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.