Gillet
A Name Borrowed and a Suffix Added
Herstal sits on the Meuse, a short ride from Liège, in a stretch of Belgium that spent much of the twentieth century making arms, bicycles, and machinery for people who needed things to work reliably. It is a fitting home for a motorcycle firm that built its reputation on endurance rather than flash. In 1919, Désire Gillet and his son Léon set up S.A. des Ateliers Gillet there, and almost immediately ran into a naming problem: a French company, René Gillet, already made motorcycles under a very similar name. The Belgian firm appended "Herstal" to its badge to keep the two apart, and Gillet-Herstal is how the marque is remembered by collectors and historians today, even though the paperwork simply said Gillet.
Léon Gillet was not a motorcycle man by training. He was an accountant who caught the bug, in every sense, and found in engineer Fernand Laguesse the technical partner he needed to turn enthusiasm into a functioning motorcycle works. Unlike some manufacturers of the era who drifted into two wheels from bicycles or light engineering, Gillet went straight into motorcycle production at its founding, with no earlier product line to fall back on or build from. That made the first machine, in effect, a statement of intent.
The Early Machines
That first Gillet, arriving in 1919, was a 300cc De Luxe two-stroke single running belt drive, engineered by Laguesse. It was modest, but it established the pattern of steady, competent design that would carry the firm through its first decade. Gillet moved quickly to broaden its range: a 750cc V-twin using a MAG engine appeared in 1920, and by 1922 the company had gone further still with a 1000cc V-twin, also MAG-powered. That same year brought a 350cc two-stroke with chain drive, a size and format that would matter enormously to the company's later identity.
Through the mid-1920s, Gillet-Herstal pushed into four-stroke engineering as well, and the firm earned a real claim to distinction here: it was among the pioneers of unitary construction, building engine and gearbox as a single unit at a time when that was still an advanced approach rather than an industry default. The engineering department kept experimenting on the two-stroke side too, including work on a unit-construction flat twin. Years later, this two-stroke line would culminate in a 720cc model with chain drive to the rear wheel and shaft drive to a sidecar wheel, supplied to the Belgian military between 1938 and 1940 — a design that speaks to the practical, load-bearing character of Gillet's engineering culture.
The Tour du Monde and the Golden Era
The event that put Gillet-Herstal on the international map was not a race but a journey. There is conflicting information about the details, but by most accounts Robert Sexé set out from Paris in 1926 aboard a Belgian-built Gillet-Herstal machine, riding a 346cc rotary-valve two-stroke motorcycle, and completed a circuit around the world before returning to Belgium later that year. Some accounts place a riding companion alongside him, though the record most reliably credits Sexé himself as the rider whose name became attached to the feat. It was the kind of journey that sold motorcycles by proving them, and Gillet capitalized on it directly: the trip led to the model that became the company's calling card, the Tour du Monde. Sources also differ on exactly when this model was introduced and reached showrooms — some point to the mid-1920s around the time of the journey itself, others to the years just after — with roughly 427 examples built during 1927 and 1928. Whatever the precise date the badge first appeared, the Tour du Monde became, and remains, the Gillet-Herstal model that collectors most want to find.
The years that followed were the marque's strongest. Gillet-Herstal built a wide range through the late 1920s and into the 1930s — 350cc, 400cc, 500cc, and 600cc machines, along with dedicated competition and racing variants — and the four-stroke models in particular earned a reputation for genuine quality rather than mere adequacy. This was a company punching well above the size its home market might suggest, competing for attention alongside the larger European makers on the strength of engineering rather than volume.
Racing and Records
Gillet's competition effort centered on one extraordinary rider: René Milhoux, who campaigned the works overhead-camshaft racer and set speed record after speed record for the marque. Milhoux's most notable achievement was the world 24-hour Bol d'Or record, set on a 600cc sidecar outfit — a discipline that rewarded exactly the kind of mechanical stamina Gillet had been building toward since the flat-out endurance of Sexé's world tour. Behind Milhoux stood an engineering team of real substance, including Marcel Van Oirbeek and a colleague named Dethier, whose work on the record-breaking machines let Gillet-Herstal's advertising claim, at one point, no fewer than 33 world records to its name.
It is worth being honest about the shape of that racing history: beyond Milhoux's record runs and Sexé's world journey, detailed championship results for Gillet do not survive in any accessible record. This was a company that built its competition reputation on speed records and long-distance proof-of-concept riding rather than a season-by-season Grand Prix campaign, and that is a different, quieter kind of racing glory — but a genuine one, and it sold motorcycles across Europe through the interwar years.
Landmark Models and the Postwar Shift
By the time the Tour du Monde had cemented Gillet's name, the range around it included 350cc Sport variants, 500cc Competition models, and 500cc Bol d'Or machines through the 1930s, each drawing on the same four-stroke engineering the firm had refined since the unitary-construction experiments of the previous decade. War interrupted everything, but Gillet came back into the postwar market with a genuinely forward-looking touch: the 1946 launch of the 239cc two-stroke Superconfort, which introduced swinging-arm rear suspension to the range at a moment when many manufacturers, Belgian and otherwise, were still sending riders down the road on rigid frames or crude plunger setups.
From there, Gillet-Herstal's product line drifted steadily toward two-strokes across the board, following the postwar European taste for smaller, cheaper, easier machines. In 1953 the company added a 125cc scooter built under license from the French firm Bernardet, chasing the scooter boom that was reshaping personal transport across the continent. It was a sensible move commercially, but it also marked a company adapting to survive rather than one setting the pace, and the writing on that wall would not take long to become legible.
Amalgamation, Decline, and the End
The postwar European motorcycle market contracted hard through the 1950s, squeezed by cheap cars and changing tastes, and Belgium's manufacturers felt it as sharply as anyone. In 1955, Gillet-Herstal joined FN and Saroléa in an attempt at mutual survival, the three historic Belgian firms agreeing to amalgamate rather than compete themselves into oblivion separately. It did not save Gillet as an independent maker. Production of Gillet-Herstal motorcycles ended in 1958, and for a short stretch afterward — 1959 and 1960 — Saroléa assembled further Gillet-Herstal machines using whatever components remained in stock, a quiet, mechanical way of using up the last of a company's inventory rather than a true continuation of the marque.
Even that was not quite the final chapter. The Saroléa-Gillet operation continued supplying spare parts to the Belgian army for years afterward, with 1973 standing as the official date when the business ceased activity altogether. There was no dramatic bankruptcy announcement, no single closure date that made headlines — just a long, slow winding-down from full production to spare-parts supply to nothing, over the better part of two decades.
The Marque Today
Gillet motorcycles have not been built since that quiet ending in the early 1970s, and the marque has never been revived in its original form. What survives is the collector's world: pre-war Gillet-Herstals, and the Tour du Monde in particular, are prized by European vintage motorcycle enthusiasts who understand what the badge represents — a small Belgian firm that built genuinely well-engineered machines and then proved them by riding one around the world.
There is a separate Gillet name active in Belgium today, and there is some disagreement over exactly when it began, but it belongs to a different business entirely: Automobiles Gillet, the sports car maker behind the Vertigo, founded by former racing driver Tony Gillet around the early 1990s, with the first prototype shown publicly at the Brussels Auto Show in January 1992. It has no corporate connection to the motorcycle firm from Herstal, beyond the coincidence of a surname that, in Belgian motoring history, seems to keep turning up in workshops where people build things to be raced and ridden hard. For the original Gillet-Herstal, the story ends where all such stories end for the marques that don't make it to the modern era: in the hands of restorers, historians, and the occasional lucky owner of a Tour du Monde, still turning over an engine that was built to cross the world once, and did.