One night in February 2007, a technician at Renault crafted a noose in his two-bedroom apartment in the village of Saint-Cyr-l’École, outside Paris, and hanged himself. The technician left behind a wife and young son, who had gone out of town and expected him to meet them the next day. His suicide was unexpected in many ways. He had a loving relationship with his family, and his work should have been equally satisfying. The position at Renault was a dream job—he had been obsessed with cars as a youth and had worked at the company since 1992, and Renault was putting him through graduate school for engineering. His performance reviews were consistently positive, and he was on track to be promoted to engineer.

But in the months before he died, the technician, Raymond D., had been sliding into an emotional abyss, largely because of pressures at work. (Under French law, the last names of suicide victims are not disclosed without the approval of family members.) The company was in the midst of a radical turnaround plan implemented by Carlos Ghosn, who had taken over as C.E.O. in 2005. As a result, the workload had steadily increased for all of Renault’s employees, particularly those at the design center where Raymond was employed. Workdays became longer and deadlines more intense. Before he killed himself, Raymond left a note on his son’s blackboard that said, among other things, “Tell Mr. Ghosn I can’t handle the pressure anymore.” (View a pop-up graphic showing notable groups of business-related suicides.)

Raymond was not alone. Between October 2006 and February 2008, six employees working at the company’s design complex—a campus called the Technocentre—and one at its nearby test facility tried to kill themselves; five succeeded, three of them during a period of just four months. Particularly gruesome were the two deaths that occurred at the complex itself. It’s possible that this is just a statistical anomaly—Renault is a huge company, with more than 63,000 employees in France and 12,000 at the Technocentre alone. Peugeot Citroën, another French car manufacturer, has also experienced a handful of suicides. But some of the Renault employees who killed themselves blamed workplace pressure as the main cause. And one, Raymond, went a step further and blamed Ghosn, the man brought in to save the company.

Renault, the third-largest automaker in Europe, made no immediate public comment on Raymond’s death, or on any of the others. No one from management called his widow to offer condolences. But as news of the suicides at Renault became public and experts posited that such a cluster in one facil­ity was unusual, the questions surrounding the deaths became harder for the company to ignore. Job-related suicides are particularly rare in France, where strict worker protections such as 35-hour workweeks are enforced and labor unions have ample input into plant activities. Yet the turnaround plan at Renault was extremely ambitious and involved releasing 26 new or redesigned cars in less than four years, a pace far faster than most auto companies can sustain. 

“I am trying to motivate people to want to do more than they thought they could do,” says Ghosn, 54, in an interview at his office in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Paris suburb where the company is headquartered. He is short and stocky, dark-eyed, and impeccably dressed in a tailored black suit. “That’s the most important role of a manager, and that’s what I appealed to when I began the transformation at Renault. I was certain that everybody in the company would feel that they were doing something extraordinary by helping Renault achieve what we set out to accomplish.” Moments later, though, reflecting on the suicides of Raymond and his colleagues, Ghosn adds, “But if you say people’s motivation is the greatest wealth and asset of the company, scenes like these cannot be ignored.”

The events at Renault raise larger questions about how far a company is able to push its workers. At a time when the global economy is sagging, most large corporations are trying to increase their productivity. This involves painful initiatives that can backfire, especially in countries with worker-friendly ­labor laws. Most restructuring efforts follow a predictable pattern: reduced budgets, layoffs among well-trained workers, and new ­operations in cheaper parts of the world. In the process, says Kaj Grichnik, a consultant at Booz & Co., manufacturers are alienating themselves from their most critical asset: their employees. “In ­exchange for working harder and harder, most manufacturers offer their workers static salaries, decreasing benefits, increasing anonymity, and abuse from middle managers,” Grichnik says. “And when workers feel that they ­are not being treated with respect, the company suffers.”

