Have You Ever Seen Anything as Lovely as a Citroën DS Décapotable?

The most beautiful French car of the postwar era is the Citroën DS Décapotable by Henri Chapron. The sedan introduced in Paris in October 1955 already looked as though it had arrived by a different route from the rest of the motor industry. Its nose scarcely acknowledged the need for a radiator grille, its rear wheels retreated beneath the body, and its roof seemed to hover above the glass. The convertible makes that improbable collection of decisions look inevitable. The sedan is the more consequential design. The side view shows exactly what Chapron changed.

Chapron did not simply remove the roof. Longer front doors replace the sedan’s four-door rhythm with one opening on each side, while the rear body carries an uninterrupted surface toward the tail. The eye no longer has to negotiate a rear door seam and a roof pillar before reaching the end of the car. With the hood folded, the windscreen stands almost alone above a body that appears to be slipping out from under it.

The useful comparison is the prewar Talbot-Lago T150-C SS Teardrop by Figoni et Falaschi. Its body gathers the wheels, cabin, and tail into a succession of swollen curves, each apparently pushing the next into place. The drama comes from the long uninterrupted flank, low windscreen, and covered rear wheels rather than added ornament. The DS approaches beauty from the opposite direction: a broad, low nose, restrained flanks, and a narrowing rear, with very little ornament available to disguise an unresolved line.

Both cars make a difficult shape seem effortless, but the Citroën has the additional pleasure of recognizable industrial ancestry. Beneath Chapron’s work is the family sedan, still visible in the front wings, covered rear wheels, and peculiar stance. The coachbuilder did not have to erase the DS to improve its silhouette. He found another way to finish it.

The authorship is worth keeping straight. Flaminio Bertoni and his team shaped the DS, André Lefèbvre directed its vehicle architecture, and Paul Magès developed the hydraulic system. Chapron’s contribution was the open body. His independently offered DS convertibles appeared in 1958, before Citroën commissioned the version presented in October 1960 and sold through its dealers. La Croisette and the other independent Chapron bodies belong to that story, but they are not interchangeable with the factory catalogued cabriolet. Nor does the result require a legend that the original sedan had secretly wanted to be a convertible all along.

The longer doors are central to the transformation. Visually, they move the division in the body rearward and give the front seats the generous opening expected of an expensive two-door car. Practically, rear passengers must now enter through that same opening, and a long door requires room beside the car. The cleaner profile has an ordinary cost.

The sedan’s roof gives the DS an almost domestic spaciousness; without it, the body looks longer and the windscreen more sharply raked, even though the familiar front end remains. Below it, the rear wheel covers keep the tail visually enclosed. An exposed rear wheel might have made the car look more conventionally sporting. Covering it preserves the impression of a body moving as one object rather than a cabin carried between four tires.

There is considerable work behind that apparent simplicity. An open body loses the roof’s contribution to stiffness, and its remaining structure must carry loads by other routes. Chapron’s conversion required structural changes as well as different outer panels and accommodation for the folding hood. Reinforcement is not proof of equal rigidity or negligible weight, and no such claim is needed to admire the result. The reinforcement and hood packaging remain visually subordinate to the body shape. Raise the fabric roof and it becomes a different composition, more intimate and less expansive, rather than merely the open view with a lid attached.

The underlying mechanical distinction also survives. In the DS suspension, pressurized hydraulic fluid transmits wheel movement to a gas spring; the self-leveling system restores the intended ride height as the load changes. The gas supplies the springing, not an absence of springs. The DS also combined hydraulic assistance with front-wheel drive and inboard front disc brakes. Equipment evolved over the production run, so the later directional headlamp arrangement should not be imagined on every cabriolet. This was advanced touring machinery beneath coachwork that could easily have excused a much less interesting car.

Color changes which surfaces dominate. A light body emphasizes the broad surfaces and the rise over the front wheels; a dark one makes the bright trim and pale cabin more conspicuous. The leather is exposed to view when the roof is down, so exterior and interior become adjacent parts of the same composition.

This was not an inexpensive way to obtain a DS with better weather. DS’s own historical account describes the cabriolet as costing almost twice as much as the saloon in period. The Tucson Auto Museum records 1,365 factory DS and ID cabriolets, including 483 DS21s, a total that should not be expanded to encompass every independent Chapron conversion. The expense bought labor, scarcity, and a different body, not a corresponding multiplication of speed. That is a rather civilized understanding of extravagance.

Chapron later applied the open-car treatment to the SM in the Mylord. The relationship is interesting without making the DS cabriolet the documented parent of the SM’s styling. Each takes an unusually sophisticated Citroën and asks what happens when the cabin is opened to the sky. The DS remains the more graceful answer to my eye. Its slim windscreen frame and retreating rear body give the passengers prominence without making them look perched on the machinery.

The Museum of Modern Art’s collection includes a 1973 DS23 sedan, appropriately recognizing the underlying design rather than certifying a hierarchy of its derivatives. The convertible’s appeal is a separate judgment. It gives up some of the sedan’s usefulness and much of its everyday anonymity to expose the long horizontal relationship between nose, cabin, and tail. The fixed-roof sedan retains the structural advantage of its roof. The Décapotable is the more beautiful object, purchased at an intelligible cost.

Only the Figoni et Falaschi Teardrop surpasses it in my ordering of French automotive beauty. The Talbot-Lago makes a body flow around its occupants; the DS Décapotable appears to let them emerge from it. Teardrop first, DS Décapotable second. Beyond that, the discussion is administrative.