Francois Truffaut founded the company in July 1957, just before his marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern, and the name was never in doubt. He called Renoir “the only filmmaker who’s practically infallible,” someone who never pretended and never tried to have a style, simply finding the simplest human solution whenever a scene got stuck. Naming the company after Renoir’s 1952 film Le Carrosse d’Or was Truffaut’s way of declaring a lineage before he’d directed a single feature.

The push to start the company at all came from an unlikely source. Truffaut had spent years as Cahiers’ most combative young critic, particularly contemptuous of the era’s safe, literary “Tradition of Quality.” It was his father-in-law, film distributor Ignace Morgenstern, who enabled the firm by granting Truffaut one million francs. Cocinor producer Marcel Berbert went on to run the company’s finances and deal-making for decades, freeing Truffaut to stay almost entirely on the creative side.

Truffaut ran the company on a deliberate financial rhythm: a low-budget, personal film after every expensive one, so a single flop could never sink him, and no success could tempt him into escalation. This logic didn’t always work; in the 1960s, The Soft Skin‘s failure nearly sank him. But by the 1970s, it’d become a reliable system that operated out of rue Robert-Estienne. It was small enough that Truffaut could keep every decision close, and loyal enough that the same few names recur across thirty years of credits.

Carrosse’s reach went well beyond Truffaut’s own filmography, especially in the lean early years of the New Wave. He co-produced Rivette’s Paris nous appartient, Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée, and Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. Not every venture held together; the mid-1960s brought a tighter financial squeeze, and several backed projects stalled before completion.

Truffaut died of a brain tumour in October 1984, and the company’s creative life ended with him. For the next fifteen years, Carrosse existed mainly as a vehicle for managing his catalogue, before in 1999 MK2 Productions absorbed the company outright.