By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

PARIS - A faltering auto giant whose brands are synonymous with the open road. Hundreds of thousands of unionized workers with powerful political backers. An urgent plea for the government to write a virtual blank check.
This is not the story of Ford and General Motors, but British Leyland, a car company that went through ￡11 billion of inflation-adjusted British taxpayer money, or $16.5 billion, in the ‘70s and ‘80s before going out of business. All that is left of the company are memories of cars like the Triumph, and a painful lesson in the limited effectiveness of bailouts.
“It’s all too evocative,” said Leon Brittan, a top official in the government of Margaret Thatcher, the free-market-minded prime minister who still backed the rescue. “I’m not telling the U.S.
what to do, but the lessons of the British experience is don’t throw good money after bad. British Leyland carried on for a few more years, but they’re not there now, are they?”
Other experts are sounding the same alarm. “The British Leyland experience is a relevant and cautionary one,” said John Casesa, a principal in the automotive consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group in New York. “The government got in the business of trying to make a winner out of a structurally flawed company. That’s the risk in the U.S. as well.”
Though Continental automakers have fared better than British ones, Mr. Casesa argues that the long history of government support in Europe made companies like Renault and Fiat strong players in their home markets, but not worldwide.
“With the exception of BMW and Mercedes, European automakers haven’t been globally successful,” he said. “Nor have they been hugely profitable.”
That comparative history is receiving new attention as the United States Congress turns its attention to the fate of Detroit.
The British Leyland bailout remains the classic example of a futile government intervention. The tight cooperation between governments and automakers on the Continent has produced happier results.
For half a century after World War II, the French government was the majority stakeholder in Renault, and Paris still holds a 15 percent stake in the company. In the 1980s, the company received a bailout equal to nearly 4 billion euros, or $5.1 billion in today’s money. Now it is highly profitable - at least compared with its American counterparts.
Today, G.M.’s German subsidiary, Opel, is appealing to Berlin for help, seeking more than 1 billion euros in credit guarantees, according to Carl-Peter Forster, G.M.’s European chief.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said her government would make a decision before Christmas.
“If these guarantees become necessary, those funds should remain within Opel” in Germany, Ms. Merkel told reporters in Berlin after meeting with Mr. Foster and other management and labor officials .
So far, Asian companies have not complained that such a bailout would amount to an anticompetitive subsidy. But Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, recently said that he thought an aid package for Detroit could be “illegal” under World Trade Organization rules.
That has not stopped European automakers from seeking 40 billion euros in loans from the European Investment Bank, ostensibly to help develop cleaner cars.
For Garel Rhys, head of the Center for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales, the trajectory of General Motors is reminiscent of British Leyland not only because of the former’s decision to seek aid to avert bankruptcy, but also for its slow, seemingly inexorable loss of market share. “Both had a history of being the biggest in their market but couldn’t adapt as they lost sales,” he said. “They couldn’t get customers back.”
Michael Edwardes, who took over as British Leyland’s chief executive in November 1977, said it is crucial that the government overhaul the management of the Detroit automakers. “Throwing money at them isn’t enough,” he said. “They need money and they need new management. They need both, not one or the other.”