CITROEN HISTORY
Citroen, probably the world’s most innovative car firm, is 100 years old. For a special birthday parade, we rounded up six icons and sent them on a Tour de France
What better way to celebrate 100 years of Citroen than with a roadtrip across France in its greatest hits?
Tranquil, don’t you think? The Traction Avant parked up on the Quai de Javel. And it is. It’s late on a still, calm night. The frenzied honkand-shrug of Paris is only distantly heard. This site is where the first Traction Avant was built and, before that, 100 years ago, the first Citroen. Today it’s Parc André Citroën, the giant greenhouses both a physical and symbolic outline of the factory that once stood on this spot. A bistro around the corner bears his name, a Metro station too. A good place to reflect. But getting here? Tranquil was not the word.
Paris cuts the Traction Avant some slack. Respects the rheumy yellow eyes, the graunching joints and hiccuping progress. There’s no synchromesh for first gear, and the three-speed manual’s lever droops from the dash – first where you’d normally find fourth, then across to first for second if you see what I mean. The mirrors show little, the headlights less, I rely on the liberté, egalité, fraternité of other drivers. A tense trip – tense enough that I clean forgot to buy a baguette. That was going to be the baton for this relay around France. Six iconic Citroens, a journey from the centre of Paris to the beaches of the south, each car driven where it was designed to excel. Only the Paris that the Traction Avant was designed for was the Paris of the Thirties. The Traction Avant was, and probably remains, the most innovative new car ever launched. It didn’t invent the technologies that made it famous – independent suspension, monocoque construction, front-wheel drive – but Citroen was an early adopter, the combination
(one that underpins the car industry to this day) unique. At the time, it was a massive gamble. But that was André Citroën through and through. A publicity-hungry self-promoter, happiest at the baccarat table of the Deauville casino, he once said, “I am not the least interested in the game, nor whether I win or lose. I am only interested in whether the amount I gamble is large enough to be noticed.”
He gambled too hard on the Traction Avant, invested too much, knocked down and rebuilt the factory, cut one too many corners. Citroen had been the world’s second-largest car company, but just eight months after the Traction Avant entered volume production on 19 April 1934, the firm was bankrupt and in Michelin’s hands. André Citroën died just four months after that.
But his approach didn’t. This bold, imaginative, radical desire to do things differently took Citroen forwards. With no propshaft to the rear wheels, the Traction Avant was spacious inside; without a separate chassis and coachbuilt body, it was low and light – the construction saved over 70kg of steel per car. And it feels modern to drive. This one’s from 1955, so benefits from rack-and-pinion steering and 57bhp. But it’s the smoothness of it, the dignity of its movement, that sets it apart. In 1934, it must have been borderline miraculous. No wonder Citroen shifted three quarters of a million of them across a period punctuated by a world war.
There’s a story from the German occupation. Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the man who replaced André Citroën, was another innovative engineer.
With the Citroen factory overrun and ordered to produce trucks for the German war effort, he came up with a brilliant sabotage strategy. He lowered the ‘full’ mark on the oil dipstick. Cue seized engines across the Reich. By the end of the war, the Gestapo had worked it out, naming him an ‘enemy of the Reich’. But they didn’t get him.
In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, I step out through the Traction Avant’s suicide door and cross the Pont Debilly to the GS. A few small steps, but a metaphorical giant leap. Weird thing is, the GS was, in many ways, a replacement for the Traction Avant. The actual replacement, the DS, was too expensive, leading Citroen to develop a car to sit below it and above the 2CV, even before the TA died in 1957. The GS didn’t arrive until 1970. Now that’s thorough development. No hatchback as CEO Pierre Bercot considered it too utilitarian, but the best aerodynamics of any car of the day, plus hydropneumatic suspension and a drum speedometer.
There’s not a dial on the whole dash, the speedo barrel mimics bathroom scales, the rev-counter needle flickers like something from a period hi-fi, the steering wheel has a single spoke. You can see your knees while driving. It takes me a while to realise this is unusual. The following morning, we traipse out of Paris. The GS was the everyday Citroen, instantly popular, way more innovative and advanced than the Peugeot 304 or Renault 6 it lined up against.
For us, it’s transport to a more bucolic France, beyond the sprawl of Paris, into the quiet villages that punctuate these agricultural plains. Paris may have grown and developed, Baron hasn’t. I get my baguettes at the boulangerie, rest them on the soft-velour passenger seat, crumbs fall, delicious smell permeates, I sink into the spongy upholstery, use three fingers to coax the tiny gearlever into first, two for the slender steering wheel and, summoning up the flat-four, set off into the countryside.
It was the chassis stiffness and refinement that most struck me about the Traction Avant. Here, it’s how well suited the GS is to this environment. So absorbent over speedbumps, so soft and calm on the open road. No sense of hurry, just unruffled, relaxed, elastic progress. Travel in a series of shrugs, but artfully done, both in its dynamics and its detailing.
“THE DS IS ROUTINELY PRESENT IN LISTS OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL”
The GS, wantonly eccentric though it is, has nothing on the SM – that is a car which is defiantly rare-breed. It joins us as we approach the D1, a jet-set car for the long haul south. In Citroen’s long history of automotive gambles, buying Maserati simply to get a V6 has to be right up there. OK, that’s a sweeping generalisation, for there was plenty of technology sharing after the 1968 takeover (most of it in Italy’s favour). But the SM was the most obvious result of a partnership that ended acrimoniously in 1975, Maserati sales withering under the oil crisis, Citroen’s because of a risky venture ( quelle surprise) into rotary engines and the GS’s late arrival.
What a symbol of the era the SM is. The 2.7-litre V6 isn’t some raspy, peaky six, but more akin to a straight six in its whirring smoothness, refinement and torque. But boy, is it idiosyncratic: height-adjustable hydro-pneumatic suspension, front-wheel-drive, swivelling headlights and Diravi, the world’s first variable-assistance steering: Super light at low speed, super stable at high speed and, with only two turns between locks, super sharp around corners. No feel, but also no kickback, and then there’s the vicious selfcentring to catch out the unwary.