The dented Citroën Saxo: why Paris is losing its most iconic status symbol

Last month I went to Paris for the first time in years and remembered what a handsome and fabulous city it is. It’s still wonderfully easy to walk around, the buildings are still effortlessly pretty and elegantly proportioned, and they still haven’t taken down that temporary pylon they put up in the 1880s. The pastries are still thick and buttery yet somehow the people are still thin and elegant and the French surgeon general, unique among high-ranking healthcare professionals, seems to have received some data that shows that smoking isn’t bad for you as long as you do it in an insouciantly sexy way.

Yet in some ways Paris has changed. They’re finally losing those little paper tickets on the Metro, for example. The streets seem strangely free of dog logs, making me wonder if Paris is trying to shake off its romantic nickname, The City Of Shite. In four days in town I didn’t experience a single bit of rudeness from a waiter, and frankly that was disappointing because a drink in Paris without a side order of sneering contempt hardly feels like a drink at all. But the most saddening change I noticed in Paris was the car-spotting.

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Unlike London, the streets of central Paris have never run thick with supercars. For reasons relating to liberté, égalité and fraternité it’s never seemed cool to prowl the 8th arrondissement in a mid-engined Ferrari or bright orange Lamborghini and, though occasionally people do, it’s a spectacular way to look like whatever the French is for ‘tosser’. No, the car-spotting pleasures of Paris always had a less obvious flavour and chiefly brought joy on two fronts. The first: large French executive cars.

In the ’80s this was chiefly the delight of seeing multiple Citroën CXs swishing down the Champs-Élysées in a blaze of yellow light. In the ’90s the unusually coloured lamps disappeared but the French kept nailing it on the big car front with a string of wonders that somehow always looked better in their home capital. There were the last of the Renault 25s, low-slung and strangely elegant, the classically handsome Peugeot 605, and of course the true piece of resistance in the French big car fleet, the strangely glassy and glassily strange Citroën XM. What made these cars all the more appealing is that they were inevitably black or dark blue and looked terrific as they swept politicians and capitaines d’industry about their business.

In more recent times we had the terrific Citroën C6 and the gloriously strange Renault Vel Satis, which looked wonderfully presidential in a dark colour, but what’s replaced them today? French firms don’t make big exec cars any more and a Peugeot 508 or whatever those new-school DS things are called just doesn’t cut it. I’m not even sure how the big fromages are getting around because whatever they’re using just isn’t interesting.

The second car-spotting joy of Paris used to be the bountiful selection of Paris Cars. You remember the sort of thing: small hatchback, a few years old, one or more missing wheeltrims, bumpers visibly used as parking sensors where the warning sound was persistent crunching, bodywork so creased the whole thing seemed to have been kicked about by dinosaurs. Extra points if this scruffed-up car turned out to be owned by someone immaculately dressed who could almost certainly afford something bigger, better and significantly less dented. But that was the joy of the trad Paris Car: you could be a latrine cleaner at the Stade de France or a senior minister of culture, it was impossible to tell just from looking at your very dented Saxo.

In fact, nothing spoke more about the desire for equality at the heart of La République than the Paris Car. But, padding around the city the other week, the Paris Car didn’t seem to be much of a thing any more. Firstly, it was almost impossible to find anything that had been rigorously rumpled by years of casual familiarity with less yielding objects. Secondly, the nature of French small cars has changed. For one thing, with the death of the 108, the C1 and the Twingo (although not for long), France doesn’t make any truly small cars any more. And its current smallest models just don’t seem stoically equipped to deal with a life of being parked by ear, being too sophisticated and expensive-looking. The current Clio, for example, is a fine looking machine but you’d think twice before inserting it noisily between two bike racks or bump-parking it against a skip before you nipped into the chemist. Plus there’s the pollution-reducing Crit’Air scheme which banishes cars from the city’s streets if they don’t meet Euro 4, immediately wiping out a whole strata of creased C2s and dinged-up Twingos.

Now, I’m all for cleaner city air, especially in a place as walkable as Paris. But as I strolled around, I found myself thinking that I’d still like to breathe in the heady scent of classically and brilliantly French cars.

This story was first featured in evo issue 331.