21/10/2009 - W de Forte a Francophile? Surely not!

Citroën Traction Avant

You will not be surprised to learn that André Citroën was a Frenchman. We all have our crosses to bear, but he had no choice in the matter, I understand, his family having moved from the Netherlands to Paris in 1870, some five years before his birth.

As such, his name should rightly have a couple of dots above the ‘e’ in his surname. I am at the mercy of the typesetter of this fine publication as to whether this nicety will appear in print, but linguists and pedants will be interested to know that the family name was plain Citroen when they lived in Amsterdam. The dieresis was only added upon reaching France, perhaps to avoid confusion with lemons. As the surname was ultimately derived from the Dutch for that very citrus fruit, as sold by grandfather Citroen in his market stall, one wonders why.

No matter; André was a clever chap in so many ways, with a flair for engineering, business and promotion. His less useful traits included laziness and a weakness for gambling. After leaving the groves of academe, Citroën’s early success was built on a type of double-helical gear, apparently inspired by a chance sight of the dismantled wooden guts of a water mill while on a train journey to visit the Polish arm of the family. After adapting and patenting the idea, he set up in business to produce steel gears with a distinctive herringbone pattern, which have the advantage of being quiet and producing no side thrust.

Thus was born Citroën’s fortune and the double-chevron company motif. With a thriving and very profitable business, no doubt our hero could have lived a life of gay Parisian leisure should he have so wished, but immediately after the Great War André decided to diversify into the automobile market. He wasn’t particularly interested in cars, but he could see that everyone else would be, either now or later.

The Type A Citroen motor car duly appeared in 1919, a not particularly adventurous design that became successful because it was cheap, thanks to the application of mass-production techniques, as pioneered by Henry Ford. One futuristic feature, however, was a set of pressed steel wheels, then a fairly recent Michelin innovation.

In the 1920s Citroën became one of the top half-dozen motor manufacturers in the world, employing tens of thousands of workers in factories dispersed far and wide. Few people were unfamiliar with the name, at least partly because since 1925 it had been emblazoned in thousand feet high lights on the Eiffel Tower. Those who missed that unsubtle message might also have seen ‘Citroën’ sky-written by passing aeroplanes, a technique some say invented by him for the purpose. Whether they found a way of adding the all-important dieresis, I know not.

In contrast to the flamboyant marketing, the cars were still quite staid, selling because they were relatively cheap, well-equipped and available through an extensive network of dealers. The patron wanted the next generation of Citroens to be bought for their innate quality. If a car were good enough, he reasoned, it wouldn’t go out of fashion and therefore could be kept in production for much longer after recouping the initial investment.

The Traction Avant was that voiture! Inspiration came from a variety of sources, including the 1931 prototype build by American manufacturer, Budd, which just happened to have front wheel drive and a unitary construction bodyshell (aka, usually incorrectly, ‘monocoque’). Citroën already had business links with the company, and had earlier bought Budd’s patent for an all-steel body, so it’s likely that ideas had been buzzing through brains for a while before the TA project began in earnest in 1932.

Astonishingly, after appointing gifted designers, André Lefèbvre and Flaminio Bertoni, to develop the concept, it took barely a year before the car was unveiled. A popular misconception is that the Traction was the first with front wheel drive, unitary construction, independent suspension and hydraulic brakes. Not so! All those things had been tried many years before. For instance, the Lancia Lambda made from 1922 featured a unitary body and IRS, while Alvis back here in Blighty had produced FWD models in 1928, with DKW of Germany not far behind. Still, one has to give Citroën credit for being brave enough to put all these elements together, in such a short time.

One also has to hand Monsieur Citroën un grand brickbat for insisting that his new car should have an automatic transmission, a novelty that appealed to lazy motorists like himself but had far too many teething troubles… literally.

Unfortunately, the general economic climate and the cost of developing such an avant-garde (no pun intended) automobile put the business under extreme financial stress. In desperate search of a cash injection in early 1934, the TA was shown off to prospective lenders. It’s reported that all was going well until the delicate automatic gearbox disintegrated, resulting in immediate disinterest from those considering ploughing more money into the company.

Bankruptcy loomed, and Michelin, the largest creditor, took control and promptly pensioned off the company founder. In a cruel twist, André Citroën became ill and died the following year, along with his million watt advertising hoarding on the Eiffel Tower.

