On 6 October, 68 years old, the DS 19 was unveiled on the Citroen stand at the Paris Motor Show. And the world of cars was never the same again. On the first day of the show, 12,000 were sold, for a total of 80,000 units during the entire exhibition. No car has ever managed to do something like this. Just as no other luxury car managed to sell 1.5 million units in its long life, which ended in 1975. An extraordinary success, which went beyond the numbers: it was the car that “explained” the kilometers to motorists, which entered the legend because it could travel on three wheels, which helped French president Charles De Gaulle escape an attack, which was celebrated by other legends such as Brigitte Bardot and Marcello Mastroianni, but also by Ginko, the famous antagonist of Diabolik
To fully understand the spirit of the DS it is necessary to never forget the historical context. We are in 1940 and in a Europe that sees the threatening clouds of the Second World War increasingly gathering, it becomes difficult to think about cars. Nevertheless…
Yet, on the very day in which the feared Nazi troops bypassed the famous Maginot Line, mocking the defenses and thus crossing the border into France, Pierre-Jules Boulanger – the great boss of Citroen – went into action and gave the immediate order to destroy all the prototypes of the tpv (which later became the 2CV) so that they did not fall into the hands of the Nazis (some were later saved hidden in an attic, but that’s another story).
Everything freezes, everything paralyzes, crystallizes. Well, almost everything: in those five long and tragic years before Europe found peace, Citroën designers did not give up and, in extreme conditions, continued to work. And yes: the genesis of DS does not stop, on the contrary. In addition to the famous little 2CV, Citroën is also working on the extraordinary DS project.
So you design, you experiment. And you think. You think. Who knows, perhaps one of the secrets of the 2cv is hidden in one of these many hours spent doing something that is often rare today: thinking…
Thus we arrive at the masterpiece of twentieth-century engineering. Designed by André Lefebvre, an aeronautical designer devoted to the automobile and also “father” of the 2CV and the Traction Avant, designed by the brilliant Flaminio Bertoni, the designer – here too – of the Traction Avant and the legendary 2CV.
Everything here is legend. The shape, the style, the technique. The car that raises and lowers, the single-spoke steering wheel that seems to float in space. And its genesis is also a legend: the DS was supposed to be a medium-sized car, but over many years of planning the Citroen technicians got carried away and created a flagship more than five meters long. Very expensive, very refined. We tried to go back, but it was not possible to do so on some things. This explains the pneumatic suspensions and this explains the style: to drastically shorten the DS, the tail was cut off, to the point that it was no longer known where to place the direction indicators which ended up on the roof, giving life to another iconic element of the DS .
But let’s go back to 6 October 1955, when the gates of the Grand Palais opened on the forty-second edition of the Paris Motor Show: the crowd poured compactly around the white railing surrounding the brand new DS 19, without caring about the other stands.
And it was an immediate shock: in a world of grey, black or blue cars, in fact, DS 19 showed up at the show with a bright apple green body with a white roof, or champagne yellow and an aubergine roof. The wheels and interiors were characterized by sophisticated materials and vivid colors: light blue, brick red, green, caramel, lilac. Its futuristic lines, the work of the Italian designer Flaminio Bertoni as we said, seemed to come from another planet.
Symbol of avant-garde and French savoir faire, with a touch of Italian style – thanks to Flaminio Bertoni and Walter Becchia who designed the design and engine respectively – the revolutionary DS 19 was introduced by another icon of Italian beauty, Gina Lollobrigida. In fact, on October 5, the “Car Goddess” made her first appearance on the cover of the French magazine Paris Match, accompanied by the face of the beautiful actress. An impressive debut, made even more sensational because until October 4th no one knew anything: years of secrecy in which Citroën even gave up on filing the patents, to prevent the competition from copying ideas and solutions. Then, suddenly, the presentation: there wasn’t a new car on the Citroen stand at the Grand Palais for the forty-second edition of the Paris Motor Show. Many more: there was the future.
A future that Pierre-Jules Boulanger will not be able to see realised, just as André Citroën was unable to see that of the Traction-avant: at the wheel of this latest model, Boulanger will die in a road accident in Broût-Vernet, the November 11, 1950.
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