VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE THE FRENCH: WHY ARE THEIR CARS SO WEIRD?

THE AUTOMOBILE WAS NOT invented in France; it emerged in several places almost simultaneously in the late 19th century. But France made it weird.

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A. (Previous pages) Alpine, with coachbuilder Chappe et Gessalin, was early to use fiberglass methods adopted from the U.S. for the A106 body in 1955.

B. French peculiarity, be it in the form of a rallying Alpine, a mid-engine Matra, a durable 2CV, an innovative DS, or a Frankenstein Peugeot, has a special charm.

C. The Citroën Traction Avant was years ahead of anything else on the road in the Thirties.

D. Figoni et Falaschi's bodywork on the Talbot-Lago T150-C SS took Streamline style to the extreme.

E. Half luxury coupe and half MPV, the Renault Avantime is, if nothing else, unique.

There are good reasons for this. First, unlike in other early car-producing countries, the automotive industry—including foundational French manufacturers such as De Dion Bouton, Panhard, and Renault—was centralized in the capital. “Everything was in the same place: finance, politics, industry, fashion. It was all in Paris,” says Sébastien Faurès, an aeronautical engineer and co-founder of the French automotive historical society Patrimoine et Histoire de l'Automobile en France.

Paris, a global artistic epicenter, was at that time a seminal locus of modernism. This emergent style attempted to make sense of industrialization’s unmooring of political and fiscal hierarchies, as well as the undermining of socioreligious beliefs by then-novel scientific insights like evolution.

France was forward-thinking culturally—and industrially. “French manufacturers were oriented toward the future,” Faurès says. “They were not going to copy the past.” The country enthusiastically embraced technology, creating a series of government-funded engineering schools in the 19th century to train designers of infrastructure and transportation. The automobile thus became central to French faith in progress.