The French Ministry of Health has classified the first two deaths as workplace accidents, a category that few suicides fall under unless they are indisputably linked to job conditions. The designation ensures that the victims’ families receive life insurance payments and a pension from the government. Potentially more problematic is the fact that the company could face charges. French labor inspectors recommended to the government prosecutor in Versailles that Renault be investigated for “moral and institutional harassment of workers,” according to a source in the prosecutor’s office. At the time of the suicides, French employees could not work more than 35 hours a week; that policy has since been overturned. The prosecutor has already begun an inquiry, which will include taking depositions from the director of the Technocentre and the immediate supervisors of the suicide victims, and local police are working to determine whether employees were forced to put in longer hours than legally allowed. Authorities plan to decide in the coming months whether or not to file charges.

When Carlos Ghosn became C.E.O. of Renault in 2005, he took over a company with a superb reputation for innovation but little strategic direction. For decades, its engineers designed cars that were mechanically and aesthetically different from virtually everything else on the road. It was the first car manufacturer to put turbochargers and hatchbacks into widespread production, among other innovations.

However, under Ghosn’s predecessor, Louis Schweitzer, a former high-ranking official in the French government, Renault swung from one new idea to another with little apparent rationale. The company had long specialized in economical cars for the masses, but beginning in 2001, Schweitzer made an embarrassing foray into upmarket autos by introducing the Avantime, an eccentric three-door coupe-minivan, and a staid model called the Vel Satis, a luxury car that retailed for about $50,000. Neither sold well, in large part because Schweitzer had tried to enter a market that was dominated by models from companies like BMW. And during that period, while Schweitzer was distracted by the launches, the quality of Renault’s less expensive models dropped significantly. “Traditional customers began to question where the brand was going and why the cars they wanted weren’t as good as they used to be,” says Stephen Norman, Renault’s senior vice president of global marketing.

It was no surprise, then, that Ghosn inherited distressing numbers. Revenue in 2005 had risen only 2 percent compared with the previous year, and Renault’s market share in Europe had dipped to less than 10 percent for the first time in years. Ghosn had seen this before, or something like it, anyway. The Brazil-born Lebanese executive had first come to Renault in 1996 as an executive vice president. Before that, Ghosn was North American C.E.O. of Michelin, a title he achieved by his late thirties, when he forged a reputation for relentlessly slashing expenses. Renault was the perfect venue for such skills. Schweitzer had set a target of trimming about $600 from the manufacturing cost of each vehicle, but when Ghosn arrived as V.P., he established a plan that would triple the projected savings. Some of his initiatives provoked strong reactions. After he closed a large Renault factory in Belgium, hundreds of workers staged work stoppages and clashed with police. Workers in France also protested, out of solidarity. Political leaders from both countries demanded that the facility remain open, but Ghosn got his way. The factory was shuttered, and by 1998, Renault’s profit margin had recovered to a healthy 5 percent.

By 1999, Renault had rebounded to such an extent that it was able to rescue a competitor, Nissan, which was then nearly bankrupt. Renault paid $5 billion for 44 percent of Nissan’s stock, and Ghosn took over the top spot. He quickly restructured the company by slashing budgets and laying off workers. A year after Ghosn took over, Nissan was profitable, and within three years it was virtually debt-free. With its newly streamlined cost structure, the company pushed its operating margins to 10 percent, comparable to those of industry leaders Toyota and Honda.

Ghosn had become the auto industry’s best-known high-wire act: the C.E.O. who would publicly proclaim an improbable set of goals for a company and somehow manage to achieve them. A Japanese comic-book series about his exploits, The True Story of Carlos Ghosn, became a bestseller, and business school students, without irony, compared Ghosn to famous historical figures in works like “The Change Efforts of Douglas MacArthur and Carlos Ghosn in Japan.” His press coverage could be hyperbolic; the Detroit News, for example, ran an article with the headline “Nissan C.E.O.: The Making of a Superstar.” Anytime an auto company had a down quarter or two, Ghosn was rumored to be in line to save it.

When Schweitzer stepped down as Renault’s C.E.O. in 2005, the celebrated Ghosn was the obvious choice to replace him. Renault had lost much of its cost-cutting zeal in Ghosn’s six-year absence, but the company was marginally profitable, and there was little sense of urgency about trying to fix it. Ghosn chose to retain his chief-executive posi­tion at Nissan while running Renault—to this day, he spends half of each month in Japan and the other half in France, and keeps a separate briefcase for each of his jobs—and most managers and employees expected that Ghosn’s arrival wouldn’t mean radical upheaval. Schweitzer told the Wall Street Journal that there would be no “sudden changes in strategy.”

