The 12/40 D.F.P. Speed model brought D.F.P. and the Bentley brothers commercial and competitive success. In 1913 and 1914, the Bentley brothers captured twelve of the Class B Speed Records at Brooklands, the first ovalstyle race track, which was built to race cars in 1907. W. O. described these achievements “as representing the very highest point that motor car efficiency had ever reached.”
While Auguste learned the ropes of entrepreneurship at D.F.P., Georges was getting his own education. He benefited from the modern French education system, which had just been developed in the late nineteenth century by Jules Ferry, a lawyer-turned-politician who held the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the early 1880s. During his term, Ferry passed two laws that revolutionized French primary education, making it free, nonclerical, and obligatory for all children under the age of fifteen. The laws sparked an outcry, though, as they wrested the right to teach from the unauthorized religious orders.
In September of 1905, when Georges was six, he entered one of the newly formed elementary schools in Neuilly-sur-Seine. There, for the next five years, Georges learned how to read and write French and received a broad introduction to a number of core subjects including mathematics, natural science, and geography, as well as civics courses that taught children about La République, its function, its organization, and its famous motto, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” Since the clergy was separated from French education, Georges attended church to receive religious instruction.
In 1910, when Georges was eleven, he left his home country for the first time to study English for a year at Lynton College in England. At such a young age, the experience must have been a formative one, expanding his horizons immeasurably. In France, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to study English since Minister Ferry had outlawed the instruction of non-French languages in public schools. Auguste not only had the money to send his son abroad, he also felt comfortable in England. Since launching D.F.P., he traveled many times to the United Kingdom to sell his cars. When Georges returned, he spoke accent-free English. Moreover, his interest in the opposite sex —and his sense of humor—apparently had awakened. “When he came back from England he said to his mother he would never marry an English woman because they wouldn’t sew and instead would use safety pins,” says Eveline Poillot, Georges’s niece, who was very close to Camille.
After the summer of 1911, Georges entered secondary school in Courbevoie, the town along the Seine where his family had recently moved. It was at that school that Auguste delivered his infamous “And why not first?” retort to a young Georges.
Pressed by his father, Georges learned the value of studying and hard work. He began school at half past eight in the morning, came home for lunch for an hour, and then went back to school until five o’clock. The evening was then filled with a great deal of homework. “I remember vividly sitting in at night in our living room, father and mother, my sister Zette and I,” recalled Georges. “Father reading and working, mother knitting or repairing clothes, and my sister and I working on our homework. We usually had at least two hours of homework every night.”
In 1912, with D.F.P. doing well, Auguste built a new house for his family in Courbevoie. It was a solid brick and stone two-story, four-bedroom home surrounded by a walled garden on 7 Rue Franklin. Auguste and Camille’s master bedroom was on the first floor, along with the kitchen, dining room, and living room, where Georges and the family spent their evenings. Upstairs, Georges and Zette had their bedrooms, along with a small kitchen and bedroom for the housekeeper. Attached to Georges’s bedroom was a small side room. Georges converted this chamber into his own personal sanctuary, where he played with his chemistry set and pretended to be a mad scientist. No one was allowed to enter this room. So adamant was he about this rule that one day he rigged the door so that if his mother tried to enter it would set off a small explosion.
When Georges had no schoolwork to do, Auguste would let him visit the D.F.P. factory. There, strolling the aisles of the factory, observing the men in their overalls welding steel and handling complex machines such as lathes, mills, boring fixtures, and drill jigs, Georges instinctively absorbed his father’s obsession with machinery—and his appetite for taking risks.
Over time, Georges became a decent mechanic himself and a fairly good draftsman. He also developed a taste for reading American magazines that dealt with machine tools and factory problems. Georges liked two magazines in particular, American Machinist and Machinery. These new trade magazines were like a headlight illuminating the automotive revolution brewing in the United States. In 1910, when demand for automobiles exploded, cars could not be produced quickly enough for the massive American market. New production methods had to be invented. Until that time, automobile manufacturing had been pioneered by Europeans, mainly the French, German, and English carmakers. But now the United States was poised to take over the automobile market, led by an engineer named Henry Ford who, in 1903 at the age of forty, incorporated the Ford Motor Company. A few years later, in 1908, Ford rolled out the Model T, the best known motor vehicle in history. It was a “car for the great multitude,” durable enough to withstand the rough American roads, economical to operate, and easy to maintain and repair.
When the car proved a hit, Ford and his associates turned to the problem of producing a vehicle in large volume at a low unit cost. The solution was found in the moving assembly line. In 1913, after more experimentation, Ford unveiled to the world the first complete assembly line mass production of motor vehicles. The system hinged on several basic elements: the conveyor belt, standardized parts, synchronization, and the limitation of each worker to a single repetitive task. In the spring of 1913, it took almost thirteen hours to build a “T.” By the end of the year, when a complete assembly line was in place, it took only ninety minutes to produce a car. The price of the Model T dropped from $950 in 1909, to $360 in 1916, to $290 in 1926. By that time, Ford Motor was producing half of all the motor vehicles in the world. Europe may have pioneered the development of the automobile, but mass production was a U.S. innovation.
When Georges cracked open the pages of American Machinist and Machinery this whole new industry of machinery and mass production was unveiled before his eyes. After all, automobile manufacturing was like the early twentieth century’s version of Silicon Valley. It was an industry transforming the world, and creating vast riches for the select few who mastered the new techniques of mass production. Flipping through the pages of American Machinist, Georges read about the latest technologies and production methods: “Machining the Ford Cylinders,” “Interesting Milling and Grinding Operations,” and “A Thousand Carburetors a Day,” were just a few of the stories that captured his imagination. Undoubtedly, flipping through the pages of these magazines gave Georges an appreciation for the dynamic nature of technology and the emerging power of America.
In the summer of 1914, the peace and prosperity that France had enjoyed for the last twenty years was shattered by the outbreak of World War I. Europe was engulfed by violence once again. The war radically altered the fates of millions of people in Europe and around the world. This was as true for the Doriot clan as for any other family that suffered through the profound tragedies of the Great War. In fact, many of Georges’s cousins were drafted as part of France’s countrywide mobilization.
The Doriot family chose to stay in Paris despite Germany’s declaration of war on France in August of 1914. But this war would require Auguste to make an extreme sacrifice. He had risked his family’s finances and reputation on D.F.P., and had worked tirelessly for ten years to get it off the ground. Now, just as D.F.P. had established itself as an up-and-coming car manufacturer, Auguste had to turn over the keys of the factory to the government. The factory was turned into a shell-making plant. Although these had to have been very trying days for Auguste, no one could question his patriotism. He had served in the Army and was just as repulsed as any Frenchman by the idea of German hegemony. So Auguste devoted himself and his business to the cause. “At the time, people worked 24 hours a day, and I think my dear father worked 24 hours a day as well,” recalled Georges.