Citroen DS changed French history
Car that saved de Gaulle an icon of Gallic technology
This is the second in a series of special, once-a-month columns dealing with interesting aspects of automobiles. Last week, Jil Mcintosh began a series on designers. Today: The relationship between cars and culture. Next week: auto trivia.
It’s not often that cars change the course of history, yet 50 years ago, a Citroen DS saved the life of French president Charles de Gaulle. Rocked by a hail of bullets from right-wing assassins, sprayed with broken glass, the chauffeur threw the car into a skid and accelerated away on punctured tires.
The angels seem to have blessed this car since its debut at the 1955 Paris Motor Show. Like the later Concorde, the Citroen DS was a symbol of French pride, an icon of Gallic high technology. Classic and Sports Car magazine called it the most beautiful car of all time. It seemed fitting that “DS” in French was pronounced déesse, like “goddess.”
The Americans didn’t get it. The car sold poorly in the United States. Lacking power windows, air conditioning and a massive V-8 engine, the Citroen DS didn’t appeal to the Cadillac set. A basic difference between French and American car fanciers had come to light. “It’s more of an intellectual pleasure in Europe to look at cars,” says JeanPhilippe Finkelstein, a French painter and architect now living in Toronto.
Ironically, in the heyday of Detroit, no one admired American cars more than the French. “They looked like exotic birds, especially in the ’50s and ’60s,” Finkelstein comments. Given the always close association of cars with movies, it is not surprising that Detroit icons costarred in a number of classic French movies. In Jean-luc Godard’s 1960 Breathless, for example, the hero, played by a Gauloises-puffing Jean-paul Belmondo, is obsessed with all things American. To demonstrate his love, he spends much of the movie stealing American cars, such as a Thunderbird coupe, and going for joy rides.
A movie the following year, La Belle Americaine ( The American Beauty), told a more ambivalent tale. A lowly mechanic who wanted to buy a used motorcycle ended up, through some unlikely plot twists, the owner of a brand new Oldsmobile. The hero’s life is transformed. Awed by the car, his fellow villagers treat him with new-found respect. Yet the car causes him nothing but trouble. The movie has the force of an Aesop’s fable. The “exotic bird” is virtually useless in the narrow highways of France. Still, the pleasure of contemplating beauty trumps more mundane concerns, at least as far as French intellectuals are concerned. In 1957, the late French philosopher Roland Barthes sang the praises of the Citroen DS in his book Mythologies. The car that would later foil assassins was, to Barthes, the modern equivalent of a sacred item. “Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object,” Barthes wrote. Most car writers limit their poetry to remarks about “fluid lines” but Barthes soared beyond that with the Déesse. “Until now the ultimate in cars belonged to the bestiary of power; here it becomes at once more spiritual and more objectlike,” he wrote of the Citroen. “This spiritualization can be seen in the extent, the quality and the material of the glass work. The Déesse is obviously the exaltation of glass, and pressed metal is only a support for it. Here the glass surfaces are not windows, they are vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, the spread and the brilliance of soap bubbles.”
Perhaps it was the spell cast by these soap bubbles and not the suspension system that saved de Gaulle’s life. After the ’50s and the ’60s, however, cars, American as well as French, began to lose their magical qualities. The 1967 Godard movie Weekend contained a famously long shot of an apocalyptic traffic jam. The immobile cars strung along the highway are magical objects no more. The 1971 Jacques Tati comic film Trafic also featured a traffic jam almost as colossal as Godard’s. Here, however, there was no apocalyptic feeling — but instead viewer hears the cheerful song of birds as drivers emerge, happy to be released from their vehicles. One thing seemed certain: the French love affair with the sirens of Detroit was over. “The fascination with American cars is definitely an old story,” says Finkelstein. “Cars now look the same.”
For the French, the end of one affair marks the beginning of another. These days, French intellectuals are enchanted by the theories of Paul Virilio, a technology guru fond of speculating about the car of the future. According to this school of thought, we inhabit time and not space. Furthermore, when we’re behind the wheel we are almost mesmerized, as if by the flickering images of cinema. The car of the future, then, will not go anywhere but will resemble something more like a home entertainment centre.
It sounded goofy to me — until I was stuck in a traffic jam beside an American-built minivan. The vehicle was frozen in a sea of cars. A flickering screen caught my eye. The kids in the back seat were watching a movie.