Yet it took only a year for the perpetually kinetic Ghosn to produce a turnaround plan for Renault that was as radical as anything he had dreamed up before. Presented at a February 2006 news conference, the campaign, called Renault Commitment 2009, would deliver “the strongest period of growth in the history of Renault,” Ghosn proclaimed. To do this, three benchmarks had to be met in a little less than four years: an operating margin of 6 percent, a redesigned sedan called the Laguna 3 that would be ranked among the top three cars in its category, and annual sales of 3.3 million vehicles (up from 2.5 million in 2005). To increase sales by that amount, the company estimated, it would have to launch 26 new or redesigned cars—an average of one every two months.

Soon after the announcement, Ghosn toured the company’s facilities, looking to shore up support for his plan, and some of the meetings turned testy. Oliv­ier Rémoleux, director of the Renault factory in Flins-sur-Seine, outside Paris, recalled a plant manager asking whether the company could realistically hope to reach Ghosn’s targets, especially with European sales slowing. “Wrong question,” Rémoleux says. “Mr. Ghosn looked at him like he was crazy. ‘It’s not a target,’ he said. ‘It’s mandatory.’ Commitment 2009 was like shock treatment to our workers.”

Ghosn’s management style might be considered a Western version of kaizen, the Japanese continuous-improvement method, in which small, incremental changes gradually make an organization more efficient. In a typical kaizen initiative, for example, the bolts required for a particular step on the assembly line are moved closer to the worker who needs them. Over time, thousands of similar moves combine to speed up production significantly. But in Ghosn’s version of kaizen, you accelerate the process first and force the workers to do whatever is necessary to keep up.

“With kaizen, you are going to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit less wasteful, but in the end you’re just overlaying a little bit of improvement on the things that you’ve always done,” Ghosn says, in the anteroom of his office overlooking the Seine. “That’s not transformation. I want to take Renault into unknown territory, which by definition means we will be stretching ourselves to go beyond little improvements into the untapped area where innovation occurs.”

Ghosn counted on the Technocentre to implement this vision. A vast 150-acre complex in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the $725 million Technocentre is where most of Renault’s new models are born. No manufacturing happens there; instead, the facility houses 12,000 designers, engineers, technicians, and manufacturing gurus in a lablike setting designed to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas from one project to another. The campus is dominated by three buildings, all of them a silvery-white color that in sunlight takes on an antiseptic, bluish tinge, like a city in a science-fiction movie. It features gardens, waterways, and tree-lined paths, along with restaurants, retail outlets, a music room in which workers needing a break can play on company-supplied instruments, and a gym complete with a sauna and fitness classes (at noon and 5 p.m. every day). Since 2006, the Technocentre’s sole priority has been to design the more than two dozen new models that Ghosn promised as part of Commitment 2009.

Almost immediately after Ghosn’s plan was announced, conditions at the Technocentre started to deteriorate, as managers began to set unrealistic timetables. As one unnamed worker later told researchers in a government-initiated investigation into the suicides, “I leave at 6 p.m. to pick up my kids, which is an hourlong drive. I start work again at 9 p.m. and go until 11 or 12. This is every day. I have to work every weekend.” Another worker said, “Extra hours without getting anything for it is considered a mark of loyalty.”

Some Technocentre employees say they tried to reason with their supervisors, asking for leniency when they couldn’t finish tasks on time, but they were either ignored or told to stop complaining. Christophe Delaine, a Renault electrician for 19 years, says that supervisors became increasingly impatient. “They push people to do more than they’re capable of,” he says. “There’s a culture of blame in the management. It’s deliberate.”

