Sadly, the launch of the revolutionary Citroën Traction Avant coincided with the financial collapse of the overcommitted Citroën empire, and the final illness of André Citroën (1878–1935) himself. The control of Citroën passed to the Michelin tyre company (one of the biggest creditors), which ran the company in a singularly enlightened way for decades and drafted in, as joint manager, a former architect and World War I flyer, Pierre-Jules Boulanger (1885–1950). Tall, austere and never without a Gitane in hand, Boulanger loved driving and, like chief engineer André Lefèbvre (1894–1963), understood that the key to a fine car was good roadholding and suspension behaviour that kept the wheels in contact with the road – ‘la liaison au sol’.
Boulanger saw that France was changing and in 1936 set a brief for a ‘simple spartan transport’. The rural farmer, he argued, had a right to his own special car – one with compliant suspension that could cope with the rough unmade back roads ‘without breaking an egg’. What was needed was a small and cheap ‘motorized pony cart … four wheels under an umbrella’ that could carry two farmers wearing clogs, 60 kg of potatoes or a small cask of wine – in fact, a minimalist vehicle of a type never built before. As for the eggs, a suspension system with springs interlinked front to rear would give Boulanger’s answer, the 2CV, the potential to cross rough roads smoothly at remarkable speed.
The distinctly odd prewar prototypes with single headlight and aluminium corrugated body skins were, fortunately, destroyed or hidden during World War II, but what emerged at the 1948 Paris Motor Show was far better considered. Some journalists judged it a ‘grave error’ but thousands of customers queued to place orders. The English car writer L J K Setright called it ‘the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car’ and this unique French icon stayed in production until 1990.
Could anything be more French? Some see in the original O-shaped door enclosures of the first 2CVs an echo of a ‘Bauhaus circle’ and a heritage of ex-architect and Citroën boss Pierre-Jules Boulanger.