Like any child of the 1980s, I grew up reading the stories of Tintin, thrilling to the exploits of the boy detective, laughing at the antics of Captain Haddock and Snowy, and being slightly bemused that one time he blew up a rhinoceros with dynamite.
Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, breathed life into every line of his characters, but he also took a particular care in the accuracy of his backgrounds. The Karaboudjan, that ship crewed by villainous, drug-smuggling scum, was sketched from life. Aircraft were faithfully copied line-for-line, and cities and architecture too. And when it came to automobiles, well.... In The Calculus Affair, perhaps the best of the stories, the baddies drive a glowering, low, suspicious-looking machine, all-black with twin chevrons in its grille. It looks like it's up to no good right from the get-go, and soon it's running poor old Tintin's taxicab right into the drink.
For the western reader, the car was interesting simply for its brooding look. For the French youth reading these stories, it would have been far more recognizable: a Citroën Traction Avant, the preferred machine of the Gestapo, and the Free French Army.
The French car enthusiast community on the North Shore is quite robust, with the major show of the year tied to the Italian car show down at Waterfront Park. If you've not heard about it before, sorry, you'll have to wait until next year as this year's show already came and went.
As such, it's hardly a surprise to find that there's a fairly special example tucked away in a local garage: a 1939 Traction Avant belonging to Chris Adshead. The car is mostly original, with just 80,000 kilometres on the clock, and spent the war years lurking under hay bales on a farm just south of Paris. As the Nazi blitzkrieg swept across France, confiscating every form of wheeled transport they could, this car somehow escaped. It was used after the war by an American entrepreneur who travelled around the continent looking for collectible cars, and later made its way first to Washington state, and then up here.
This year, the Traction Avant turns 80, and despite being a car few have seen outside the pages of Tintin, it's quite an important machine. It was the first mass-produced, unibody, front-wheel-drive car ever; while it might look low and swoopy, it's actually quite like your average Toyota Corolla in layout. The brainchild of André-Gustave Citroën, it would nevertheless bankrupt the man who once saw his name spelled out in lights on the Eiffel tower itself.
Citroën, while trained as an engineer, was more a master of distributed intelligence and marketing than an automaking genius. If his contemporary, Ferdinand Porsche, had an almost savant-like ability to focus on a set task to the exclusion of all else, Citroën was a gambler, a promoter, and somebody who wasn't all that interested in cars at first. As an example, the double chevrons that have become a symbol synonymous with his name are taken from a set of gears he discovered in use on a farm, licensed, and then mass-produced.
These gears, which operated more smoothly than the traditional model, were Citroën's first success, something he owed to a mania with mass production. He was obsessed with it, and had as his hero the great industrialist Henry Ford — this despite Ford's early anti-Semitic tendencies and Citroën's Jewish heritage. His first car, the 10 horsepower Type-A, went on sale in the middle of 1919, and a decade or so of strong sales followed.
However, the Traction Avant that succeeded it would be a leap forward in a time when many manufacturers, including Ford, spurned innovation. Citroën's thought was fairly pragmatic: to design a car that would be so advanced, it wouldn't have to be updated for years.
It was one of the first cars to be sculpted in clay (by Italian Flamino Bertoni), and was at least a foot lower than contemporary cars thanks to the unibody rather than body-on-frame construction. Stepping into Adshead's 1939 example, there's a tremendous amount of room, and the driver and passenger sit at the same level as a modern car.
The engineers on the project were André Lefèbvre and Maurice Santurat, and while an automatic transmission was attempted, it broke so they simply came up with a three-speed manual instead. The shifter is mounted vertically on the dash, and each gear has a little gate so the lever doesn't simply fall out from the upper first and third gears. Elegant.
It took just 18 months for the Traction Avant to go from concept to reality, but the tremendous outlay in funds overstretched the company and eventually bankrupted Andre Citroën.
Michelin, tire supplier for the company, stepped in with a bid, and the business transferred out of its founder's hands.
There were other, darker clouds on the horizon too. The Traction Avant enjoyed critical success, but also some early notoriety too. Le Gang des Traction Avants were a band of murderous bank-robbers with names like Pierre "Le Fou" Loutrel, who favoured the Citroën for its handling characteristics. The thieves would steal one to use as a getaway car, and then elude the gendarmes by hurtling down the tight French streets at top speed.
Then, of course, the Luftwaffe arrived overhead with occupation soon afterwards. The all-black Traction Avant became the signature car of the Gestapo, with civilians restricted from purchasing fuel. The cars would arrive in the night suddenly, spiriting away those thought to be aiding the resistance, never to be seen again. It was a car to be feared.
But then, as the fortunes of war started swinging back the other way, the Traction Avant would find itself the chariot of freedom, its sides daubed with the "FFI" signifying the Free French Army. It became a hero of the resistance, and was soon assisting in punting the Wehrmacht back out of France.
After the war, Traction Avants were built in various trims and body styles — including the Familiale, which could seat at least nine — right through until 1957. Nearly 800,000 cars were built in total, in factories in Paris, Denmark, Belgium, and the U.K. Having served both sides in a time of turmoil, the car became a symbol of something quintessentially French, wrested back from the occupiers, and was a star on TV and the silver screen. Traction Avants frequently accompanied the Tour de France, and twice World Accordion Champion Yves Horner travelled on the roof of a Traction Avant, trailing the cyclists and playing her accordion all through the countryside. That might just be the single most French thing that's ever happened.
Eighty years on, the Traction Avant is perhaps a little overshadowed by the jaunty 2CV, but the former's impact on the motoring world echoes through the ages (like, for instance, an accordion). Pioneer, gangster, collaborator, freedom fighter — joyeux anniversaire, Traction Avant — vive la difference!
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