The situation came to a head one morning in October 2006, when Antonio B., a 39-year-old engineer, jumped to his death from an elevated walkway in one of the Technocentre buildings. He fell more than 30 feet onto concrete and died instantly. According to a union delegate who was nearby, people initially thought a chunk of the building had broken free. Several employees saw the body hit, as the engineer had chosen a location people routinely passed and a time, 10 a.m., when they were on break. On Antonio’s computer screen, according to Technocentre employees, was a description of a bitter argument he had just had with his manager. (Neither Renault nor the local police will confirm the contents of the note.) In that description, he said that he felt unappreciated and that no matter how hard he worked, management was never satisfied. Antonio’s death traumatized the Technocentre for weeks. One worker says, “Coming to work each day is like going to a crime scene. I can’t forget the sound of his falling body.” The elevated walkway has since been closed.

Three months later, the body of Hervé T., a 44-year-old technician, was found in the artificial pond on the grounds. He had been missing for more than a day; because of the papers on his desk and the fact that his car was still in the parking lot, co-workers assumed he had to be on the campus somewhere. But the property is immense, and by the time his body was finally discovered—in a remote corner of the pond—he had been dead for 36 hours.

Hervé left behind a diary of a yearlong battle he had waged against depression, including a short hospital stay to treat anxiety. He described the tension at work and the fear that he didn’t fit in at Renault anymore. “We are always working in a state of emergency,” he wrote. “This has led to a lot of negative stress. I’m afraid to make mistakes in the documentation, and since we generate the engineering data, it can have consequences for purchasing, prototype, logistics, and manufacturing.”

Raymond D.’s suicide, less than three weeks later, was perhaps more disturbing, in that people who knew him well had watched him emotionally disintegrate. In October 2006—soon after joining the team producing the Laguna 3 sedan, one of the three components of Ghosn’s turnaround plan—Raymond’s wife says he told her and friends that if he didn’t complete the technical specifications for the car’s undercarriage, which was his direct area of responsibility, the car would not come out in fall 2007 as Ghosn had promised. Worse, the Sandouville plant in northern France, where the model was being built, would be closed. It’s irrational for one technician to assume responsibility for a factory full of workers, but Raymond’s wife maintains that he believed he carried the future of that facility on his shoulders and that his supervisors had encouraged him to think that way. He began to put in up to 15 hours a day on the project, breaking only to eat and sleep erratically for as few as three hours a night. “There were times,” his wife recalls, “when he would wake up at 3 in the morning, after going to sleep very late, and check if I was asleep. If I was, he would sneak out of the house and go back to work at the Technocentre.”

Raymond told his brother-in-law, also a Renault worker, that he felt as though he wasn’t good enough for the job and that his supervisors didn’t think he was capable, belying his positive performance reviews. Raymond said, “Next to Carlos Ghosn, I’m nothing,” according to his brother-in-law. And when his wife suggested that he mention his concerns about the Laguna’s falling behind schedule to his supervisors, his face grew ashen. “Then I won’t get my promotion,” he told her. Though Raymond was losing his grip, his family feared that had they forced him to seek help, he would have completely withdrawn from them. So they did little more than gently try to persuade him to seek help at work. (At the time, the company had doctors on staff to counsel employees who needed emotional help, and an enhanced program has since been put in place.)

His wife still lives with their young son in the home where Raymond hanged himself. She has a letter written by Raymond’s doctor saying that he had known Raymond for 15 years and that he’d never shown any signs of psychological problems. A tall, well-spoken woman originally from Sarajevo, Raymond’s wife is haunted by the stark goodbye note he left on their child’s blackboard, and the eerie reference to Ghosn. The family’s lawyer says she believes that he left such an explicit signal because he felt that the first two suicides were dismissed by Renault as flukes. “Every day I wake up in an empty bed and think about Carlos Ghosn, how he doesn’t suffer the same pain that I do,” Raymond’s wife says. “All I want is for Carlos Ghosn to say he did something wrong.”

That hasn’t happened. Soon after Raymond’s death, Renault issued a statement that there was “no correlation between work conditions and the three suicides” or between the deaths and management strategy. More recently, a Renault publicist emailed Condé Nast Portfolio a response to questions about the suicides that read, “We are profoundly shaken by these events, and took prompt action to assess the situation and address specific points on which improvements could be made. This does not mean that there is a direct link between work and the suicides, the causes of which are highly complex.” The company’s stance is that the multiple deaths were a mere coincidence and, in fact, correlated closely with the annual suicide rate in France, a relatively high 20 per 100,000 people. In the U.S., by comparison, the suicide rate is only about 10 per 100,000 people.