Strangely, or not, his car business continued virtually as before, with the controlling Michelin men letting the design team get on with launching the Traction, minus its troublesome automatic transmission.

Faced with such innovation, people were suspicious. Arch rival Peugeot declared that the car would be unstable without rear wheel drive and dangerously weak without a traditional chassis. Citroën responded by launching a TA over a cliff to land on its nose, resulting in so little damage that the doors could still be opened normally afterwards. Any other doubts about functionality were well and truly answered in 1935 when François Lecot managed to drive an incredible 400,000km in 400 days in a Type 11.

Mention of which reminds me that although all Tractions share the same basics, they were available in a baffling number of variations, with a deeply confusing selection of names. To give a taster, the first model, powered by a 1303cc engine, was the 7A, which was almost immediately succeeded by the 7B and 7C, each with slightly raised capacity. Then there was the 1911cc 11, and the 2867cc, six-cylinder 15. The numbers usually refer to the French system of fiscal horsepower rating (CV, standing for ‘Cheval Vapeur’). But sometimes they don’t, because the 15 was actually a 16CV!

To add further bewilderment, the initial 7CV was called the Super Modern Twelve in Britain, while the 11 was called the 15, not to be confused with the French 15, which was actually a 16CV. To make things crystal clear, I should also mention that the French 15 (16CV) is often called the Six, because that’s how many cylinders it has, of course.

Beyond that, a choice of wheelbase lengths and body styles were catalogued, including the Commerciale, which has a justified claim of being the world’s first hatchback. Perhaps for the sake of our sanity it’s just as well the proposed 3.8 litre V8 never made it into production.

One of Citroën’s many satellite factories was in Slough, as immortalised for all the wrong reasons by John Betjeman (‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now…’). Apart from the obvious steering wheel relocation, British TAs differed in trim from the French version, by having leather upholstery rather than cloth. A chrome radiator grille, semaphore indicators and 12V electrics were other identifying features.

Changes to the steering mechanism and drive shafts were made early on (a major obstacle in providing FWD in those days was the problem of transmitting power to wheels that had also to be steered, explaining 1000km greasing intervals). In the last years before the War, the car also gained a set of distinctive broad-spoked wheels known as pilotes.

Understandably, production dwindled after 1939, although the occupying Germans appreciated the Traction’s abilities, it’s gathered. A superior mode of travel to Hitler’s People’s Car, we can be certain! No time was lost in restarting manufacture in peacetime. Some essentially minor alterations were made, but the model carried on into the 1950s, looking increasingly quaint compared to the new breed of American-influenced autos.

1954 gave us a taste of another future, when the rear torsion-bar suspension was supplanted by a hydro-pneumatic system, which was to appear on the groundbreaking DS scheduled to arrive the following year. The last of some 750,000 Tractions was built in July, 1957.

Notwithstanding my loyalty to an even more ancient motor car, I must admit that familiarity had made me slightly contemptuous of the big Citroën by the mid-1950s. Like everyone else, though, I warmed to it again when the model made regular appearances on television in the hands of Inspector Maigret. Always a rare sight on UK roads, a great number continued to be used as everyday transport in France right up into the 1980s, when the unfortunate word ‘classic’ entered our lives. Over 25,000 were assembled in Slough (the bombs landed on Coventry instead), but not many seem to remain and values have risen accordingly.

The scruffy example pictured here, a late French model, has recently been rescued from a long period of idleness in a farm outbuilding. After a static quarter of a century, it needed only minor work to make roadworthy. Sensibly, the new owner has resisted the temptation to destroy the car’s character by embarking on a ‘restoration’. Blemishes abound on the grey bodywork, but it’s an eminently usable machine, as proved by a recent trip to Arras for the model’s 75th anniversary celebration. A mere 800 mile trip may not have impressed M. Lecot, but we are all much older than we were then!

I first caught sight of the Citroen closer to home. Wearing its rusty patina with pride, it looked splendid, and attracted far more attention than the ranks of cosmetically enhanced cars nearby. Few shapes are so stylish or evocative. De Forte is emphatically not a Francophile, but his eyes misted with the memories of a lost age; of Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf and a time when motoring – and life - was fun. The word ‘icon’ is grossly overused these days, but the Traction Avant deserves the appellation.