Bernard Auplat ran Butagaz from October 2000. Les Echos announced the appointment on 24 October 2000: he was 43, a graduate of the École supérieure de physique-chimie industrielle de Paris and of the Institut Français du Pétrole, and already twenty years into a career at Shell.
He died in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, on 21 October 2017, at 60. A family notice in Le Figaro’s Carnet du jour and the entry kept under his name in France’s national register of deceased persons line up on the date; a British companies file covers the working life in between.
No newspaper profile of him exists. What survives is a paper trail with two ends, a corporate career and a funeral announcement. The same name was carried by another Frenchman born a generation earlier, and the two sets of records are easy to confuse, because directories and registers list the two men side by side. Telling them apart matters more than it sounds: one born in 1957, the other in 1933, they share a surname and little else.
Who Was Bernard Auplat?
Bernard Auplat was a French energy executive, born in the Loire department on 5 January 1957, who spent most of his working life at Shell and became managing director of Butagaz in October 2000.
He died in Rueil-Malmaison, in Hauts-de-Seine, on 21 October 2017, aged 60.
The anchor for all of this is the civil register. INSEE, France’s statistics office, maintains the national file of deceased persons and publishes it as matchID; its entry for Bernard Auplat reads: male, born in Le Coteau on 5 January 1957, died in Rueil-Malmaison on 21 October 2017, aged 60. INSEE explains that the file is built from information the municipalities transmit, which is what gives the entry its authority.
Notice what the two documents each supply. The British file that covers his later career records his birth as January 1957, month and year only. The French register fills in the day and the town: 5 January, at Le Coteau, a small town across the river from Roanne. That pattern of blanks and fillings repeats through his whole record: no single document carries his full life, but each one fills a blank the others leave.
The Shell Years, 1980–2000
Les Echos summarized his route in the page that announced the Butagaz appointment, and that summary remains the nearest thing to a biography he received in print. Bernard Auplat entered the Shell group in 1980, straight from the two schools the paper lists, and began in refining. In 1983 he joined the economic studies directorate; in 1986 he was posted to London, to the group’s trading arm.
The 1990s brought a run of country roles. He was Shell France’s supply director from 1989 to 1991, then assistant to the vice-president for refining and supply in Europe, at The Hague. In 1994 he became director of lubricants in France, adding bitumen to the portfolio in 1996. By 1998 he was commercial director for France, in charge of sales outside the filling-station networks.
Read as a list, the roles trace one long movement through the same business: fuels, lubricants, supply, commercial. Paris, London and The Hague appear in rotation, with no change of employer across twenty years. That stability is itself information about a man no one interviewed; the appointments were made by people who watched him work.
Managing Director of Butagaz, October 2000
Les Echos reported on 24 October 2000 that Bernard Auplat had been named managing director of Butagaz, replacing Xavier Le Mintier. Butagaz sells bottled butane and propane across France, a business a refining man could take on without learning a new industry. The paper gave his age as 43.
The move is also where the trail starts to thin. In the records used here, nothing dated survives between the autumn of 2000 and the next trace, four years later. The French press wrote nothing more about him; no filing of his from those years surfaces anywhere.
The London Directorship, 2004–2013
The next trace is British. On 1 September 2004 Bernard Auplat was appointed a director of Shell International Trading and Shipping Company Limited, the group’s trading company registered at Shell Centre in London. He resigned on 25 July 2013.
His appointments page at Companies House lists exactly one mandate, that directorship, with a French nationality and a birth date of January 1957.
The page does quiet work: it connects the two halves of the record. A French civil register and a British officers register normally never meet, but here they carry the same man. The London file’s birth month and year match the French entry’s date, and the name is the one the family printed on the notice in 2017. The chain runs name, birth data, nationality, and each link holds.
Death and Funeral, October 2017
He died in Rueil-Malmaison on 21 October 2017. The family notice for Bernard Auplat appeared in Le Figaro’s Carnet du jour on 24 October. It names his wife, Claire; his children Bruno, Marion, Jean-François and Pierre; Alexandre Milan as his son-in-law and Cécile Vaullerin as his daughter-in-law.
The religious service was set for Thursday 26 October 2017 at 10:15, in the church of Saint-Léonard, 15 avenue Foch, at Croissy-sur-Seine in the Yvelines, celebrated by père Boidot. The burial followed in the family plot at the cemetery of Roquefort-la-Bédoule, a village in the Bouches-du-Rhône. The notice gives no reason for the Provençal cemetery, and none appears anywhere else.
The closing lines are the part a register never carries. “Ni fleurs ni couronnes”: no flowers, no wreaths. In their place the family asked for donations to the Institut Gustave Roussy, the cancer centre at Villejuif, or to the diocese of the Yvelines, for the retreats of its priests. The notice names no illness. The choice of the institute is the only hint it prints.
Two Bernard Auplats in the Records
Company directories list a different Bernard Auplat, born in June 1933, as the manager of SCI Auplat Fouilland, a property company founded at Cours, in the Rhône, on 30 June 1982. The two men are not the same person, and the birth year settles it in one glance: 1957 for the Shell executive, 1933 for the other.
The second man’s own records are not tidy, and they deserve a warning of their own. The company directory shows the 1933-born manager holding a mandate from 15 November 2016. INSEE’s file, searched the same way as the executive’s, holds a Bernard Antonin Marcel Auplat born on 26 June 1933 at Saint-Vincent-de-Reins, in the same department as Cours, who died at Roanne on 22 July 1996, aged 63. Same name, same birth month and year, same corner of the Rhône: the two descriptions read like one man, and if they are one man, one of the two registers is out of step with the other. Nothing in the sources used here reconciles them.
A table keeps the two men apart at a glance.
| Bernard Auplat, born 1957 | Bernard Auplat, born 1933 | |
|---|---|---|
| Birth | 5 January 1957, Le Coteau (Loire), per the civil register | June 1933 per the directory; the register lists a Bernard Antonin Marcel Auplat born 26 June 1933 at Saint-Vincent-de-Reins (Rhône) |
| Working record | Shell from 1980; managing director of Butagaz from October 2000; director of Shell International Trading and Shipping Company Limited in London, 2004–2013 | Manager of SCI Auplat Fouilland, a property company at Cours (Rhône), founded 30 June 1982 |
| Death | 21 October 2017, Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), aged 60 | The register records a namesake of this region who died at Roanne on 22 July 1996, aged 63; the company file shows a mandate dated 2016 |
| Where the traces sit | Les Echos, Companies House, INSEE, Le Figaro | Company directory, INSEE |
Keep the two apart by the year: any record that pairs the name with 1957 concerns the executive buried from Croissy-sur-Seine; a pairing with 1933 concerns the other man, whose own files disagree among themselves.
What the Records Leave Open
The records leave open three things: his birthplace outside the civil entry, the illness that ended his life, and what he did between 2000 and 2004 and after his 2013 resignation. No source used here fills any of them.
The two documents even disagree slightly on his age. The notice says he died “dans sa 60e année”, in his sixtieth year, while the civil entry, counting from 5 January 1957, makes him 60. The British file’s month and year of birth back the register’s figure, which is the one that survives arithmetic.
What the files cannot give, the notice does. The corporate record last touches Bernard Auplat in July 2013; in October 2017 he is a husband and father of four, with a funeral in a church at Croissy-sur-Seine and a grave in Provence. The trail ends there, with the family’s request for donations instead of flowers.