But suicide experts say such reasoning is flawed. Broad averages can’t predict which types of individuals will commit suicide; more specific factors such as age, gender, and occupation must be considered. In France, agricultural workers between the ages of 25 and 49 have the highest suicide rate—about 61 per 100,000 people—compared with only about 12 for every 100,000 people in that age group with jobs in corporations. Given these statistics, the recent wave of three suicides in one year at the Technocentre is actually more than double the national average for its category.

Of course, suicides sometimes happen in groups because of the copycat phenomenon. Yet multiple people taking their lives in the workplace is unusual, and two in the space of three months is “exceedingly rare,” says suicide expert Sally Spencer, executive director of the Carson J. Spencer Foundation. Most people who commit suicide leave notes saying that they have relationship, family, or money problems, not that they can’t stand their bosses. The Technocentre deaths, says psychiatrist Christophe Dejours, professor at France’s National Academy of Arts and Trades, “indicate that something is happening at Renault in the way the work is organized that is putting people off balance.”

In September 2007, yet another Renault employee killed himself. Few details were reported, other than that the victim was a maintenance technician who worked at the company’s D’Aubevoye facility, which tests the prototype cars coming out of the Technocentre. (The two operations are managed jointly by the same executives.) He committed suicide while out on sick leave.

Not long after that, a Renault health-and-safety committee, prodded by the Technocentre unions, brought in the consulting firm Technologia to look into the company’s operations at the campus. The report, which was made public, painted a picture of a troubled facility. Technologia found that 31 percent of Technocentre employees—three times the norm for workers in similar jobs—were under stress and at risk to develop psychological problems. It also said that the problems at the Technocentre can be linked to “the combination of professional passion and ambition and a managerial system that pushes these buttons to meet their increasingly ambitious goals.”

The first-person accounts in the report are more specific. As one engineer in the Technocentre study put it, “The workload is such that it is necessary to work every night of the week until about 11 or midnight.” Another added that the extra work, performed without compensation, is taken as proof of an employee’s “devotion to the company.” The comments of a third worker went straight to Ghosn’s management style: “It’s a lot easier to give nonrealistic objectives and to see what comes out than it is to give objectives with some cohesion. From a human standpoint, it’s a catastrophe.”

Earlier this year, at the midpoint of his four-year plan, Ghosn had a lot to be proud of. Renault’s operating margin rose to 3.3 percent in 2007, from 2.6 percent the year before, and revenue was up slightly, to $60 billion (or 40.7 billion euros). Renault has expanded its presence in emerging markets, and non-European customers now account for more than a third of all sales. In addition, Renault launched six new models in 2007, with nine more coming out in 2008.

But some analysts believe that the company will fall short of its ambitious goals and may have to scale them back in the coming months. In fact, by the most basic measure—how many cars are sold in a given year—Renault’s sales have remained flat since 2005. The new Laguna family sedan (the car Raymond was working on, released with great hype in September 2007) failed to meet expectations.

In the wake of the suicides, Renault named Bernard Ollivier, an engineer, to manage the Technocentre and implement new measures to improve morale at the facility. Among these initiatives are weekly meetings to bring supervisors closer to their staffs and the hiring of about 100 new vehicle-development employees to lighten the load of those already there. “We took these steps because we’re concerned,” Ghosn says.

But the innovations aren’t enough for some employees at the facility, who dismiss them as window dressing. The amount of work and pressure, they say, remains relatively the same, and many employees still work extremely long hours. The situation was driven home again in February, a year and a half after the first suicide at the Technocentre. Even as Renault’s human resources chief, Gérard Leclercq, was announcing at a press conference that the company was on a “good course” toward improving labor conditions at the facility, the automaker separately confirmed what the local newspapers had reported a few days earlier: Another Technocentre worker had been found dead—the fifth suicide among Renault employees. People close to the victim say that he had worried for some time that his job was in jeopardy because he wasn’t proficient enough in English.