Établissement d'Armement AMX-APX [1964-1990]

The Ateliers de construction d'Issy-les-Moulineaux was created in 1936 by the nationalisation of the tank development department of Renault in Issy-les-Moulineaux. And so that is the last concrete information available on this organization. This branch was created in 1935 as a bit of a provocation by Louis Renault, who responded to pressure from the government's Directorate of Armaments to disperse strategic production outside the Paris area (for example, to Le Mans, where Renault already had a passenger car factory anyway, However, Renault would have had to meet this requirement at its own considerable expense) responded by moving the development offices and workshops of its tank department from Île Seguin, an island under Boulogne-Billancourt, to Issy-les-Moulineaux, literally just across the Seine. Incidentally, this was also the home of another new Renault subsidiary, the aerospace firm Caudron.
In 1936, a wave of nationalisation of the arms industry began, with the socialist government of Léon Blum seeking to simplify the chaotic state of industry in France, where dozens of companies of varying sizes fought among themselves for every government contract. The nationalisation of 28 aircraft factories during 1937 is well known, but by the end of 1936 nine munitions factories - the munitions factories at Châtillon and Vernon belonging to the Brandt steelworks - had already been nationalised by the War Ministry, the artillery factories of Schneider in Le Havre and Le Creusot, the tanks and light weapons department of Hotchkiss in Levallois-Perret, but it was the tank department of Renault that was nationalized first. The latter was also targeted for nationalisation because its deliveries were reportedly constantly late. Exactly what this involved is again hidden in a fog, usually people talk about a design office in Issy and an assembly plant on the Stalingrad waterfront, but there's a small problem of course - a) it certainly wasn't called Stalingrad at this time, b) it's on both sides of the river, in Boulogne and Issy...
The result was the Issy-les-Moulineaux Construction Workshops, which, although it started as a fairly tiny organisation with a few hundred employees, soon grew to become one of the main tank manufacturers of pre-war France. But this is one of the last concrete pieces of information I have been able to find out. Most sources end by saying that the AMX plant was moved to the Satory platform, properly part of Versailles, but that's the end of it, and they don't mention when it happened. This move may have occurred in the 1950s. After the war, however, AMX no longer functioned as a manufacturing plant, but probably only as a design office and prototype workshop. Actual production usually took place at the Atelier de Construction de Roanne. Another thing the sources agree on is that AMX merged with the Atelier de Construction de Puteaux, which was also moved to Satory. This transfer took place in about 1964, when AMX was already established there, and this is perhaps the year in which the merger took place.
Under the new name AMX-APX, the organization became part of the new organization "Industrial Group of Ground Armament", aka Groupement des industries de l'armement terrestre, aka GIAT, in 1971. This was intended to unite all the various production organisations under the French armed forces into a single entity. Even within the GIAT, however, AMX-APX was still operating in the 1980s. It was not until 1990 that GIAT was radically "restructured" and transformed into the joint-stock company GIAT Industries SA, now NEXTER.