there were indeed a few civilian customers most of the production was absorbed by police and army forces, much like the Danish Nimbus motorcycles. There were only 1,200 motorcycles produced after the government failed to renew its contract with the company.

Today in Figeac, the company produces aircraft parts, in particular for Airbus.