Why Does Peugeot Have a Lion on Its Logo?

The Peugeot family business began in 1810 in Franche-Comté, in eastern France, as a steel foundry. It went on to make saws, tools, coffee grinders and bicycles, and only in 1896 did Armand Peugeot found a company devoted to cars. The lion belongs to the tool years. Wikipedia records that Émile Peugeot applied for the trademark on 20 November 1858, and that the first lion, shown walking on an arrow, stood for the speed, strength and flexibility of the saw blades.

You will often read a more detailed version of that story: the strength of a lion's teeth for the saw's teeth, the lion's spine for the flexibility of the blade, the arrow for the speed of the cut. It is a neat reading, but we only found it repeated in secondary sources, so treat it as the popular retelling rather than a quote from the company. Sources also disagree on when the lion first appeared on the blades, with dates in the late 1840s and early 1850s in circulation. The documented date is the 1858 trademark.

One more caution on attribution. The page for the Peugeot brand credits the 1858 drawing to an engraver named Justin Blazer who lived near the factory. We could not confirm that name in Peugeot's own material, so we mention it as a claim, not as settled history.

For its first century the lion changed shape with fashion. It walked on an arrow, then stood on a rock in a sculpted version around 1910, and in 1925 appeared beside the name on a red disc. The big change came in 1948. The black lion rampant, standing on its hind legs, replaced the walking pose, and the new 203 carried a forward-leaning chrome lion on its nose.

The rampant lion is the one most people picture. It sat on blue shields in 1950 and again in 1970, in the first case as a yellow lion on a blue field with gold bars. That 1950 look resembles the coat of arms of Franche-Comté, the home region of the family, which shows a lion rampant on blue. Some histories say Peugeot borrowed the pose from the regional arms. We could not find a Peugeot statement saying so, so it is a plausible link, not a documented one.

A roaring lion's head first appeared in a blue shield in 1960, and a faceted yellow head in a square followed in 1968. From 1980 the brand settled on a white lion rampant inside a blue square, with the PEUGEOT name stacked below. That layout lasted three decades with small redraws, and it is the badge on cars such as the 205 and 206.

On 8 January 2010 Peugeot switched to a silver, shaded lion on a navy wordmark. The blue square was gone. Then on 24 February 2021 came the current emblem, a roaring lion's head in a black shield with the name across the top. Wikipedia's 308 article describes the third-generation 308 as the first car to wear it.